Dealing with Plagiarism

Last week, just as I was attempting to head off to Poland for a friend’s wedding, I had a message from Steph at Cuddlebuggery book blog, alerting me that I’d been plagiarised.

Whilst I was insanely glad that’d she’d alerted me and was so incredibly supportive and awesome all the way through the last few days, what followed was a few days of hellishness when I was supposed to be happy and celebrating the marriage of two awesome people.

Let’s start at the beginning. By the time I picked up Steph’s message the plagiariser (Samantha) had already removed over forty plagiarised reviews from both her goodreads page and her blog, having stolen from over fifteen other book bloggers that we know of, and potentially many more. Now if you visited either you were greeted by a ghost town of dead links and empty pages. Luckily Steph had screen grabbed as many of the plagiarised reviews as possible and was able to send me mine. 

Note to self: Don’t read reviews someone has stolen from you on a train travelling across Poland, you will either a) look like you might murder the person opposite, b) cry or c) both.

Perhaps it’s just as well I opened it then because my wifi was so patchy that it meant I couldn’t do any of the knee jerk reactions that I probably would have done had I been at home. I had time to think and stew and generally fume until I was in bed in the hotel that night after sixteen hours of travel and unable to sleep.

Working my little fingers like crazy across a phone keyboard that was definitely not built for long email writing, I fired off an email to Goodreads alerting them and adding my voice to the cacophony of bloggers who had been hit.
I talked to friends and other bloggers, and then I (foolishly) went on Samantha’s new twitter page. After she’d been found out she’d shut down her old twitter page and started a new one, where she had in the last few hours been talking to author Kate Scelsa about how much she was enjoying reading ‘Fans of the Impossible Life.’ At that point my rage kinda overflowed, because I was in the middle of reading ‘Fans’ too, and Samantha’s last tweet re-sparked all the outrage I had felt on the train.
I replied.

Since I was then on a roll, I drafted an email to send to Samantha. By the time I was finished, but hadn’t yet sent, I had an email from Samantha in my inbox.

At the time I felt gratified she had finally bothered to apologise and I sent a surprisingly nice response back. Since then it has emerged she sent the same email to anyone she discovered she had plagiarised from, she also lied repeatedly in follow up emails she sent to me, and openly admitted she didn’t know who she had plagiarised from. That’s how many people she’s stolen from, she genuinely can’t remember it anymore.

The reviews were down, she’d apologised and promised never to do it again and I was feeling slightly calmer about the whole thing. I thought that things were on their way to being resolved.

I went to the wedding, I partied.

I came home to another message from Steph – Samantha was putting the plagiarised reviews back up again with odd words tweaked and other bits of my review plagiarised instead.

Shortly after she set her goodreads profile to private so only friends of hers would be able to see the reviews she was putting up.

Around twelve hours after that Steph posted an expose on Cuddlebuggery detailing everything that had happened.

Twelve hours later Goodreads removed Samantha as a user.

So why am I telling you all this? Two reasons.
Firstly because I have never had my work plagiarised before and when Steph first told me what had happened I had no idea what to do. Did I just stay quiet and seethe? Did I make a fuss? Did I need to contact anyone? Without Steph’s help I would probably have done nothing, as it was she guided me through all the various things I could do to try and rectify the situation. Who needed to be contacted, what needed to be handled. She was amazing, and I cannot thank her enough.

And I know that other bloggers would be equally stumped if put in this situation, so this is in part to make people aware of steps you can take if you find your work has been plagiarised.
Contact the plagiariser, try to get it take down. Contact goodreads and alert them. Don’t keep quiet about this sort of thing. Plagiarism is not ok and should not be glossed over. Samantha is most likely having a bad time of it at the moment with so many book bloggers outraged at what’s happened, and I do feel sorry for her, but I also feel she really didn’t help herself with how she handled it. So at the end of the day, other bloggers needed to be made aware of the situation and to keep an eye out for more plagiarism more than her feelings needed to be protected.

And secondly, because I needed to talk about it. Like I said, this is the first time something like this has happened to me, I have lived in a fairly drama free corner of the blogosphere, and I was shocked and angry and I felt violated.
These were my words, my hard work, being stolen and passed off as someone elses. Not only on her blog, but her facebook page, her tumblr, her goodreads page and (perhaps the most upsetting part for me) on Netgalley. These are books she cited she had received from Netgalley which meant that she was sending my reviews to publishers and saying they were her own.

I keep oscillating between being furiously angry and horribly depressed and upset about the whole thing. I have a stack of books I need to review and I cannot motivate myself to get on and write the reviews because there’s this terrible little voice in the back of my brain saying ‘what’s the point if someone is just going to steal them?’ Then there was the other little voice in my brain that was just laughing hysterically because why would she steal my ramblings?! Should I be flattered in some weird way? I think that's the part of my brain that has had too much caffeine.

My blog has been my project (my baby) for five years, I have invested thousands of hours perfecting the layout and design, building up my readership and contacts in the publishing world, reading the books and writing the reviews. And some girl has come along and reduced all of that to Ctrl C + Ctrl V – LOOK AT WHAT BEAUTIFUL WORDS I WROTE.
That is a horrific feeling.

So if you find out you have been plagiarised, know that there are others that know what horrible feelings you’re having, and do not stay quiet and let them get away with it. The blogging world is a place where we are able to express ourselves, share our love of books, make friends and bring out our creativity, and no one should be allowed to take that away because they didn’t much fancy writing a long review for themselves.

A Book Blogger Ties the Knot (Or: How I managed to get as many books into my wedding as possible...)

