When this story first came out, there was one author (Meg Cabot, I think) cited as being copied and she admitted to being a big fan of Cabots and probably unknowingly influenced. Side by side, the passages looked a lot alike. It was like a Jr. High student who has learned that copying word for word from the encyclopedia will get you caught but pulling out the thesaurus and changing just a bit of the style might slide you by. With only the one author influence, the publisher was inclined to pull the books until they could be edited.

Yesterday, stories came out with citations from other authors that had the same problem. And it wasn't just a turn of phrase but several sentences just modified a bit. A paragraph from the Princess Diaries was pretty closely mimicked. It seems that several publishers/authors are checking to see if they are being ripped off, and justifiably so. Now her publisher has had enough and dropped her and a newspaper she had an internship with is going back to vet her pieces to see if that was on the up and up.

At first, with just the one author in the picture, I sided a lot with Dave's feelings but now that it seems to be beyond the single author, I believe there is something decaying in southern Scandinavia. One way or another, she dug herself a pretty big hole.

Ferrick