A New Book From One of My Favorite Authors.

Romancing Miss Bronte by Juliet Gael book coverAnd a dear friend and mentor of mine as well. Romancing Miss Bronte: A Novel by Juliet Gael.

Apparently, everyone’s raving about it. I don’t have my copy yet, but I’m waiting until I get it signed before I read it. She’s loved Charlotte Brontë forever, and I’m thinking that will make all the difference in this novel. Not to say that her others weren’t fabulous, but it always helps when you’ve researched the snot out of something and are so passionate about it.

Or rather, it helps some authors. I’m not feeling the passion. Read some of my novel out loud to a friend on a road trip and decided it was crap. Ennui and depression (and, admittedly, some hostility) has set in…  We’ll see what happens when I get back.

 

Writing Frustration and Blog Books.

I had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: – ‘No good in a bed, but fine against a wall.’Eleanor Roosevelt

Isn’t that just the best? I was obsessed with her when I was younger and read every biography I could. I was torn between thinking her husband was the biggest jerk ever or the best friend she ever had. And I doubt I could ever be as saintly as she was. I have a hard time with the whole volunteering thing and don’t really know about spending my life in service to others. I also don’t think I could spend hours a day writing letters back to people either. Don’t get me wrong. I love my correspondence and all, but I’m not that devoted. She is one of those superior human beings.

In searching for the perfect historical role models and ideas for characters, it’s funny that I completely forgot about her. I suppose I was staying more in the time period and didn’t think more contemporary, but Eleanor Roosevelt would be perfect for some character ideas.

On an entirely different topic, I’m also a little frustrated with myself because I checked out a bunch of research books from the library which are, of course, due now (and can’t be renewed because other people have holds on them) and all the cheap used copies that I had in my shopping cart on Amazon.com are gone now. All that’s left are the expensive new versions. Just one of those days, I suppose. Lesson learned. When you find the $40 book for $10 online? Just buy it. Spend the extra $4 for shipping and buy it.

Which brings me to another topic. The Blog Book. This is amazing to me. Blog2Book.com is a site that turns your happy, digital blog that’s floating around out there in the ethernet into a book. A printed book with a title and a cover and pictures and a dedication and everything. Does no one else find this amazingly strange? Amazon.com is telling me that the Kindle is the wave of the future (and don’t get me wrong–I love having the digital books while I’m on a trip. And I didn’t buy a Kindle anyway. I love iPhone apps…) and that print books are dead; Google books comes up just as often as Alibris.com and Amazon.com does when I do a book search; the whole publishing industry is turned upside-down because of digital books; and newspapers are proclaiming that only the iPad can save them now.

So what gives with the Build-a-Book out of your blog option? The blog is already right where everyone keeps telling me the action is–why change that? It just blows me away. It seems like there’s some sort of chaotic, end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it implication there. But I just can’t put my finger on it. Soon people will start making blogs into books and books into blogs and the world will end in a fireball of death…or something.

 

And yet more on plagiarism.

Apparently, I can’t get enough of it. A friend told me both about the Chinese version of Harry Potter (Harry Potter and the Golden Dragon. The only mention of it I can find online is on the fan fiction site. And don’t even get me started on fan fiction…) and about a short story she read in school that was similar to Garfield’s Nine Lives. It’s everywhere, I tell you.

I had to refresh my memory, so I checked out the Colleen McCullough: A Critical Companion by Mary Jean DeMarr and reread the section on The Ladies of Missalonghi. Completely forgot that DeMarr writes the whole thing off as a “parody of the genre.” She claims that McCullough was merely making fun of the sentimental type of romance that L.M. Montgomery had written. That’s why there’s the relationship based on deceit, the odd character of Una who pushes the characters together and the wry, snappy humor throughout. I don’t know… Why wouldn’t McCullough just say it was a parody then and get the whole plagiarism thing out of the way?

It reminds me a little bit of an English class in high school when we were reading Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros”. One of my more brilliant friends made the observation that he had read that Ionesco was portraying fascism in the play. The teacher looked at him (not my favorite teacher, mind you) and said, “Do you really think it matters what the author was trying to say?” I was stunned. Blown away. I mean…doesn’t it? Shouldn’t that make all the difference in the world what the author was trying to say? What the intent was? Why else was he writing it if he didn’t have a purpose or a goal? The teacher’s argument was that what with all the subconscious and subtext and deconstructionist theory out there, the author really doesn’t  have a clue what he’s doing because he’s at the whim of his talent and creativity. Intent means nothing.

I still don’t agree with it. There’s something to be said for critical analysis. I can geek out on it as much as the next English major can. But as a writer, I also have to really give credit to what the author thought he was writing about, too. Because (and this goes back to my whole McCullough argument about plagiarism) if the author knew he was copying a story that someone else had written, wouldn’t he go out of his way to make it as original as possible so that he didn’t get caught? If J.K. Rowling did steal this idea, then she really did an excellent job of hiding it. There are very few similarities (and one of my new favorites is the claim that she stole the idea of having the wizards ride trains. Um. Yes. Right. Because no one rides trains in the UK…) and those that are there are very well disguised. (Again. If she did steal it.)

So I don’t buy it. I don’t buy DeMarr’s argument about the parody, nor do I buy my English teacher’s argument about author intent, and I especially don’t buy that Rowling plagiarized this guy.