The home of fiction author Val Gryphin…

I decided to revisit this topic for two reasons. One, on my last post on memoirs I received this comment.

To clarify about Laura Albert, she herself was an abused child and she never used AIDS to sell her books. Please try to find a reliable source for that misconception, it does not exist.

What she did was an articulation of her very real experience with trauma and childhood abuse.

Then, I found yet another false memoir story, “Love and Consequences,” in which

“Margaret B. Jones writes about growing up as a half-white, half-Native American girl in South-Central Los Angeles in the foster home of Big Mom. One of her foster brothers, she writes, was gunned down by Crips gang members outside their home.

Jones also writes of carrying illegal guns and selling drugs for the Bloods gang” (cnn.com)

Interesting…except for the fact that she’s white, upper class, private schooled, and never been in foster care. Yeah. This is not a memoir, this is fiction. This was such a gross deception that there is no way that she can even pretend it is real.

Now, about Albert. After I received that comment, I went back and did some research on Laura Albert, also known as J.T. LeRoy. While her books were at first marketed as fiction, they were soon “revealed” to be confessional fiction based on his tempestuous life , which told the reader that they had some grounding in fiction.

An elaborate back story quickly unfolded in reviews and articles. This was the life the author had lived as a young boy. He eventually ended up wandering the streets of San Francisco, and was rescued by a doctor and sympathetic writers and editors, who encouraged him to put down his hellish life on the page. (Salon)

Not only did Albert pretend that she was LeRoy when she was writing, but to her editors, readers, and colleagues as well. And she took it beyond just playing the character - she went so far as to talk about suicide and going back to drugs with an editor friend as well and noted sex writer Susie Bright who said,

“This really breathy, tearful, high-pitched voice would say, ‘I just don’t believe in myself.’ Being desperate, being like, ‘I hate myself.’ It wasn’t comical. You felt like you really had to get into therapist mode and give him reason to hope.” (Salon)

In addition to duping writers and publishers, she also wrote non-fiction articles, such as when she wrote an article about going to Paris Disneyland for the New York Times. In it she says,

When I was a child, my mother worked the strip clubs outside Orlando, Fla., and weeding out the Disney dollars from legitimate tender stuffed into her G-string was my job. The Disney money annoyed her because no matter how hard she tried, for any exchange rate, her dealers would not accept it. I was thrilled, and hid it, my stash for secret trips to Disney World with some of her customers. As a teenager, I hustled on the streets of Los Angeles. (NYTimes)

This was more than just a nom de plume. Albert deliberately deceived everyone in order to market her book. As far as the AIDS claim goes, Albert said,

Originally I felt that he might die of AIDS, but that’s not in any of the books. I didn’t deny the rumors, but I never made any statement intended to further JT’s popularity by claiming he had AIDS. (The Paris Review)

She let the rumors build without correcting them, again for the publicity and furthering the mystique.

“People were generous because they thought they were helping an H.I.V.-positive former drug addict, ex-prostitute, who used the hardships of his life to make art,” said Ira Silverberg, JT Leroy’s former literary agent and an early champion. (NYTimes).

So yes, I think that Laura Albert’s deception was fraud. It doesn’t matter in terms of this hoax that her childhood was abusive - she could have written fiction inspired by her life, but by claiming to be the character in the books she turned the focus from her writing, to her persona, and started lying to her readers.

Pretty much everyone and their brother have heard of James Frey, author of the memoir A Million Little Pieces. Frey marketed the book as a memoir of his life, and then had it revealed that he had made quite a bit up and embellished a lot more. There were (are) two sides to this debate. One, the side that I am on, held that Frey deceived the reader by passing off fiction as truth. I feel very strongly about this - if I am reading something that I believe to be true, I do not want to find out that in fact part of is not. I feel that this is breaking a promise on the part of the writer to be truthful with the reader. The other camp, which is smaller, says that it really doesn’t matter if part of it was made up, because they don’t expect a memoir to be 100% truthful, as memory is subjective.

