Some of you may remember this wank from last year, revolving around a certain individual who decided to claim he'd 'won' NaNoWriMo by copying and pasting pages from Wikipedia and so on into Word and then using find and replace until it was a 'completely new and unique literary work'.

Well, he's back. With his profile page proudly boasting of last year's 'achievement' thusly:

My debut with NaNoWriMo was in 2008, when I completed a 2.5-million-word draft titled "The President Who Exploded." This work is what I call a “non-linear literary collage.” It consists of materials I mined from various blogs, chat rooms and fan fiction sites. I'm a word rustler. I prowl the talk pages of Wikipedia, the reader comments on io9.com and various venues frequented by anonymous bloggers. I shamelessly plagiarize their words -- even their misspellings and gramatical errors -- then transform the stolen content into a new and unique literary product through a series of computer-assisted modifications (cut-up engines, Markov generators, search and replace functions, etc.) and combinations with recycled content from my own writings. These are techniques I first explored in “Marienbad My Love,” the world's longest novel. Released in 2008, this 17-million-word creation also sets records for the world's longest word, sentence and book title.

Which, notably, is copypasta from his own website. Self-plagiarism must be the literary equivalent of sitting on your hand until it goes numb before masturbating.

Modus operandi announced, he trots into the 'Reaching the MILLION ...... NaNoWriMo 2009' The following exchange ensues:

marienbadmylove: I logged 2.5 million words last year. I'm swinging for 999,999-plus again this time. Let the good times roll!

Kateness: you know I don't think your words count, on the basis of our disagreement last year.
BUT
because the rules explicitly say I can't call you a cheater, I won't, because god knows that rule has helped me in the past, and we'll just leave it at that. If you think it's a win, it's a win (Just kindly keep your hands off any excerpts I may post, and my blog if you're so inclined), and that's all I'm going to say about this.

marienbadmylove: Ah, but how can you stop me? *snip some drivel about William Burroughs*

Dragonchilde (forum moderator extraordinaire: OH NO YOU DIDN'T *cites rules stating why he can't threaten to steal other Wrimos' writing*

marienbadmylove: *more gibberish about Burroughs that is kind of really not applicable in this situation at all*

Rest of responses: *dogpile without explicitly calling him a cheater* The best of which is Angolera's: There's a huge difference between writing 2.5 million words and using 2.5 million words.

marienbadmylove: *disappears from thread*

But where is he now? Oh, here he is, announcing his intention to hit 50,000 words on Day One to give himself a 'little cushion' on his way to the million. Please note he never states he's going to write these words, and is yet to return to the thread to pass comment on whether he is typing these words or using a voice recognition system. Funny about that.

And it's not even November yet...

Edit: Classic response from painkillers regarding the need of someone shooting for a million to sleep: Sleep? SLEEP? sleep is for writers, I'm a conceptual artist I am. ga ga goo goo ga ga, gin gang gooly, see it is the conception of the words that matter, not the words themselves. i don't need to sleep, because i don't use my brain -- for anything.

Son of edit: He reaches 50K!

Over in bad_service, beccaweccavt makes a post about some "bad service" she receives from a mechanic who charges her less than they should have but OMG doesn't cash her check immediately! The denizens of bad_service are confused. beccaweccavt then proceeds to let the community know that she's unable to keep track of her written checks because she's a bookkeeper for a large corporation and has a credit score of 800.

Keep on truckin', beccaweccavt. Keep on truckin'.

Who's in the mood for a good ol' academic tussle?

1. Professor Steve Fuller writes a book called Dissent over Descent: Intelligent Design's Challenge to Darwinism.

2. Professor AC Grayling reviews the book for New Humanist magazine.

It is sometimes hard to know whether books that strike one as silly and irresponsible...are the product of a desire to strike a pose and appear outrageous (the John Gray syndrome), or really do represent that cancer of the contemporary intellect, post-modernism.

3. Fuller responds to the review.

I wish I could repay AC Grayling’s compliment by naming an exotic mental pathology after him, but regrettably his review of Dissent over Descent displays disorders of a much more mundane kind: he has merely failed to read the book properly and does not know what he is talking about.

4. Grayling responds to the response.

Steve Fuller complains, as do all authors whose books are panned, that I did not read his book properly (or at all). Alas, I did.

5. Forum fight!

(But it can't make him use the shift key consistently.)

Giles Coren would like you to know that "a" is very srs bsn:

3) And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed 'a' so that the stress that should have fallen on "nosh" is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you're winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can't you hear? Can't you hear that it is wrong? It's not fucking rocket science. It's fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and i have never ended on an unstressed syllable. Fuck. fuck, fuck, fuck.

I am sorry if this looks petty (last time i mailed a Times sub about the change of a single word i got in all sorts of trouble) but i care deeply about my work and i hate to have it fucked up by shit subbing. I have been away, you've been subbing joe and hugo and maybe they just file and fuck off and think "hey ho, it's tomorrow's fish and chips" - well, not me. I woke up at three in the morning on sunday and fucking lay there, furious, for two hours. weird, maybe. but that's how it is.

It's just his letter, but oh, it's so tasty and I love "academic" wank on a Sunday, don't you?

Wank of the SF book reviewing variety- which pretty much automatically means, "Pretentious genre debate and flashing-credentials variety."

Paul Kincaid, a British SF reviewer, writes a review of the non-SF novel The Wild Girls for the SFSite. The review is pretty tepid, and was essentially only done because the author, Pat Murphy, has also written SF novels.

Literaticat, an American on LJ, disagrees.

( It's a MIDDLE GRADE novel, people )

The SF Blog Torque Control reports on both the review and the response, and the blog editor gives his own opinion, which falls solidly on Kincaid's side. This inspires a comment thread in which people from both sides show up to argue about what "middle grade" (a US book categorization that does not exist in the UK) should mean, and whether a UK reviewer is obligated to be familiar with the US book market's labels before he reviews a book.

Kincaid then responds with a quiet but decisive takedown of Literaticat's opinion:

( This is patent balderdash )

Will there be further developments in the exciting saga of what we should call this marketing category? Stay tuned!