Entry tags:

person: cassie edwards, plagiarism

First We Stole Their Land---Now Cassie Edwards Steals Their Prose
Or Raccoon Penis Quill Wank.
ETA: Part 4
Cassie Edwards lifted passages from 1930 Pulitzer Prize Winner Laughing Boy.


ETA: THE RETURN: Signet responds. Don't worry. It's not "really" plagiarism because it's not copyright infringement. Cassie Edwards responds in an AP Article. It can't be plagiarism. She didn't know it was wrong. Fortunately, as per her publisher, it wasn't wrong.

I wasn't sure if I should put this here or OTF_Wank, but I figure since the Anne Rice wank shows up here, I'd go with F_W. If it's wrong, my deepest apologies.

Earlier today, Smart Bitch Candy makes a rather serious accusation about popular romance novelist Cassie Edwards. If you don't know the name, she's the author of over 100 books, including such classics as Savage Winds. Candy gave her friend a book called Shadow Bear, and her friend immediately did what professors across the country do every day--notice a huge discrepancy in writing styles and suspect something strange is afoot at the Circle K.

Cassie Edwards is a plagiarist.



Here's a brief example of what they found:

"I read that ferrets stalk and kill prairie dogs during the night. Using their keen sense of smell and whiskers to guide them through pitch-black burrows, ferrets suffocate the sleeping prey, an impressive feat considering the two species are about the same weight," Shiona said, shivering at the thought, for to her one animal was as cute and precious as the next. It was a shame that any had to die to sustain the other. Shadow Bear p. 221

Compared to...

Ferrets stalk and kill prairie dogs during the night. Using their keen sense of smell and whiskers to guide them through pitch-black burrows, ferrets clamp a suffocation bite on their sleeping prey -- an impressive feat, considering that the two species are about the same weight."Toughing it Out in the Badlands," Defenders Magazine, Summer 2005.

But her fangrrrls aren't taking this sitting down!

This author has thousands of readers who are loyal fans.

You people are sick. Are your lives so pathetic that you have to single people out and attack them?

Do you even know any of these authors that you are always attacking?

Maybe you should get to know some of them before you go around bashing them.

You may think this is funny and makes you look good. It doesn’t! All it does is show what kind of evil person you are.

Instead of trashing people and their work promote a charity, or do something nice.

I’ve yet to meet anyone who has said anything nice about your website or the people on it.

This might be from the same person, though it's difficult to tell.

You people need to get lives! Shame on you for attacking authors the way you do.


The name of your website tells exactly what kind of people you are!

One day someone is going to sue you and when it happens a lot of people are going to be very happy!

People are shocked/angry/outraged at this discovery, but things don't get terribly wanky until the comments in post 4. Yes, there are four posts so far detailing the huge amount of plagiarism.

That's when Jenny Cruisie and her friends start accusing Candy and Sarah of using Cassie Edwards as a scapegoat. It begins in the 2nd post with this Here’s a question I’ve been meaning to ask for a long time: Did Cassie Edwards run over your dog? . Most people don't appreciate Crusie's tone--is that all she really has to say to such wide-scale plagiarism--and heats up from there. Crusie elaborates:

So when I saw another “Cassie Edwards, ohmygod” post, the fact that it was about plagiarism is not what annoyed me first, it was that it was another shot at Cassie Edwards, discovered because people were reading her to make fun of her again. She plagiarized, I hope she goes down for it. But she doesn’t deserve the constant humiliation this site heaps on her, nobody does.

It's okay to point out plagiarism, but don't humiliate the woman who stole from countless sources!

FTR, there are more posts praising Crusie at Smart Bitches than there are posts criticizing Edwards.
Wait! This is a witch hunt! Now I wonder if Edwards weighs as much as a duck?

I’m no fan of Cassie Edwards, or of plagiarism, but neither am I comfortable with the witch hunt tone of these postings. Is Candy disillusioned by Edwards, or by romance in general? She’s complained about the genre being too predictable and seemed to dislike JR Ward partly because her books are popular. Is this like high school, where everything commercial isn’t cool?

(ETA: I didn't mean to imply this particular quote came from Crusie. It came from "Jill Sorenson")

ETA: She's not above plagiarizing herself.

From Savage Obsession, 2006:
“It was the most attractive lodge in the village, a long narrow structure of handsomely fashioned bark. The ends were beautifully rounded and the roof gracefully arched. The snow-white birchbark sides were decorated with striking totemic designs in brilliant but harmonious colors.”

From Savage Torment, 2007:
“This lodge, the Chippewas’ council house, was a long, narrow structure, handsomely fashioned of bark and appearing to be sixty feet or more in length and about twenty feet wide. The ends were beautifully rounded and the roof gracefully arched. The snow-white birchbark sides were decorated with striking totemic designs in brilliant but harmonious colors. Slow spirals of smoke rose from four smoke-holes and an Indian stood guard on each side of its front door.”

I imagine this isn't going to go away for awhile. I, for one, eagerly await Cassie's response. Or the response from her publisher--they have been notified by Candy.


ETA: But wait! There's more!

ETA 2: As seen at SBTB. The guy she ripped off? One Charles Alexander Eastman. If you don't recognize the name, you can find out more here. Including the interesting fact that he helped to found the Boy Scouts of America in 1910.