As a writer, I feel that if I am writing fiction I can write whatever I want within the guidelines of slander, libel, thinly veiled abuse of a real person, etc., and people will know that it is a made-up narrative. And when I write non-fiction it needs to be factual or I will loose the readers’ faith in my account. Obviously it impossible to be totally and completely exact, as memory is subjective, but an author needs to get as close true the facts as possible - and when a writer deliberately manipulates facts, I feel they are being deceitful towards their readers and are breaking the bond of trust that exists between them.

The school of thought that some tweaking is ok gets murkier the more cases you examine. What about J.T. LeRoy, the supposedly teenage male hustler who was in fact the imaginary product of Laura Albert? Albert not only went so far as to pretend to be J.T. in public, but she carried out this charade for nine years total. She played on people’s emotions and feelings about abused children, AIDS, prostitution and other vulnerable subjects. So, is this really considered acceptable for a memoir? Does the amount of untruths diferenciate it from A Million Little Pieces?

Now another memoir has been uncovered as fictional. Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years, a best selling memoir by Misha Defonseca that was also made into movie has been revealed to be a hoax. In both this and Albert’s cases there is almost nothing personally truthful about in their writing, and therefore their books are works of fiction, not memoirs, and in my mind that means they deliberately deceived their readers.

So what differentiates Defonseca and Albert from Frey? In my mind not much. A little lie or a big lie is still a lie, and if I’m reading something non-fictional, I don’t want to be lied to at all. I have to admit, these and other cases have in a large part turned me off of memoirs - as a reader I place a certain trust in an author to be honest with me about what they are presenting, and in my reading as in life, I don’t like being lied to.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Zooty & Flapper, a “pre-publishing site” that several sites, including Storycrafters and Writers Beware, warned authors off of as it took away a writer’s first publishing rights for very little payoff. The proprietor of said Z&F site, Mr. Pappalardo, who apparently is tracking down and commenting on and/or chastising the authors of posts about him left a comment on my post about him. While it didn’t address any of the specific problems I and other raised about this site, he raised a couple of points that I want to rebut.

Thank you for your comments.
I have been called a scam, clueless, stupid, jerk, etc by the followers of Jean and Victoria Strauss. Both have said I know nothing about marketing a book. I do not know the publishing industry.
Note: Forbes did a story back in 12.01.06 about an author Cory Doctorow who gave away 30,000 free books (down-load) to readers. Within three years he had sold 700,000 of the same book. Cory never has a book published before he gives it away free.
http://www.mdbell had a story today about author Neil Gaiman. His publisher agreed he should give away free (down-load) one of his books to build a larger following.
Those who think I’m a nut might want to read the above. And, there are others.
The experts who have made an effort to bury me, should first check what has proven to work.

The thing that most of the commenters were concerned about was the site’s announced intention of offering other people’s manuscripts for free. The concerns that were given about Z&F had nothing to do with whether an author could give away their own work and succeed, although there aren’t a whole lot of success stories. The examples he lists prove absolutely nothing about his site and its originally stated intention. Doctorow was giving and away and promoting his OWN work - not taking on others’ work and publishing it all on one site. The thing is though, Doctorow devoted a huge amount of energy to ONE book - how could a site that offered to publish many authors’ work possibly even attempt to do anything close to that? And Gaiman? there is no way that man has to worry about a book contract. He is a brilliant writer with graphic novels, movies and books under his belt. He has nothing to loose by giving his work away free.

Pappalardo also has a page up where he talked about first rights that gives me cause for concern because of the misinformation he is spreading. For instance, while he is correct on what constitutes published, he is wrong on much of what he considers to be unpublished. (Bold text is mine.)

1) You gave up your first North American serial rights.
2) Your book went through an editorial process.
3) It appeared in an online journal.
4) It appeared in print publication..even a small print run.
5) It appeared in a literary anthology (collection).

All correct.

Unpublished if….
1) Won a prize but not printed. correct
2) In a workshop ( online writing workshop ). ONLY if the online workshop was password protected, i.e. not available to the general web population. If it was an open workshop. it has been published.
3) Appeared on a blog.. but this is changing. Has been considered published for quite a while. Some publications might not consider it published, but most do.

He also has some misconceptions reguarding what authors want.

