Beyond Heaving Bosoms

by Sarah Wendell

  But that kiddie pool of pink sand got a whole lot bigger in January 2008. In December 2007, a friend of Candy’s, a classics student by the name of Kate, asked her for a sample selection of romance novels so she could try out the genre. Candy gave her three: one that represented what Candy thought was the best of romance, a Loretta Chase novel; one that represented the most popular, a J. R. Ward novel; and one that represented what Candy thought was among the worst, a Cassie Edwards novel, Shadow Bear. While reading Shadow Bear. Kate noticed a major shift in didactic tone when, in a postnookie scene, two characters remark upon the behavior of the black-footed ferret. Kate discovered, through the magic of Google, that Shadow Bear was riddled with passages lifted directly from historical textbooks, memoirs, and in the biggest what-the-fuck moment a Defenders of Wildlife article about black-footed ferrets by journalist Paul Tolmé.

  Initially our posts on the similarities attracted a little attention from people who couldn’t believe it was true, people who made jokes about the relative quality of Edwards’s novels in the first place, and people who said we were sick and had no lives and justified beating up an old lady who had millions of fans just because we thought it would be funny. The most we had to worry about in terms of Web traffic was a few trolls, and a few hours of lost sleep as we googled anything suspicious from a random selection of Edwards’s novels.

  Then Signet, Edwards’s publisher, released a statement that indicated she’d “done nothing wrong.” That would be when the excrement hit the air-circulating device. Signet’s statement placed the entire debate on ethical grounds—grounds that didn’t leave Signet or Edwards much earth to stand on. If they’d said she did nothing illegal, well, we wouldn’t have had much to say. Neither of us is an attorney, and many of the works that were identical to passages in her novels were already in the public domain.

  On Wednesday, January 9, the Associated Press published an article about our findings and Signet’s response. The article also contained a statement from Edwards, who said she had no idea she was supposed to credit her sources. The most startling part for us, aside from the idea that the AP would cover the story, was that they published our URL. At that moment, our server curled up in a fetal position and began to weep for its own bandwidth. The story was picked up from the original AP article and posted on the USA Today Web site, various entertainment Web sites, and the front page of Yahoo: News. That weekend, an article appeared in the New York Times about the allegations surrounding Cassie Edwards.* Paul Tolmé wrote a marvelously pointed article for Newsweek online in which he expressed his bemusement at seeing his magazine article quoted in a romance novel—as postcoital pillow talk, no less. Then NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! used that story as part of its Bluff the Listener segment, which asks listeners to guess which of three outrageous and weird news stories is real and which are fake.

  Our readers responded by going to the library with their own copies of Cassie Edwards’s novels, which supports Sarah’s theory that Edwards’s backlist is so ubiquitous that everyone probably owns at least one, to find additional sources used verbatim without attribution within the narrative prose. We received many e-mail messages from people simply saying, “Thank you.” Librarians, teachers, college professors, and writers e-mailed us privately to express their thanks that we’d taken the time to research and publish what we’d found.

  But, oh, the backlash.

  The reaction from some in the romance community online, at least the comments that we read and heard, were as disillusioning as when the heroine wakes up from the bliss of amnesia and realizes that she’s not a princess and has to do the dishes. As fans and followers of romance, seeing the depths to which some authors would refuse to See the Point was beyond disappointing, and moved clear on into frightening and infuriating.

  Part of the drama and nasty came from the fact that some authors and commentators focused on the name of our Web site instead of the issue at hand. By calling ourselves “Smart Bitches” and calling the romance genre “trashy,” many accused us of doing the genre a great deal of damage because we opened it up to public scrutiny and ridicule. If you ask us, Edwards levered open the can of humiliation when she used unattributed source materials in Shadow Bear. A scientific discussion of ferrets following connubial bliss is hilarity on its own. We didn’t open the genre to ridicule and mockery. Cassie Edwards’s decision to plagiarize did.

  “You guys never liked her anyway.

  You’re just being mean.”

  “You just have a vendetta against her.”

  “You’re nothing but nasty bitches!”

  “You’re just in it for the hits to your site

  and for the publicity.”

  We’ll see you on the first six words, but we take issue with the rest. Indeed, we have never been fans of Cassie Edwards’s novels. And while we defend the right of any reader to enjoy the literature of his or her choice—come on, we’ve been crapped on liberally for our taste in romance novels—we also reserve the right to state our opinion on our Web site. And in our opinion, Edwards’s novels use a poor choice of words to refer to Native Americans* and capitalize on the racist, antiquated mythology of the “noble savage.” We don’t like her novels. We’ve said as much. And because Edwards is shorthand for romance in that her books are shelved and available in many, many locations where there’s two feet of space reserved for romance, not just in bookstores but grocery stores, drugstores, and interstate gas stations, we referred to her novels as shorthand for “really, horribly bad romance novels that represent the worst, most offensive selections of the genre.” Candy also recommends referring to the unedited self-published Dara Joy novels as similar shorthand reference for “romance that is not of the best quality, if you don’t mind our saying so.”

