Cristiane Serruya has turned out to be an archetypal 21st-Century plagiarist. She exemplifies genre-fiction plagiarism at its “best”: minimum cost and effort, maximum profit and social success. She had high standards for whose work she plagiarized—only rip off the best—and she “serruyaed” together scenes and passages from more than seventy different sources for each of […]
Plagiarism’s #MeToo Moment Has Arrived
With Nora Roberts’ revelation of Cristiane Serruya’s rampant plagiarism igniting a Twitter firestorm in the romance-genre publishing community, the #MeToo moment for plagiarized authors may have arrived. This time the Bad Guy of the story isn’t men taking sexual advantage of vulnerable women, it’s self-published plagiarist authors taking advantage of vulnerable established authors. How can […]
Building Solid Paragraphs
I see it all the time. A perfectly good scene, shoehorned into just three or four monolithic paragraphs. Or a whole dialogue poured into a single huge paragraph, flat and solid as a concrete sidewalk. Sometimes a writer will err in the opposite direction, smashing a coherent paragraph into smaller shards just to add more […]
Welcome, Ethan Ransom, Screenwriter and Script Doctor!
Wordsmith Writing Coaches is proud to welcome our newest Wordsmith, Ethan Ransom! Ethan grew up in the rolling hills of Virginia where he developed a fascination with examining the grittier side of life, exploring conflicted and complex characters, grounded plots, and natural, authentic dialogue. He focuses on stories of hard-won redemption found in a journey […]
Goodbye, Google+
When Google announced its launch of Google+, I was already blogging on another platform and couldn’t imagine being able to add yet another social media or blogging outlet. But since it promised to smoothly integrate with my Google account, and I was also using Google Voice and Google Docs, and didn’t cost anything, I went […]
Creative Paths to Publishing: Inkshares
As I say in my Path to Publication workshop, there are thousands of different paths to publication these days. The challenge is no longer just “to get your book published.” The challenge is “to publish wisely.” Here’s another publication option (once you get to that point)—integrated crowdfunding with “hybrid” publishing, with Inkshares. The idea is […]