If you are an unknown writer building a following of readers, you may want to give up the first right to a book.
Publishers do not want a one book wonder anyway. Your second, third etc books will have a following you can show a publisher.
Read rosenfelds article on Writers Digest and determine what is best for you. Most publishers and/or agents really don’t care about someone’s web following unless they like the book. So giving up those rights has not real benefit.

As for myself, I have chose to give first rights to a publisher before giving away free books. If well received by readers, my publisher will still have first serial rights. This is super confusing. If he has given first rights to a publisher, than that means it has to be published in that format before he can offer it for free online - and only IF the terms of his contract allows it. If it hasn’t been published in their format, by posting it online he is taking first rights away from them, and that could get him in a whole bunch of trouble. First rights is the first time it appears in print. Period.

I stand by my original post on Z&F. As he is now pushing only his own work though, he can publish and promote it however he likes. However, I partially agree with him on one thing - that giving away some of your own work can help bring in publicity and reap some rewards. I’ll post more on that tomorrow.

I was web-hopping around this last Friday, visiting links from my fellow High-Fivers, when I ended up on the blog StoryCrafters. I started digging into it, and soon read an article titled” I’m a Mazzikin, or is that mizzikin?” that started out with the phrase:

I hadn’t been over to the Zooty & Flapper site for a couple days but was told he’d updated it and since I had some free time this afternoon, decided to check it out.

Whhaaaa? I read it and it was humorous, but I didn’t understand the background. So I went back into the archives to dig out the whole story, and actually found a more serious story than I was expecting.

The first post in the series was titled “ZootyandFlappers.com World’s First Pre-Publisher.” It was written by Jean Lauzier, and descussed the website Zooty and Flappers Pre-Publishing. From her summery of how they work:

First, you send him your novel. He sets it up and puts it on his site as a free download. The readers that download it, give it a rating of some kind. If enough readers like it, he pulls it from the “download for free” side of his site, and adds it to his “bookstore” as an e-book or cd and sells it with him paying you 45% of the sale price. Then, once you sell 10,000 copies, he will send a copy of your book along with a sales report and a readers report to “ten real agents.”

Hummmm, so lets see here, he makes money off of your writing on his site without paying you, and then if it starts making even more money, he’ll kindly to give you less than half. Then, as if that isn’t generous enough, he’ll send a sales report and readers report (because we know how well the agents will look at those!) to 10 “real” (as opposed to imaginary) agents, who will probably throw it straight in the trash when they realize who it is from. Mmmmmk, sounds good to me so far. He describes an author as (spelling and capitalization his own):

What does Zooty and Flappers consider a Published Author? A writer who has secured an agent, who has sold your work to a Publisher who prints books on paper, and sells your books to books stores.

And here I thought that you know, having fiction that I wrote published made me a published author. Damn, guess not.

So anyway, Jean published this post warning others about this scam, and this made Mister Domenic Pappalardo very unhappy. He started threatening her. Hence post two: Zooty & Flappers pt. 2 Here Jean outlined exactly what she said about him before, why she had problems with the site and then posts some of his comments responding to her first post.

What you have printed on this site, to the public, I shall take up with my attorney. If I can hold you and the chat room harmfull, I will.

I will take up with her in a court of law.

I understand why you have never been published by a Standard Publisher. I do believe anyone can go to a writing school, and learn how to write. But there are no schools that can teach talent. It’s like learning to sing. Anyone can learn to sing, but they still need talent. And you can’t learn talent. You either have it, or you don’t.The one thing you do have. You have the power to shut anyone on this chat room down when they won’t let you play the expert.

If you can’t beat them by logic, just scream really loud and hope they give up and go away.

The reason that this little “scheme” is so bad, other than just the money aspect, is that this is a form of publication, but not a good form. For one thing, no “real agent” is going to take this guy seriously. And, even worse, once a novel (or story or non-fiction book) is posted on that site, it is published. That means that should someone want to try and shop around a work that was on the Z&F site, even if the site is no longer in existence, they are going to have to tell every agent and/or editor that their work has already been published. While there are writers who have parlayed their online work into novel or non-fiction contracts, they are few and far between, and they were firmly in control of their work at all times. With this concept, the author is giving up a lot of control, and first publishing rights, for little or no payoff, and probably almost non-existent chance for an agent to pick it up off of that site.

