BUSTED! Plagiarists, Fakers & Literary Hoaxes

[chiqui]

Have you ever visited another city and picked up the alternative weekly and been completely bemused by the band names and hot restaurants? I love to do this. "Oh, look, Oscar's Garbage Can is playing tonight at Jax's Shack."

That's how I feel reading about that M/M scandal. I can tell it is terribly important, but I have NO idea what anyone is talking about, even though the synopsis was clearly written.

I gather that this Marvin character is rather unsavory and that his wife Alicia has aided and abetted him. And anyone who fakes cancer for money is a scumbag.

That's how I felt. It's par for the course for fandom, even though it's publishing -- many recent romance writers cut their writing teeth in fandom and carried that culture over with them when they started professional careers. (Professional as in getting paid.) Unfortunately over behaviors carried over from fandom as well, like the false identities and the misplaced trust.

[Carolinian]

Not a hoax, but a crime... a major literary agency has been ruined by an embezzler. I feel for the authors.

[riosamba]

Jun 1, 2018 8:43:08 GMT -4 Carolinian said:

Not a hoax, but a crime... a major literary agency has been ruined by an embezzler. I feel for the authors.

That’s shocking. I can’t believe the lack of oversight at the particular agency, and the apparent badness of the system in general. It’s sickening to think that authors’ work could become assets of the agency in bankruptcy, and they’ll lose all control.

[addison]

A Der Spiegel reporter who has won some major awards has confessed to making up a lot of his reporting. He was apparently really good at it and fooled everyone but it's seems kind of far fetched that none of the fact-checkers ever figured it out. He also did an article on a small town, Fergus Falls', response to Trump, and one of their residents did an article on some of the lies he told in it. He was really blatant and basically made up entire articles, it's really hard to fathom that he got away with it for so long.

[seat6]

I saw that and was appalled! Who was the NYT guy? Jayson Blair? Reminds me of him.

I think what’s particularly insidious about this German dude is the story as he wrote it perpetuates the whole “dumb blue collar Middle America voter who blindly supports Trump” stereotype.

As the fact checkers pointed out, plenty of people in their community did vote for Trump. But life there is a lot more complicated than that.

[chiqui]

Daniel Mallory, author of "The Woman in the Window," spun a web of untruths

Very interesting article from The New Yorker. The writer in question seems to have escaped career repercussions so far.

[canuckcutie]

He’s a medical miracle! All those bouts with cancer and he’s still going strong...

Makes me wonder if he deliberately tried to emulate Tom Ripley or if he was drawn to the character because he is also a charming sociopath...

[seat6]

Man, Jill Abramson has really screwed up with her new book.

“I made mistakes”: Jill Abramson responds to plagiarism charges around her new book

7 Things Journalists Should Never Do (But Jill Abramson Did Anyway)

And one of the topics of her book is how journalist standards are deteriorating!

She has been very forthcoming in the many, many interviews she has done (presumable set up to promote the book, and now being used to address all the issues in it). She hasn't thrown her researcher or assistant or editor under the bus, which is to her credit.

But how did all these mistakes slip by? I don't think the book was rushed to print. She had time to self-edit.

And, on a completely superficial note, her slow talking drives me nuts. I can't place her accent. She was raised in Manhattan, went to primary school in the Bronx, and now lives in Tribeca. Where did she pick up this strange mid-20th C, mid-Atlantic way of speaking?

[Ladybug]

A couple of romance writers I follow on Twitter, Tessa Dare and Courtney Milan, have discovered another romance author plagiarizing their work. She stole directly from several of Dare's and Milan's books, and passed it off as her own work. Dare posted screen shots of all the plagiarized passages, and yeah, it's bad. They named the author, Cristiane Serruya, #copypastecris. The kicker is that CopyPasteCris just posted this on Twitter: "I just woke up to the distressing news that my work has plagiarism from other authors. I am taking down all the works I did with a ghostwriter on Fiverr - who btw has closed the account - until I have made certain this is solved" So, she's blaming it on the ghostwriter. NUTS!

[mrspickles]

Feb 19, 2019 11:13:45 GMT -4 Ladybug said:

A couple of romance writers I follow on Twitter, Tessa Dare and Courtney Milan, have discovered another romance author plagiarizing their work. She stole directly from several of Dare's and Milan's books, and passed it off as her own work. Dare posted screen shots of all the plagiarized passages, and yeah, it's bad. They named the author, Cristiane Serruya, #copypastecris. The kicker is that CopyPasteCris just posted this on Twitter: "I just woke up to the distressing news that my work has plagiarism from other authors. I am taking down all the works I did with a ghostwriter on Fiverr - who btw has closed the account - until I have made certain this is solved" So, she's blaming it on the ghostwriter. NUTS!

I thought ghostwriters were brought in to write for famous people? Why would CopyPasteCris have a ghostwriter?

Is this like the Milli Vanilli thing?