Two Quick Self-Serving Links
Posted on April 24, 2006 Posted by John Scalzi 3 Comments
One, just in case people are wondering if there are a lot fanficcers out there or not, I’ll note that according to BlogPulse, the Lori Jareo post from Friday is the #2 Top Blog Post on teh Intarweebs today. Neat.
Two, a nice review of The Ghost Brigades in the Some Fantastic critzine, which you can download from here; they call TGB “an entertaining novel that points to a continued bright future for Scalzi as an SF author of note.” Groovy. Other reviews in this edition: Orson Scott Card’s Ultimate Iron Man, Vol. 1; Stephen Jones’s The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror #16; Lucius Shepard’s A Handbook of American Prayer; Lou Anders’s Futureshocks; Justina Robson’s Silver Screen; Octavia Butler’s Fledgling; Chris Roberson’s Adventure, Vol. 1; & Christopher Moore’s A Dirty Job. That’s good company.
The Lee Goldberg post on the Jareo debacle was #16, I noticed.
If I were a fanficcer of the non-idiot variety, I don’t know what would piss me off more. That Jareo is such an idiot, or that her idiocy has landed her more exposure than 99% of fanficcers will ever see. Grr.
Oh, and this just in. From the Lori Jareo school of writing comes a girl who got paid half a million bucks for it!
Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard sophomore accused of plagiarizing parts of her recently published “chick-lit” novel, acknowledged today that she had borrowed language from another writer’s books, but called the copying “unintentional and unconscious.”
The book, “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life,” was published by Little, Brown this spring to wide publicity. On Saturday, the Harvard Crimson reported that Ms. Viswanathan, who received $500,000 as part of a two-book deal for “Opal,” had seemingly plagiarized language from two novels by Megan McCafferty, an author of popular young adult books.
In an e-mail message this afternoon, Ms. Viswanathan said that in high school she had read and loved the two books she is accused of borrowing from, ‘Sloppy Firsts’ and “Second Helpings,” and that they “spoke to me in a way few other books did.
Somehow I don’t think the “I wrote this just for me” defense will work for her either.
Just as a by the way, I’m the same person who reviewed Old Man’s War for New York Review of Science Fiction, which just ran the review in its April, 2006 issue.