So the third post, the I’m a Mazzikin, or is that mizzikin? post, contains basically a slander article that Pappalardo wrote about Jean, slamming her every-which-way and twisting the truth each time he makes a statement about her. Knowing the background puts the whole post into context, which I will only quote a little bit of, you have to read the whole thing for yourself.
He said:

What sparked her to go public with her writing? And what direction did it take?She said she read an article in a magazine. Angered, she wrote a letter to the editor, giving a rebuttal. Her letter along with those of several other people was printed. She had slapped someone down in print! How did that make her feel? In her own words, “I think I slept with that issue under my pillow for a month.”

The quote from an interview with Jean that he mangled was:

In fact, what really got me started on the road to becoming a writer was an article in a magazine. I wrote a rebuttal and it was published. The magazine was an international publication and I think I slept with the issue under my pillow for a month.

And a couple other choice quotes from him:

… I’ll tell you where you can nail my hide to the wall. Find spelling errors in what I write. I am a lazy speller. Heck I even put double words in at times…You put yourself out there as an expert as to what will work and what won’t. You name three other’s who have done the same thing. You say I can’t do it, because others have failed. Hmm? Come on kid, why don’t you stop trying to be an expert on things your not. I told my dog Ruff, “I don’t want to get down in the gutter with this gal and her following of Mazzikins. I have been asked by others to publicize some of your exploits. I know some of your readers think of you as a sweet person.

Humm.

I checked out his site of course, and the text is sloppy and has errors. The graphics that change on mouseover on the menu looks like either clip art or collected images, which gives it an amateur feel. So far it looks like he is his only client, although it seems that since the exchange with Jean, he has pulled most of the text down, and is no longer soliciting other authors’ manuscripts. Hopefully he’ll keep it that way. He is however, already talking about nominating a piece of work from the site for a Pulitzer Prize.

This was one of those things that I came to a little bit late, but I want to make a quick note about it, and what it says about the writing community as a whole.

Patry Francis is the author of the thriller novel The Liar’s Diary, which was published in February 2007. It did well enough that there was a paperback edition, scheduled to come out January 29th, 2008. Of course, for any novelist that is a huge deal. However, in November of 2007, Patry was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. Life went from focusing on the book, to focusing on living.

In January of this year, a group of wonderful people got together, and decided that since Patry was trying to live, they in turn would try to help her by promoting her book. The result was over 300 writers, bloggers, agents, readers, editors, publishers, and many other people in one way or another, on January 29th, promoted Patry’s book.

There’s a lot of cut-throat in any business, but I think writers have a special bond, in that we love hearing about other writers, we encourage each other, help each other, and even when we think, Gee, I wish that was me, we are still happy for one another, and say You go!

I have not read this book, or heard of Patry before this, but I went through and read a great deal of her blog after hearing about this, and there is a lot that resonates with me. I’ll finish off with a post I found on her blog, when she first found out her book had sold.

Ok, so by now we all know plagiarism is bad. Bad bad writer. However, via The Marketing Whore’s blog comes another plagiarism story, but this one is just plain weird.

So, The New York Press decides it’s going to have a sex column, and they recruit Claudia Lonow to write it. The first column comes out and the gals at Jezebel poke fun at/express distaste at (not 100% work safe, but pretty tame) some of her questions, in particular an incest one. In the comments people mention that the question sounds very familiar and start doing what else? Googling it of course!

And so not only did she plagiarize the question, (again pretty tame pic, but definitely graphic column) but she plagiarized Dan Savage, a nationally syndicated sex advice columnist based in Seattle. Of course, if you are going to plagiarize, go big! *sigh* Of course, after finding this out the editors yanked the plug on the column, saying that:

“It has come to our attention that some of the questions in this week’s debut of the New York Press’s new sex-advice column, “Lip Service,” were taken from past columns by Dan Savage, the nationally-syndicated sex-advice columnist and editor of The Stranger. The author of the column, Claudia Lonow, a television writer based in Los Angeles who had not previously written for a newspaper, used the questions to provide material for her inaugural column, in the absence of real questions from readers. It had been our understanding that the questions for her first column came from friends. She has told us she was unaware that using questions from Savage’s column was a breach of journalism ethics. She has offered her resignation, and we’ve accepted it. We apologize to our readers, and to Dan Savage, for this error in judgment.”

