Mid-week errata

[annathepiper]

First up... greetings to gellemar and dragon_lord, who I see are looking in!

And now, the news! Rumor has it that I may get Friday off by way of a thank you for the overtime I've been putting in. Considering that for two weekends in a row I've had my writing time joggled by this, a day off would officially fail to suck. Especially if it's a paid day off. Cross your fingers that nothing blows up this week and that I won't have to come in on Friday after all, folks. ;)

It's May now and spring finally seems to be settling in around here, which is good--for May is the time of the Street Fair and Folklife, for which good weather is, if not precisely Vital, certainly a Great Help. solarbird and I will hopefully be able to bike down to the Street Fair as well, which will be Fun. And if the good weather as well as my potential day off hold up this weekend, I hope to get in that biking I didn't get last weekend, so I can go to the Woodinville Barnes and Noble and get mizkit's book!

Meanwhile, it also seems to be the season of writer scandals, the whole flap over Kaavya Viswanathan being the latest. And I can't say I'm terribly displeased that her publisher is pulling her books off the shelves and cancelling the contract with her. I mean, hells bells, when you get right down to it every writer on the planet ultimately cobbles a story together by pulling it from other sources... but a good one won't be practically cut-and-pasting passages from other works into her own and handwaving it off as "internalizing" them. Not that I'm peevish that a teenager can do that kind of thing and get a six-figure advance for it or anything. Much.

Tuesday evening miles: 2.4
Wednesday morning miles: 1.6
Miles out of Hobbiton: 940.3
Miles out of Rivendell: 482.3
Miles out of Lothlórien: 20.3
Miles to Rauros Falls: 368.7

Comments

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

i dunno. i've been following the "plagiarism" flap on language log, and i'm not sure i buy that it's really so appalling. i mean, if i hang out with my teevee-watching friends, they seem to randomly appropriate 14-word strings from shows they've watched and spontaneously re-deliver them all the time; i don't see why readers should be so different from watchers in that way. heck, i have a whole bunch of poetry paraphrases in the werewolf novel (from ee cummings and "the highwayman" for instance) and i only *hope* people will realize that i lifted them....

[gellemar.livejournal.com]

Thank you for warm welcome! Unfortunately I can't offer the same for you because my LJ is in Russian... But at least if you'll see letters 'фото' you could expect photos inside. :-)

Could you please in your calculations also include mileage from Barad-Dur, to Minas-Morgul and to Orodruin? I also'd like to see mileage from Thranduil's stronghold, but that's impossible basing on very approximate placing it on map.

Good luck with your day off... as far as with other intentions. :-)

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

I kinda feel sorry for the poor girl. She's going to spend the rest of her life as the girl who plagarized, and I really doubt she did it on purpose.

[annathepiper]

Oh sure, I'll cheerfully quote my favorite TV shows all the time. But there's a big difference between doing that in everyday conversation--and doing it as part of writing a script for, say, my own TV show, and trying to pass it off as my own art.

I do absolutely appreciate deliberate references to prior works, such as what you mention for your werewolf novel--that's a different thing, too, and there can be literary value in that or even just the value of sharing a cultural in-joke. There's a matter of balance here, though. The vast majority of your work I think is clearly, solidly, your own work and not just paraphrasings of other stuff you like.

Moreover, this kid has has specifically admitted to lifting passages from other works for her own novel. She does also assert that this was completely unintentional and unconscious on her part, but it still seems dubious to me. At the very least, indicative that she needed to take more time to develop her own voice as a writer.

[annathepiper]

Part of me does feel somewhat sorry for her, yeah, and she has specifically said that she had lifted passages from other works but that it was completely unintentional on her part. I'm perfectly willing to grant her the benefit of the doubt on that.

But I think I'm still peevish that a kid who sounds as though she really needed more time to develop her own voice as a writer rather than just mechanically borrowing the ingredients from other people's stories can get a six-figure advance, when so many writers who have developed their own voices and styles will never see such compensation at any point in their careers. It's more peevishness at the difficulty of the industry rather than specific peevishness at her, I guess.

And yet, I'm still trying to get published. Go fig. ;)

[annathepiper]

I'm pulling my calculations off the Eowyn Challenge/Walk to Rivendell site, here--they in turn pull their data from The Atlas of Middle-Earth.

I'm on the Rauros Falls branch of the Walk right now, which is why that's the last in my list of locations I'm showing. :) I'm planning to do the "Follow the path of Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli from Rauros to Isengard" branch of the Walk next!

I can indeed see the Cyrillic characters, though unfortunately I cannot read them. (I tried to take Russian once in college, but had to drop it due to a schedule conflict in my classes--that's the closest I've ever come!)

And thank you kindly for the good luck wishes!

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

*shrug* i guess i don't see her comment as admitting to "lifting", certainly not with the intentionality with which say i paraphrased "the highwayman". for a variety of analyses and comments that have made an impression on me, i refer you to http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003068.html and links thereof.

i quite strongly suspect that a lot of unconscious quoting goes on, and i'm not at all sure it's worse in young authors than old ones. the line "it was dark. there were teeth. that's all i remember." in my novel was *definitely* lifted, but i knew not from where; i couldn't remember for the life of me where i got it from. eventually i posted a query in lj, and found that it came from an old friend's description of a dream he had, and was widely quoted. i guess i'm only glad he didn't publish :) middlin'-sized tracts of my erisian tarot were also lifted, from a friend and character-model, and are available online to anyone who looks (although in that case i knew what i was thinking of, and got permission :)

[dragon-lord.livejournal.com]

Greetings and salutations. ;-)

[darthhellokitty.livejournal.com]

Well, she can GET a six-figure advance. I doubt she can KEEP it.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

They didn't pick her up despite her being a teenager--they picked her up because she was a teenager. Viswanathan herself looked like someone who could be groomed for celebrity--the book packagers thought they could pimp her, not just her books. Apparently, this isn't the first time the book packaging company has been caught in a plagiarism suit.

Success and wealth would be okay, but I don't envy her the celebrity--not even the celebrity she thought she was getting when she cast her lot with the packagers.

When I think about her, I think about my old students at Rutgers, and how hard it was for them to learn where the lines were when it came to plagiarism. It was easy enough for them to get that stealing someone else's phrasing was wrong, but anything more subtle than that, and they really had to work to wrap their heads around it. Even the bright ones, even when they were trying.

[annathepiper]

I saw a couple of the pictures that went along with the articles on the matter, yeah. And she's a very pretty girl, very photogenic; I can totally see why there might be a desire there to promote "her".

I definitely don't envy her the celebrity--or now, I suppose one should say, the notoriety. As I have occasionally joked to Kit, I don't want to be rich and famous; I'll settle for being moderately well known and comfortably well off. ;)

[annathepiper]

*snorf* There is that!