Borders, Plagiarism

[sub_divided]

I had to spend way too much money on unfun utilities today so to cheer myself I drove to Borders to spend way too much money on books (YES I KNOW there is something wrong with this logic). I was browsing Science Fiction when I noticed two teenagers in Manga (naturally the two sections are right next to each other). They were highschoolers, a boy and a girl. "Noticed" isn't the right word. They were loud. The boy kept saying how cool comics were, and how he couldn't believe that the girl didn't like comics. The girl kept insisting that she hated them and wouldn't be caught dead with one, while glancing around to see whether anyone had caught her yet.

I couldn't help myself, I picked up a Delany book and moved in to browse the manga section.

(An aside at this point to note that in cases where the last two books in a series you've been following for years are availible, you should NEVER EVER buy just the second-to-last one. ARGH. What happens next, I must know!)

It's possible I made the two of them (more) uncomfortable, though I was only innocently minding my own business. After no more than a minute, the boy picked a volume off the shelf, seemingly at random.

"I'll get this!" he said. "Legal Drug, sounds cool. Look, it's got a marijuana leaf on the cover."

"Good, fine, let's go," his girlfriend said, and practically dragged him away.

...well, it could have been worse. It could have been Gravitation.

(Legal Drug is not a BL title, but it has an awful lot of m/m fanservice. Actually fanservice is its only major selling point.)

***

I bought:

Tam Lin by Pamela Dean (College AU; also proof that there's no such thing as bad publicity)[1]
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera (I wasn't going to, but then I saw that the main character's name is Sabina; this is bound to be amusing even if the book winds up too hip for me)
The Fall of the Towers by Samuel R. Delany (impulse purchase)
Chrono Crusade volume 7 (HOW DOES IT END, I MUST KNOW.)
Bleach volume 12 (not one of the better volumes, I have to say)
Earthian volume 4 (...normally I would have something to say about this, but my head is pounding pretty bad...)

***

I'm not going to make it to Friday, guys. (Friday is when my contact lenses come in. For various reasons I won't go into, my glasses are misprescribed; wearing them for more than five minutes gives me a headache and after a whole day of them I feel positively hungover.)

***

[1] On the subject of plagiarism, I can only say that I struggle with this too. Mostly in stories that paraphrase nonfictional sources. I'll have the thing in front of me -- the magazine or the book or the web article -- as a reference so that I won't mess anything up. The problem(?) is that the original author always knows way the hell more about whatever they're talking about than I do, and is probably a better writer than me too. The temptation to "adapt" their words is very strong. I have to stop and remind myself that it's bad practice. (And wrong, and illegal, and not worth it.)

On the upside, since I started writing regularly I've found that it's become a lot easier. Easier to write my own words, easier to avoid re-writing the words of others. I still get urges, but they are much more easily suppressed, and I bet if I wrote more often they'd fade away entirely. I am reluctant to write fic for book-based series, though, because that would mean style-copying and I figure, why tempt fate?

...I did break down and read the online texts for Suzumiya Haruhi. I read the prologue and first chapter, enough to see that the style I'd been using would pass, approximately, if I added a few more explicit "I thought"s. Then I stopped. (It also helped that I just don't like the novels very much. Too much like reading anime in book form (says the girl who has no trouble reading manga in book form over on bb_shousetsu).