  Value judgments of good and bad quality notwithstanding, our point in revealing the evidence we found was not to make the point yet again, “Wow, we think her novels suck.”

  Our point was simple:

  “Wow. That’s plagiarism. That really fucking sucks.”

  The issue is not whether we like Cassie Edwards’s novels. We don’t. Never have. She is our standard by which any book approaching an F grade is measured—the Cassie Edwards asymptote is a line which few books manage to approach, much less cross, but once they do, it’s a pantheon of craptastic writing.

  The issue is ethics. There’s no expiration date on addressing unethical behavior, no matter when it’s discovered. Plagiarism, using another person’s words for profit without attribution or compensation, is unethical. Frankly, our discovery was not even newsworthy in the least until Signet released their first statement regarding the matter that said, in part, “Cassie Edwards has done nothing wrong.” Again, “right and wrong” are value judgments, and apply to ethical debate, not legal debate. There are plenty of acts that can get you failed in English class that won’t get you arrested.

  And speaking of ethics, once the story became public, we saw the truly nasty and appalling side of many, many people, including writers whose books we admired.

  If you took a stroll around the Web the first two weeks of January 2008, there was plenty of Bitch bashing going on. Normally we don’t pay attention; any frankly stated opinion is going to attract negative attention. When it came to an issue that affects the public perception of romance, a genre that’s already scrutinized and dismissed as meaningless pornography for women, it was beyond disappointing to see attacks on our morality, and worse, silence altogether. We never took the opportunity to discuss our reaction to the reaction until now.

  If an author’s work is her business, not in the privacy sense but in the income-generating incorporated-business sense, then wouldn’t someone else’s unethical practices be a reason to defend her own business? Wouldn’t speaking out against plagiarism, and defending her own research practices be a no-brainer?

  Not that it is exactly the same, but when one toy manufacturer was revealed to have lead paint on their product, we saw plenty of p
ress releases from other toy manufacturers saying, “We do not import our toys from China and we test our paint for lead.” There were plenty of “Our toys are safe!” newsletters in the in-box. Those manufacturers wanted to make sure folks pointed their wallets toward them when the safety and integrity of another line of toys was called into question.

  When dog food from several product lines was recalled for toxins, we had plenty of pet food alerts in the in-box saying that the pet foods manufactured by a host of other brands did not contain the toxic ingredient, that they were safe and were not affected by the recall—and gee, wouldn’t they love to have us as customers? It’s damage control, pure and simple. Protecting your product seems normal in a business setting when another product of similar ilk is called into question.

  But that’s not the case with many romance authors and these accusations of plagiarism—because as usual, it would look better if they said nothing. Somehow, it’s better to remain friendly with other authors than to stand up against an ethical issue that should be pretty clear.

  That absence of damage control in favor of silence or niceness was one thing. But the anti–Smart Bitches commentary was just breathtaking. Some authors and fans of the genre wrote on message boards and began their posts with the absolutely jaw-dropping words, “Plagiarism aside.”

  There’s another issue besides plagiarism?

  Silly Bitches. Of course there is: nasty women like us who weren’t being nice, and mean authors like Nora Roberts who publicly stated that they thought what Edwards did was wrong. Some authors posted vitriolic screeds against Roberts and against us, asking why she was being praised for slapping at an author who “did nothing wrong.” Roberts’s actions of “slamming another author” took more heat than Edwards’s thirty-year profit from use of unattributed source material written by people who couldn’t give permission because they were dead.

  We stand by what we did, what we wrote, and how we presented it, and we’d do it again without compunction. Moreover, we know and recognize that for every one author who decided we were the first cousins of Satan, many, many other authors backed us up, because they felt as we did—that plagiarism in the romance genre demeans every writer and every reader. Learning that there’s an author whose work we don’t like? Not really that horrifying. Learning that a thirty-plus-year career was based partially on the plagiarism and unethical use of other people’s words made us feel rather sick. That is what makes the genre look bad. Not calling yourself a Bitch and loving romance.

  While some folks, particularly Nora Roberts, came out and said, point-blank, “That’s plagiarism, and that isn’t right,” the silence spoke volumes. And we are impatient Bitches, so it was difficult for us to accept that it would take some time for the effect to be visible.

  But visible it was. At the Romantic Times BookLovers Convention, three grand dames of romance, Bertrice Small, Jennifer Blake, and Roberta Gellis, led a session about incorporating historical research into fiction by using the same encyclopedia entry to draft three different pieces of sample fiction. It was like watching Celine Dion, Barbra Streisand, and Madonna showing people how to audition—effortlessly professional, and a very solid response to the entire controversy.

  Nora Roberts, who herself was the victim of plagiarism and copyright infringement in 1997 when Janet Dailey used in her own books several lengthy passages from Roberts’s novels, was by far the most outspoken about the issue, and she was among the first people contacted by the AP for comment on the original story. She was the person in the article who called what we found “clear evidence of plagiarism,” and she took a lot of heat for it.

