Category Archives: Books

Plagiarism Debacle

The solution:

1. We cut most of the offending material, as it’s non-essential.

2. We cite the other book the author published the information in, for the bits we keep.

3. The author never works with us again.

I’ve put too much work into it to cancel the book, so I’m fine with this. We have to recoup the time and money we’ve put in somehow, and publication’s the only way to do it. The manuscript is in galleys now, which is usually the point of no return; you can edit for punctuation or spelling errors, or remove something, but you can’t add anything. Galleys are also known as proofs, and they’re the final step before publication. They show you what the layout of the final book is going to be, and it’s the last chance you have to catch errors.

Thank the Goddess I caught this one before it was too late.

I have a feeling this author’s agent has received a nasty eye-opener concerning her client. I don’t know what the fallout will be, but we reap what we sow, so I’ll leave it up to them to work it out. Interestingly enough, the same agent represents the other author we’ve been working with on the second book, and that’s been sailing along so beautifully that the agent has a unique opportunity to compare and contrast the two situations. The only variable has been the author; the editing team is the same. The agent can draw her own conclusions.

An editor is supposed to be “a partner, not a critic” according to Richard Webster (author of How to Write for the New Age Market), but by this point I’m so unimpressed with the author that I don’t feel that this is a partnership at all; I feel like we’ve been doing most of the work. I know that there are authors out there who hand in substandard work and expect the editing team to polish it for them, and I find this attitude intolerable. I can’t know this author’s attitude throughout this process, but the lack of response to the first set of requests for rewrites, and this previously published material issue don’t do much for my confidence in him. A reader wants to trust the author. The editor helps that happen by making the material as accessible and as interesting as possible. Technically our goal is the same: to create a strong, positive product. So why do I feel so let down?

Everyone slips from time to time. This author claims that the material was a placeholder, that he meant to pull it out and rewrite it, and forgot, and he’s terribly embarrassed. Every single author I know is busy and overloaded with work of various sorts. There are authors out there who write books to pay the bills. This author had two projects that overlapped, and identical material ended up in both. I just happened to browse through the one that got published first. Whatever. His story might be true, it might not. It’s just further proof to me that he doesn’t really care about his readers. It also suggests that he doesn’t respect his subject, either, which as a reader upsets me.

I keep trying to like humanity, I really do. And then something like this happens, and I get all dejected and wonder if anyone’s honest at all.

It seems to be sunny today. I might wander downtown to clear my brain.

So That’s What I’ve Done With My Life

Found via Muse:

Literacy Test: Highlight in bold those books you’ve read.

(Ed. note: Hunh? Since when has literacy been indicated by the number or calibre of the books you’ve read? Those books might have had an influence on your literacy, but it certainly isn’t directly correlational. Whatever. My comments are scattered throughout in italics.)

Author – Title

— Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua – Things Fall Apart
Agee, James – A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane – Pride and Prejudice and everything else
Baldwin, James – Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel – Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul – The Adventures of Augie March
Bront�, Charlotte – Jane Eyre and everything else
Bront�, Emily – Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert – The Stranger
Cather, Willa – Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey – The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton – The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate – The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph – Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore – The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen – The Red Badge of Courage
Dante – Inferno and the two smash sequels!
de Cervantes, Miguel – Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel – Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles – A Tale of Two Cities and just about everything else
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor – Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore – An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre – The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George – The Mill on the Floss but not Middlemarch? Wha? Who developed this list?
Ellison, Ralph – Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo – Selected Essays
Faulkner, William – As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William – The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry – Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott – The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox – The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von – Faust in two languages!
Golding, William – Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas – Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph – Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest – A Farewell to Arms
Homer – The Iliad
Homer – The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor – The Hunchback of Notre Dame but not Les Miserables?
Hurston, Zora Neale – Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous – Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik – A Doll’s House
James, Henry – The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry – The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man thank you for not listing Ulysses
Kafka, Franz – The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong – The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper – To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair – Babbitt
London, Jack – The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas – The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel Garc�a – One Hundred Years of Solitude
Herman – Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman – Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur – The Crucible
Morrison, Toni – Beloved
O’Connor, Flannery – A Good Man is Hard to Find
O’Neill, Eugene – Long Day’s Journey into Night
Orwell, George – Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris – Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia – The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan – Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel – Swann’s Way
Pynchon, Thomas – The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria – All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond – Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry – Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. – The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William – Hamlet
Shakespeare, William – Macbeth
Shakespeare, William – A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare, William – Romeo and Juliet and just about everything else
Shaw, George Bernard – Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary – Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon – Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles – Antigone in two languages!
Sophocles – Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John – The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis – Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher – Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Swift, Jonathan – Gulliver’s Travels
Thackeray, William – Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David – Walden
Tolstoy, Leo – War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan – Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire – Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. – Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice – The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith – The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora – Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt – Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar – The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee – The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia – To the Lighthouse and plusieres autres titres
Wright, Richard – Native Son you know, I honestly can’t remember

