The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Alma Alexander:

I just posted something on the matter on my own blog at LJ - but for the record - *this is not a brick-and-mortar business which was heavily shuttered and left echoingly empty over a holiday weekend*. Amazon's URL was live all the long weekend long. This means that someone was in the hot seat on duty SOMEWHERE. THe fact that this wasn't caught (someone was suddenly tagging books that were anything from a few years to a couple of DECADES old with a mass attack of "Adult" tags, and nobody noticed? REALLY?) and then the fact that nothing is being said about it other than a few evasive maneuvers seemingly thrown out there to hold fire while a mad scramble in the backrooms somewhere is going on - as somebody said it up-thread, by this stage it isn't the crime, it's the cover-up.

This is an online organization. They don't have to wait until the holiday weekend is over to have a meetings of the big boys - this is a crisis of fairly large proportions, and these folks are net-savvy enough to do email conferences or chats or even a phone-conference if all else fails. There needs to be an unequivocal statement from Amazon's management about this whole matter, like, YESTERDAY. They need to get their act together. And if they have to hire an extra warm body whose responsibility will be to monitor potentially malicious taggage from the Moral Majority, well, that's good for the economy, isn't it? It's another person with a job. So it cuts a little into the profit margin. So what? Would Amazon seriously come out telling me that this is better than having a large percentage of your customer base mad enough at you to threaten a comprehensive boycott? Trust me, the loss of profit will be MUCH greater if that is allowed to gather any sort of momentum.

Damage control. They need damage control, like, NOW. I give them until Wednesday morning, if they really really really need a "workday" for getting any work done (despite the fact that they are open for internet business 24/7, as it were, for people who want to throw money at them - did you ever get a message that said, sorry, Amazon is closed now, come back at 9 AM tomorrow morning...?). After that... the cover-up gets to be way bigger than a cover-up. It becomes not so much a denial that anything really bad actually ever happened to tacitly supporting that really bad thing that actually happened. If this is truly not Amazon's policy they need to come out and deal with the fallout before they really go to the wall for it.

Concerning monasteries -

I was young, back then. My cousin and I decided to take a walk by ourselves - unsanctioned, of course, by the elders in the party - and went off into the sloping woods behind my great-uncle's summerhouse, in the opposite direction from the pastoral fields and vineyards that stretched out to the other side, deliberately choosing the 'wilderness'.

Except that it wasn't, really. Our trail led us to the edge of the woods, which were alive with birdsong, and out onto a steeper clearing from which the view broke across the hills and the green valley below. Around us were moss-overgrown ruins - an ancient abbey had stood here once, long ago. All gone, now, except for the broken walls of stone and the moss and nodding wildflowers that grew in the crevices.

But faith dwelled here once. We could feel it. The birds were singing of it in the woods at our back while the sun spilled across the valley at our feet.

In about another month it will have been five years since my husband woke me up at 3:15 AM - and at first I couldn't understand what he was about but then I realised two things - his speech was VERY slurred, and what he was saying, or trying to say, was, "I think I am having a stroke".

You don't wish this on your worst enemy. I've never woken up so fast in my life, or felt quite as helpless. And I did all the wrong things - he wanted water, and I brought him some, not knowing of the danger that he might aspirate the stuff and get it into his lungs because the swallowing reflex was gone; he wanted up, and I tried to help him get out of bed, which is when we both realised that his right side was utterly dead because his leg collapsed underneath him and he went down like a sack of potatoes.

All this took less than ten minutes. At this point, I grabbed the phone and dialled 911.

We live just up the hill from the local fire station/paramedic first response station. They were at my house in another ten minutes or so. They took one look at him, slapped oxygen on his face, bundled him on a gurney, and screamed off in an ambulance to the hospital ER - where, for a WONDER, there was absolutely nobody requiring more urgent care and my husband was bundled out of the ambulance, admitted, MRI'd, and diagonsed almost instantaneously. It was just after four o'clock that I left the hospital, because they told me to go home because there was nothing else I could do there just then and to come back in teh morning.

