Plagiarism has occurred to her and I think she wrote a great post about it on her website. The main points she touches on are identifying plagiarism, what to do if it happens to you and how you can prevent it/give yourself more credence in plagiarism cases. Here is the article for your viewing pleasure:
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Plagiarism
Unfortunately ladies, either we have been plagiarized or will be plagiarized for the sheer fact that we are creative writers who write many words, some of which may be stolen without our knowledge. I follow very few author's work, but I have been reading JL Langley since high school and hopefully will interview her soon for an academic paper. She is a writer of romance novels and has received acclaim for her mixture of erotica and solid plot structure. As a closeted diehard for pulp and romance novels, she displays a way to reconfigure a genre from grocery store quality to literary quality. This is my excuse to still be reading her.
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It's pretty chilling to think someone would just up and steal your manuscript like that. What I found especially interesting was the idea of saving all your drafts and early criticism. It makes me want to start plotting things out on paper more. The downfall to this digital age of ours (well one of money) is that once it's gone, it's gone.
ReplyDeleteThe only comment I would have on this author's advice (and it was very well written and she touches on a lot of good points) is the thing about registering copyright. Not that it's a bad idea or anything, but it's kind of an expensive and lengthy process, from what I remember. (I know I looked all this shit up a while ago.) I don't know about you guys, but for everyone one good idea that I actually work on enough to have someone else read it, there are ten or twenty that I throw out or never do anything with. And at the time I start them, I can't tell the difference between the two. So here is my question for you, when do you think would be a good time to actually go through the process of registering your work?
That was a wonderful blog post about plagiarism and how to deal with it. If it happened to me, I'm quite sure I would've dealt with that differently (for example: lacing the entire blog post with creative curse words), but I'm glad to know that she's using her experience to educate us.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad to know I can keep this in mind, but right now, I'm so befuddled with the changes in my own work that perhaps plagiarism is still on the backburner. No one wants to plagiarize shitty work! ahahha!
Thanks for the share, Cylon!!
Oh, man. That would be terrible for someone to steal your work! I can't imagine what she must have gone through.
ReplyDeleteDepending on the story, I have written an original draft on paper, then I transcribe to Word doc. But once it's on the computer, I usually make edits within the doc and there's no copy of the original. So as far as multiple drafts I usually don't have any unless I sent it to someone in an email, or saved it as something else later. This makes me wonder, should I save drafts as I go? I don't think I will (at least not immediately..) but maybe when I actually get rolling on a novel, that might be worth saving the drafts as I continue to make revisions. Thoughts, ladies?
And about copyright, Cerasi, I have no idea how to do that. I would imagine it's an arduous thing, so I don't know if I would do that for any of my works now. I don't think you can really copyright an idea, and I feel like that's all I have for some of my projects that are really worth protecting like that. I would think that for my novels that I'm 'working' on, what I have now might become unrecognizable after edits once the whole thing is done. But we'll see. I don't actually have that much complete on them, so I don't see the benefit of getting them copyrighted. However, if I finished something, like a novel or short story (Zombie Apocalypse Plan perhaps?) and was looking to publish it, I would get it copyrighted before sending to publishers.