This list is obviously American, because it doesn’t ask if you’ve read Two Solitudes or Kamouraska. And where’s Fahrenheit 451? I find it interesting that the list is fiction and poetry, with Emerson and Thoreau thrown in, but doesn’t include important philosophical works. Apparently philosophy (Aristotle, Hegel, Kant, whoever) improves the mind but not the literacy rate. I think literacy evaluators ought to sit down with Kant and try to follow the a priori theory. They’d understand just how much philosophy rests on the ability to read and comprehend.

I took a couple of American Literature courses at university, which is how I came to read things like Theodore Dreiser and Henry James. Most of the rest of my score here is attributed to the double BA in Liberal Arts and English Lit. (That and a decidedly anti-social streak.) And yet I’ve managed to reach the age I am without reading the high school classics Catch-22 and Catcher in the Rye. Go figure.

Have fun.

God As A Fellow Artist

Surrealmuse takes a look at art in several different ways. Her subtitle was what really caught my attention: When the muse is alive in anyone, they become an inventive, searching, self-expressing creature.

I found this paragraph in Art & Spirituality:

I envision God as another fellow artist, the master artist with a touch of scientific knowledge, but an artist all the same. Who else but an artist would create such beautiful scenic beaches and mountains? With the same token, the dark side of God’s artistic vision is illustrated in the creation of angry, fiery volcanoes. But God also has a sense of humor, who else could create a platypus?

I thought that might get your attention. Enjoy the site, and think about how your own creativity conveys your spirituality.

Grr

Any time Philip Heselton’s Wiccan Roots wants to stop quoting and re-hashing Jack Bracelin’s 1960 bio of Gerald Gardner, it can go right ahead. I’d rather read something original than a secondary text. Heselton acknowledges in his foreword that Bracelin’s book is a key text and that he quotes frequently, but really, the first two chapters do nothing to advance the scholarship of the field. So far the analysis is weak and pointless, and it’s just a string of quotes from other books.

This book is supposed to be ground-breaking. I keep waiting for the ground-breaking part. I may only have finished two chapters, but readers are gained are lost through a first chapter alone.

Serial Stories Taken to a New Level


NOVELS DELIVERED TO YOUR PHONE: E-mail Opens New Possibilities for Old Medium.

Nowadays the sight of people passing time on the train by sending e-mail with their mobile phones is an everyday occurrence in Japan. This technology has now led to the emergence of a new and unexpected phenomenon: people reading entire novels on their mobile phones.

How… novel.

Warning: Academic At Work

I woke up at five AM and finally decided to get out of bed at six. This happens every once in a while, and I usually end up getting some serious reading and note-taking done. Lately it’s been to my benefit, because I’ve been blazing through a pile of academic Celtic Iron Age archeological and historical texts.

It took me a week or so, but I managed to find my thesis groove again. Yes: almost four years to the day after I submitted my thesis, I realised I had another academic book to write. I have a nameless customer from the bookstore to thank for this one. She came in and asked for a book on the Celtic goddess Brigid, and I had to tell her that there wasn’t one.

Then I went home and was hit with a clue-by-four. I’ve been a priestess of Brid for seven years. I’ve been a teacher for almost five of those years. I’ve been a writer for most of my life. Why haven’t I understood that this book was missing and needed to be written?

So for the past month I’ve been jotting down rough subject outlines, researching heavily, running out of sticky tabs, draining highlighter pens, making pages of notes, and trying to track down little-known and out-of-print books. I’d forgotten how much I love doing this.

I’m fairly certain that my increase in energy is also due to the leap in temperature, however temporary it may be. There’s more light, as well, which always helps. I cannot deny, however, that at heart I’m an academic, and the idea of curling up with a pile of books, pens, paper, and a cup of tea thrills me beyond the level to which it ought to thrill me.

I’m just a witchy academic geek. So sue me.

ph33r

How amusing. Neil Gaiman got a l33t message and a fan translated it for him.

Thought the translation (liberal in places) would be interesting to those of you who were teasing me about knowing how to read it. Okay, I actually thought you’d laugh too.

And damn, I completely and totally forgot that Gaiman had written a short story called The Daughter of Owls, found in the Smoke and Mirrors collection. This makes me feel incredibly guilty and a right twit.