When my other half proposed in February I knew that somehow we were going to get our two favourite passions into our wedding day – bicycles and books.
Which started, in amongst all the other stressing and panicking, a slow, careful deliberation about which of my many many favourite books I wanted to include in the day. Because when you read as much as I do, you inevitably amass a fairly huge pile of favourites.

I wanted to include favourite books from my childhood, recent favourites, classics I return to again and again, and books we both loved. And unfortunately there was a limit to how many books we could get in their various guises into the marquee. But we were creative…

So when we got married at the end of last month there were an absolute plethora of books in amongst the celebrations.

The tables had books wrapped around the vases on the tables, both to serve as names for each table, but also reading material if anyone got bored and to take away at the end of the night. There were book pages suspended from the bike wheels (of course there were bike wheels, he’s a cycling fanatic!) and the crowning glory? Miniature books decorating the cake. A labour of love done between me, my mother, and my long suffering Boy.

There were favourite cycling books, Terry Pratchett’s and Redwall as his

contribution, but other than that I was granted free reign. And I loved it.

Tamora Pierce, Gerald Durell’s ‘My Family and Other Animals’ and ‘The Princess Bride’ by William Goldman stood for my childhood loves. Harry Potter made an obvious appearance, in amongst more recent favourites like ‘The Fault in our Stars’ by John Green, ‘Seraphina’ by Rachel Hartman and ‘The Night Circus’ by Erin Morgenstern. We had classics like ‘The Time Traveller’s Wife’, ‘American Gods’ and ‘Neverwhere’ and of course the books I cannot live without like the Lady Julia Grey series by Deanna Raybourn, ‘The Scorpio Races’ by Maggie Stiefvater and ‘Unspoken’ by Sarah Rees Brennan. And right at the top, a novel yet to grace the shelves until early next year, the debut by a very great friend, ‘The Last Leaves Falling’ by Sarah Benwell.

They were a talking point, a communal love that had people come racing over to me to tell me how thrilled they were that I loved this particular book and they loved it too. They sparked conversations about books people loved and if you like that you should try this. They forged beginnings of new friendships and I have loved hearing about books that people took away with them and what they thought of them. It was exactly what I wished for as part of my wedding day. A way to celebrate my love of books and sharing them with others, and also to celebrate the books that have brought me and the Boy together over the years.

Finding my way back to books

So you may have noticed the somewhat sporadic posting over the last year or so, as I fell off the radar, attempted to climb back onto it and failed spectacularly by going straight back into hospital. Basically I should never say I'm back, it is guaranteed to jinx it, I should just sidle back in when no-one is paying any attention...
It was quite an interesting time, because I was suddenly faced with multiple crises all at the same time, and for the first time in my life I reacted in a different way to usual. I stopped reading. I have so many books, I constantly have one in my bag or within easy reach just in case I get a spare two minutes to read a couple more pages. At no point ever in my life have I gone so long without picking up a book. I tried, oh believe me I tried. I tried new books, but they were usually discarded within a page, three pages, several chapters slogged over several months. I tried old favourites and could usually manage to get about half way through before giving up, but nothing managed to stick with me until the end.

Which meant I had an awful lot of free time to spend pondering all the things I really didn't want to think about that had caused the reading crisis in the first place.
It was a really pretty awful time, although some of the things that have come out of it have made up for it in spades. But it meant that I started trying to find new ways to fill in the gap that the books had left.
I went back to audiobooks. Although there was never anything so exciting as listening to a new book, I listened to my three favourites 'The Scorpio Races' by Maggie Stiefvater, 'Graceling' and 'Fire' by Kristin Cashore. I can now pretty much recite them all word for word from memory. It became one of my favourite things to curl up at night with my headphones in and disappear to Thisby or The Dells, or the Seven Kingdoms. They were familiar, and something about having someone else read the story to me was comforting, and snuck them in around the reading block.

Then there were the TV shows. I've always had a couple that I followed avidly and loved, but suddenly I was watching so many more, and boy was this the year to get invested in American TV. There was such a wide breadth of variety across the board. The staple supernatural in 'The Vampire Diaries' and 'The Originals', and boy did 'The Originals' knock it out of the park in its first season. It started off as quite a safe predictable show, and within a few episodes had completely twisted everything on its head and turned into one of the most compelling shows out there.
Then we had 'Starcrossed' sadly only for one series before it was cut. The incredible period drama 'Reign' which will get its own blog post because it was so incredibly awesome, detailing the life of Mary Queen of Scots when she was a teenager at French court. 'The Witches of East End', based on the novel by Melissa de la Cruz and due back for its second season this Sunday. Third seasons of both 'Revenge' and 'Once Upon a Time', of course the brilliant and breath taking fourth season of 'Game of Thrones' and a new discovery for me 'Sleepy Hollow' which I am currently forgoing sleep to plough through.

And finally after months of ignoring my books and watching TV shows and listening to audiobooks, I was stuck in hospital again and very, very bored, when I felt the first stirrings of wanting to read. I begged The Boy to bring me the first three Harry Potter's to re-read and to my surprise, devoured them. Once I got home I worked my way through the rest of the series, finding comfort in some very old friends. And once I'd finished? I picked up a new book.

Since then I haven't stopped, I've been working my way through books I have been desperate to read for months, consuming words like someone who has been starved for the last year. I can't put into words how relieved I am to finally be able to enjoy reading again, and to know that I will finish a book that I start. It felt like I'd lost access to a part of me that I'd taken for granted, and I am so grateful to have it back.
But whilst I missed all the books during that year, I loved discovering so many new things. Now it's just trying to find a balance between the two!

Which brings me, in a very roundabout way to the question I wanted to pose through this post. Have you ever had a patch where you couldn't read, or where you didn't want to? And what did you do to help yourself through it, and did you find other things in the process?