  Roberts also put her money where her mouth is, challenging our readers to raise money for Defenders of Wildlife and their efforts to revive the communities of black-footed ferrets in the upper Midwest. In under forty-eight hours, our site raised over five thousand dollars, which was matched by the Nora Roberts Foundation. That ten-thousand-dollar donation was created from small donations from hundreds of readers of our site around the world, most between five and ten dollars.

  And to our great surprise, on April 18, 2008, Signet released a statement that after a review of her books, they have parted ways with Cassie Edwards citing “irreconcilable editorial differences.” Her books are no longer published by Signet. Her backlist continues to be published by Dorchester and Kensington.

  The long-term benefits of exposing plagiarism on the part of a historical romance author remain to be seen. But as Sarah wrote in a guest article for Affaire d’Coeur magazine, the essential conclusions we’ve drawn from the experience have not changed. Plagiarism is wrong. It’s an insult to every writer, ourselves included. And if we had the chance to do it again, we would. Twice. A dozen times without compunction, because if you missed it the first time, we’ll say it again. We don’t care if you like us or you like what we say. It should not matter who says it at all: plagiarism is wrong.

  Choose Your Own Man Titty

  People accuse romance novels of being impossible to differentiate from each other, and nobody knows the untruthiness of this more acutely than we Smart Bitches. If nothing else, just look at the mind-boggling variety of heroes who inhabit Romancelandia. You have your choice of tall, dark, alpha billionaires; tall, dark, alpha police detectives; tall, dark, alpha dukes, tall, dark, alpha pirates; tall, dark, alpha (and angsty, so very, very angsty) vampires; tall, dark, alpha werewolves…

  Okay, so we kid. There are the occasional tall, blond, alpha males.

  With such a mind-boggling variety of heroes to suit your palate, how do you choose which one is right for you?

  By shamelessly stealing an idea from our geeky childhoods, of course. We here at Smart Bitches are proud to present: Choose Your Own Man Titty. That’s right: using only the finest diagramming technology available (also known as “a pencil, a piece of paper, and a whole lot of erasing”), we provide you herein with an invaluable service that allows you to match the perfect hero to the type of heroine you are, thus allowing you to cohabitate forever and ever in amazing nookerific (if fictional) bliss, amen. Just follow along with these tantalizing scenarios, make your choice, and turn to the appropriate numbered sections.

  The Adventure Begins!

  You wake up in the morning, the sun bright in your eyes. You stretch and sigh, anticipating the start of a new day, and sit up. The mirror across the room catches your eye. What do you look like?

  You’re unremarkable-looking, in your opinion. A perfectly ordinary, perfectly pleasant face with regular features; people oftentimes think it is a face that has been untouched by the mark of passion. Turn to Option 1 (below).

  Glorious tumbling tresses fall down your back and frame a heart-shaped face with winged brows and a mouth just a touch too wide. Turn to Option 15.

  You have a ritual tattoo of a snake swallowing its own tail encircling your left eye socket, and your hand is wrapped around the katana you always keep within arm’s reach. Turn to Option 24.

  Option 1

  You’re just barely getting started on your first cup of coffee when the cell phone rings. It’s your surly boss, and he wants you to come in early. What does your boss look like?

  He’s swarthy and chiseled and a captain of enterprise. His mistress is blond and icy, and her manicures are more immaculate than a pregnant Jewish virgin. He occasionally grabs you and shouts a lot. Turn to Option 2.

  He’s short, chubby, intensely hairy, and kind of repulsive, and he’s the head of the newspaper you work for. Turn to Option 7.

  Option 2

  The boss is in fine mood today. His mistress is storming out of his office just as you get in, and she shoots you an especially poisonous look from beneath her perfectly groomed brows, making you feel like even more of a mouse than you usually do. The boss comes out of his office shortly thereafter, barking that he wants you to do an impossible task before lunch and pick up an order from an exclusive and prohibitively expensive lingerie store during your break.

  Do
you:

  Do as you’re told? Turn to Option 3 (below).

  Quit, because nobody needs this shit? Turn to Option 4.

  Option 3

  You complete the impossible task perfectly, despite its impossibility, all the while daydreaming in excruciating, redundant detail about your boss’s brooding masculine presence and feeling a writhing mass of emotions roil through you every time you contemplate picking up the order from the lingerie store: a strange amalgam of jealousy, resentment and…something else. Something you can’t quite put your finger on.

  Just then, Travis, the flirty but extremely gay coworker drops by your desk and starts talking with you. He leans down to give you a big hug after taking a look at your haggard face and offers to take you out to lunch. Just as he makes the offer and rubs your back comfortingly, Boss Man walks in and sees the two of you, and you suddenly realize that it must seem like he has just interrupted a romantic interlude. Your heart sinks as his face darkens with anger, and he icily tells Travis to go back to his cubicle, and then summons you to his office.