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.

WordPress really is amazing.

I was even telling a friend about it last night. She was contemplating going with Blogger. Ha! I said. Forget Blogger. Everything you want to do you can do it with more flexibility and distinction in WordPress. Blogger is nice and easy and doesn’t give you too many options, so there’s not an overwhelming amount of information…  Basically, it’s perfect for what it does. Families who want to keep their distant relatives and friends updated on how cute their kids are, and hobbies and other interests… I speak from experience. I have both kinds of blogs. Started out on WordPress and thought I’d get a Blogger one for fun. The Blogger one has only served to frustrate me. Things that I can do easily (well, easily now that I’ve figured out how to do them) on WordPress are very tricky in Blogger. Even moving the page settings around in the sidebar in Blogger has proved challenging for me. I click and drag, but it doesn’t always go where I want it to, and then I’m left with something I wanted in the sidebar up in the header, or in the footer. I don’t know why…

And WordPress has these incredible widgets. I download and use for a while to make sure I like it, and then donate. Because money is important. Sad, but true. (Although the person who developed my theme is no longer supporting it. Not sure how I feel about that.) Among my favorite widgets are the WP to Twitter, which (as expected) tweets whenever I’ve made a new post. So I feel extra productive–I’ve written a post and updated my Twitter account. My new favorite is Shashin, which uses Picasa to get all your photos right where you want them to be. And here I was uploading them one at a time to my media library… Foolish girl.

And my absolute favorite? The favicon. I never even knew that’s what they were called. Where have I been? I always wanted one, and there are so many resources out there… I can make my own at favicon.cc or download one at any number of sites, or generate one with from an image or photo at Favicon from Pics. I just used a small image from my background and had it converted at Dynamic Drive. They had the best graphics for what I wanted. But since I’ve found the photo option, I may just do that instead. So many decisions… See what I mean? Perhaps too many decisions with WordPress… But still. I would never recommend Blogger instead.

What counts as writer’s block?

Suffering a bit from it, I think. I haven’t been able to do anything for a couple of weeks now. If I’ve taken a break, it’s usually a bit trickier for me to get back into again, but it’s never taken this long before. I sit down and want nothing to do with writing. I still get ideas and scribble them down and have written a couple of scenes, but nothing really productive.

So I decided to fall back on my next best skill-set–research.

This is the definition from Wikipedia:  (Don’t even get me started on what I think of Wikipedia, but it’ll do for now.)

Writer’s block is a condition, associated with writing as a profession, in which an author loses the ability to produce new work. The condition varies widely in intensity. It can be trivial, a temporary difficulty in dealing with the task in hand. At the other extreme, some “blocked” writers have been unable to work for years on end, and some have even abandoned their careers.

If that doesn’t depress you… The entry goes on to describe the pressure of genius and how creativity could come from a particular portion of the brain and how writer’s block could be because of damage to that portion. From trauma or just from drinking too much? What if I’m just bored? Lazy? Tired?

The Purdue Online Writer’s Lab has an article about Symptoms and Cures for Writer’s Block.  However, it’s for students working on assignments and papers. No help there.

Then there’s the Writer’s Block site. My first impression was not a good one. The bad music and little movie at the beginning didn’t impress me. I’m not particularly fond of websites that start playing music as soon as you link to their site (See?  I’m giving you a warning.  Nice of me, eh?)  Worse–I don’t like it when they’ve played their movie and music and then you have to click to enter the site. Frustrating. That’s why I went to the site in the first place–because I wanted to enter it! Why should I have to click again? Hm. I call myself low-maintenance…perhaps I’m mistaken.

Once you’ve accessed the site (again), it’s not that attractive. Black and blue–like a big bruise. Seems to mostly be for musicians anyway, although there are links to forums for writers and poets and even visual artists as well. And there’s a never-ending story started, although I didn’t want to register just to find out what that was all about.

The best seems to be Language is a Virus. Much more interesting site (although way too many ads) and there were even creative writing games like the Haiku-a-Tron and Poetry Generator. Unfortunately, their website design for the games puts black words on a black background, so you have to highlight to read the results, and I only discovered that by accident. (So much for being impressed by the design.) But the content is still good. Writing exercises from Burroughs and Kerouac and Dali and even a link to NaNoWriMo and photos for visual inspiration… Oh my, yes. It’s my new favorite. Definitely check it out. I don’t seem to be writing more because of it, but at least I have a legitimate excuse to be wasting time now.