Ok, this boggles me. How could she not know that copying freaking Dan Savage would not land her in trouble? (Although, that is the the one thing in her favor - she copied Dan Savage!)

(Dan Savage incidentally isn’t ticked over this, and actually says she could have used the questions if she asked!)

As a side of interest, The New York Press is now hiring a new sex column writer, in an “American Idol”-style format. Given though the rate that Editor David Blum has gone through sex column writers, (five in a year!) I think I’ll pass.

from the guy whose article on black-footed ferrets she plagiarized, in Newsweek. Hysterical read, he ticked off some romance readers with his stereotyping of the genre, which I can understand, but the article rocked.

Also, I updated my High-Fives post below.

I generally don’t talk too much about romance books, namely because I’m not really interested in that genre. Although, as a disclaimer, I do enjoy one every once in a while, as long as it doesn’t involve rape, taking a woman captive, any of those domineering kinds. They have to involve humor, a plausible plot and bonus points if they involve Vampires. (Me? Picky? Never.) However, a story has recently hit the mainstream news outlets, regarding romance author Cassie Edwards’s apparently wide usage of plagiarism in her novels, and I feel that it applies across genres.

Now, I don’t care if it is horror, literary, mainstream, fantasy, whatever genre fiction, (and non-fiction for that matter, but that’s ‘nother post), I personally feel as an author that when one writer plagiarizes, it can cast a negative light, or at least an air of suspicion across all authors. In this particular case, the information first came to light on the blog Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, when one of the readers noticed a difference in style in one of the passages in an Edwards book. On a whim she plugged it into Google, and found sources where Edwards seems to have copied passages word for word into her novel. The authors of the site got curious, started digging, and started uncovering a large amount of places in several of Edwards’s books that were lifted, almost verbatim, from many nonfiction sources. And, not only did she use those authors’ words in her own writing, she didn’t even attempt to legitimize it by listing them as research sources. Further digging revealed that she plagiarized articles and fiction novels, most notably Pulitzer Prize winner Laughing Boy by Oliver La FargeThe Smart Bitches, Trashy Books people have done an amazing job of researching, documenting their findings, and discussing how Edwards’s publisher is (not) dealing with this issue. If you want to read more about this, go visit them here at the beginning, and there are links to all of the rest of the story.

While the issue of plagiarism has always ticked me off, (not to mention that every professor and teacher I have ever had drilled in the idea that it is BAD), there are a couple of things that I have found of interest in this case. This isn’t a case of a new writer plagiarizing a first novel, or an unknown writer getting busted. Edwards is 71 years old, and has written over 100 books! Yes, more than one, plus two zeros behind it, and as of my last check at least twelve of them have been found to have a substantial amount of plagiarism. Leaving aside the interesting question of how so much of this got by the editors, fact checkers, and who all knows who else in the publishing process over her long career, not to mention all of her readers, one of my biggest questions is how could she possibly have justified doing this? An even bigger one is why did she do it? As a writer I have to wonder, did she just hate the writing process? Did she get writer’s block and copy “once” to “get over it” and then just keep on doing it? Was she so focused on getting those 100 books out that she didn’t care how she did it? Personally, I don’t always like what I write, sometimes writing is hard as hell, but I take pride in the knowledge that the fiction that I do write is my own. Personally, I feel like plagiarizing is akin to selling your writing soul to the devil.

I’m not sure how much of a financial impact this is going to have for Edwards, and really, I’m not interested in seeing her get financially socked. The reason is that she’s already getting the worst punishment possible - now no one is going to think of her as a “real writer;” instead, she’s going to be that romance novelist who had to steal other people’s words because she couldn’t write good enough stuff herself. And I think that is about the worst feeling a writer could have.

As a final note, again, courtesy of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, here’s a link to biographies of some of the people Edwards plagiarized. If their words are being printed, they deserve to at least be known.