We had just moved to a new place. I knew nobody. I knew nothing probative about strokes, not when they struck this close to home.

He was in ICU for about 3 days, then transferred to a general hospital room for another three or four until they stabilised him - but his right side was still dead dead dead and he was eating babypuree mush because his swallowing reflexes were simply not reliable enough for solid food. Then they transferred him to a nursing home facility to get a little stronger before they turfed him to rehab, and oh god, what fresh hell was this, I left him there amongst all the pitiful forgotten old people left there to die and came home and cried for three hours and then both he and I pushed as hard as we could for him to be transferred to the inpatient rehab unit as quickly as possible.

He now walks without a cane, although he still drags the right foot, and his right hand is still lacking a functional opposable thumb - but as I keep telling him, if we need to live without one hand we can adjust as necessary, what I am SUPREMELY grateful for is the fact that his personality didn't change, that he himself remained behind after that massive stroke and didn't become someone else altoghether, which I have heard is not uncommon with stroke victims if the stroke was in a particular area of the brain.

His recovery THIS far is due to the fact that he got treatment well within the Golden Hour - whatever could be done was done and he was lucky to get it as quickly as he did. I'm just sorry I wasted those first few precious moment trying to "help" in my own clumsy untrained way instead of calling the professionals immediately.

What I call his fifth re-birthday is coming up on June 20. I still feel a superstitious frisson of fear going to sleep on the night of June 19th. I'm still haunted by the memory of that night.

22, and a few of those were simply knowing what the damned font was NOT and paring it down from there.

Still. 22. TWENTY TWO. I didn't think I had it in me.

abi #1042 - Bravo!

Whatever you can say about Rowling as a writer, she's a damned GENIUS at marketing.

Just as the hoohah and the hullaballoo about The End Of Potter is dying down after that frantic summer that we had - here she comes, slyly lobbing another little explosive device into the mix.

I mean, this gives the Christian right MORE to kvetch and whine and complain about, as if they didn't have enough before with all the "oooooh look WITCHES" fingerpointing that was going on, and ensures that controversy and lively interest continues to surround the Potter franchise.

And lively interest sells books.

There you have it. Marketing coup.

I have no strong feelings about Dumbledore's gayness one way or another - I haven't read HP past book 3, anyway, so I have no clue what anyone is talking about half the time with all these "past relationships". But good GOD, ROwling's good.

Gabriele Campbell #853

We have deviated a lot from the original plagiarism topic, though. Sorry for that.

Well, when in Rome... [grin]

green_knight - at this point I can freely accept the fact that Lanaia did not know WHAT text, precisely, had been copied at the time that it had been copied, or that any particular INDIVIDUAL text had been copied - these are the risks you take, I guess, in the business.

The thing in this whole mess that burns me is simply the fact that here's someone who professes to have a "gift" that she wants to "share with the world", that this is her dream, that this is something she just really really wants... and then she goes away and hires a ghostwriter to do the dirty work for her.

I'm sorry, but for me that is the bottom line. If you want to be a writer, then YOU will write. You won't pay someone else to do it for you. You most emphatically won't then take those words and tack your own name on them and try and get them published in any way you can and give media interviews about how hard you worked on the manuscript and so on. You have the dream, you do the work. You DON'T get to call yourself an author by slapping your name on the cover of a book. You just don't.

I've known too many people whose dream was real enough that they sweated blood and tears over their work, and then had to put some darling aside and roll up their sleeves and start again, rinse and repeat, lean against a brick wall until it falls down or you do. When every word is yours. When you breathe on every word to give it life. You. *YOU*. Not someone you slip a dollar or a thousand dollars to do it for you. It's YOUR dream. Own it, or walk away.

