Angel Zapata posted his documentation of a pernicious repeat plagiarist.
As a past victim of plagiarism, I feel a special kinship here. Opening up a publication and reading something that sounds familiar, then really familiar, then really, really fucking familiar. That horrible moment when you pull your own material from a few years before and, yep, there it is. Paragraph after paragraph, lifted word for word.
It was the semicolons (and the parenthetical asides) that gave it away; no one uses them to quite the same effect as I do. No one born in this century, anyway.
I made some enemies during that episode, but to be fair, they started it.
To the plagiarist: dude, did you think no one would notice? Do you think no one would care? Even stealing from Lovecraft... just because he's dead, did you think was OK? A sentence here, a paragraph there - no one will notice?
Well it's not your sentence or your paragraph, so hands off. Go do your own goddamned heavy lifting, you lazy jerk.
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I detest when someone lifts a signature statement or phrase from my work, but then I'm sort of impressed (this is not regarding whole works) that I made that big of an impression on them that they adopted it. Then I get mad again and wish I'd never shared it at all. I think our biggest fear as a writer, or at least one of them, is having someone else beat you to bat with your own ammunition.
ReplyDeleteyikes. can't imagine having that happen...sorry it happened to you.
ReplyDeletealas, i've nothing more than an idea stolen from me -- and since I never mentioned it to a soul, I suspect the individual was mining my brain from afar :)
likely story, huh?
We all start with the same basic tools and materials, the same set of grammar and the same 50,000 words in our dictionaries.
ReplyDeleteThe only thing that makes any of us unique and praiseworthy is the sequence in which we string those words.
This is hot button issue for me. Once you've had your work stolen by another (purported) professional, it makes it VERY hard to trust people. It's an act of faith for me every time I post a piece of fiction here.