It's become a case of what did she know and when did she know it. That might be the legal question. For me, the deeper one is the underlying ethical question of it all. The fact that she - in the face of being outed for this all over the Internet in great and gory detail - she still maintained her "innocence" and that she did nothing wrong, for as long as she could still manage to do it. THat she still insisted that she had the gift, that she owned the dream which she had just tried to buy a simulacrum of by hiring someone to write - I don't know - BETTER than she could? Differently? Whatever, that she hired someone to write for her and then claimed that SHE was the writer with the gift and the drive and the dream. It is that part of ir that bothers me the most, really.

Maybe because I could no more conceive of doing it than I could conceive of asking someone to perform a heart transplant and then coming out of the OR in someone else's bloody gown and gloves and claiming that the hands which had held a living and beating human heart had been mine.

FranW #659



I usually sit at the computer with coffee at hand. All I can say is, you are SO lucky it was a tad too late for coffee right now or I think you might have owed me a new keyboard...

Cheryl #591

I will also take a polograph test.

Sounds like something you do on the back of a pony with a mallet...

Pyre #500

Lanaia's alternative prologue at creativeconsciousness

"Privaledge"? "Elixer"? "Nector"? "Ingrediants"?

For that matter, "Archamedes"?

And all that in the first paragraph?

Okay, she can spell the name of her protagonist however the hell she pleases, even if does poke at my eye with sharp pointed sticks. But even if this was written in the dark ages before spell checkers were freely available for the production of the original draft, surely a spell check could have been run on it in the final stages before uploading onto the Internet?

And while a lack of a knack for spelling and punctuation is fixable, and has been known to be overlooked if the story which they cling to is sufficiently mind-blowing to make you forget them while you're reading that story. But the story has to be *mind-blowing*.

I admit to only having read the two paragraphs posted in this forum. I also, alas, have to admit that I have no wish whatsoever to seek out more.

Lanaia #368
Pathetic? I fired Christopher before I finshed the book. He was there for the prologue and chapters 1-4, the rest IS mine.

1) What does "the rest" mean, precisely, then?
2) If you were capable or willing to write this book why did you hire a ghostwriter at all?
3) After this fiasco, how seriously do you think anyone is going to take this book?
4)I return to what I said previously and I still think is your last best hope. ERASE ALL THIS. These books never happened for you. You've already "changed" your name to Lanaia Lee - change it again to something quite different, and if you really want to write a book... lady... go and write one. A DIFFERENT one. Something new and untainted by this train wreck. Ditch Cheryl, ditch Roval, ditch ghostwriters. No more excuses, no more throwing up disabilities for not doing the work, and by this stage I think you should have learned that it is a perilous path indeed to pay someone to publish your book before you've at the very least checked their credentials - and if you are capable of posting to Web forums you are capable of using Google with sufficient google-fu to do this.

I tell you this, once, twice, three times - the only way to be a writer is to write. Giving interviews to a local paper and seeing them calling you "an author" does not MAKE you one. Only writing a book does.

In the words Richard Bach, from a wonderful little book called "Illusions" (you should read it, maybe) - "You are never given a dream without the power to make it come true. You may have to work for it, however." The emphasis is mine. THe message is simple - if you truly have a dream, roll up your sleeves (metaphorically speaking) and get your own hands dirty. No amount of posturing and pleading and giving interviews to the press will take the place of this work.

That's it. In a nutshell. Make a choice.

Lanaia #250, my sympathies. But you are *perpetuating the scam*. You may have emails detailing Hill's meetings with Viking, but it should be obvious by now that they are not true. It is also beyond obvious that the excerpt which is STILL up on your website with your name on it does not belong to you, whatever the fake "Viking" emails have to say.

You might well have been scammed but you've shot yourself in the foot here, badly, and the only way out is to do several hard things.

1) Sever all ties with Cheryl, immediately, and distance yourself from her in public. Your website will be one appropriate place to do this.

2) Take down that excerpt, and post a REAL apology in its place. You can say you've been scammed. You can say whatever you like. Just say you're sorry, and hopefully that you won't do it again.

3) Scrap this particular project, which is tainted beyond recovery, and start writing something else if writing is truly the "gift you want to share with the world". You may have to be content with sharing it on the Internet. You may go with an outfit like Lulu,com, if you're that desperate for a book-shaped object with your name on it. But it will have to be a different book. The sooner you come to grips with that, the sooner you can start working on it. If you want to, that is.

Writing is hard work. Probably harder than you ever thought it would be. The only way out and up is THROUGH. You have to do the work, and pay the dues.

One last thing. I can appreciate a stroke can take away your ability to physically write - I am married to a stroke survivor, and since his stroke, four-and-change years ago, he is still not able to use his right hand to type with. However, it has not stopped him from writing - he uses voice recognition software, and dictates his stuff into the computer. Failing that, you can hire (for far less money than you paid Christopher Hill) someone to whom you can dictate your story and then that person can type it into the computer. But once again - you have to WANT to write, and you have to do your own writing. There is simply no way around that. The stroke might have been traumatic, even tragic, but you're playing it here as the pity card so that people will feel sorry for you and stop harping on you and just accept whatever "writing" you might have to offer. But even with the stroke taken into the equation, you've damaged your own credibility here, and it's taking further hits every day, every hour, every minute that excerpt is up on your website with your name attached to it.

There you go. Take the thing down. Apologise. Tell Cheryl she no longer speaks for you.

Then start again, fresh. Sadder, but wiser. It's the only way out of the hole.

For those interested in antecedents, a significant majority of these guys are of Albanian origin. You know, those lovely folks from the KLA whom the US has been aiding with such alacrity in order to enable Albania to land-grab Kosovo from the heartland of Serbia.

Chickens coming home to roost. The KLA is on record as doing plenty of bad-ass stuff back "home", but when what-was-then-Yugoslavia tried to step on their tails there was a hue and cry and a general uproar of "these guys are being persecuted!" Well, here they are, in America. Let the fun commence.

Say a prayer for us, while you're thinking about this. New Orleans happened in a powerful nation at peace with all its support systems supposedly in place - in theory, anyway. The floods in Serbia are happening in a place that's already ready to break. The people who are being flooded out have very little left to lose. I am afraid that this might be the final slash that cuts our ties with survival.

I know these places. I was born on the banks of that river. I don't even have to see the pictures to know what the place must look like... and what the consequences might be.

An individual author owns his or her work, check, Fifty (or seventy, or whatever) years post his or her death, I can live with copyright extending that long. But I can't imagine today's literature, at least the genre literature, the thing I read and write, without the use of common domain ideas - and it frightens me that whatever is in common domain today is all we will ever have. It doesn't bode well for future creative endeavours. We create myths today, just as our forebears created theirs - and someday, somewhere, if the human race survives that long, Star Trek is going to be somebody's mythology. It would be tragic if such things were absolutely out of a creative mind's grasp, to build future myths on.

every time you think it can't get worse, it does. now they're talking hundred*S* of thousands. in the plural.

i'm not computer savvy so i can't mirror sites or anything like that; i sent off what i could in terms of financial aid, but i can only imagine what life must be like out there right now.

re. agents - it's one of those chicken-and-egg situations for young authors - can't get a book accepted without an agent, can't get an agent without a book offer, what now?...

charlie stross got lucky in one way, i got lucky in another - i connected with a really well known British agent some ten years ago or so through sheer chutzpah on my part, then life happened and i went my own way, and when i was working on the megabook coming out this spring i took another dose of chutzpah and emailed that agent and asked if she would be willing to take me on. as it happened, circumstances weren't right there - but she DID steer me to someone who might be interested, who WAS interested, and who has since worked miracles for me. without my agent - we've been in partnership for over a year, now - i couldn't have got very far - she opened doors that would have not only been inacessible to me without her, i would not have even known that they were there.

having a good agent really is worth its weight in comissions.

having said that, teresa has it in a nutshell - a bad agent is far worse than no agent at all. homework is tough but it's worth doing in this instance.

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