Send to me the purloined sentences and I will make a story

[shalanna]

I am now collecting sentences for my all-plagiarized novel. Please donate any that you think are really cool by leaving them in a comment. A few examples of things I couldn't resist:

"Make my day."
"People do like to see their names in print," Mrs. Howard admitted.
"Your mildly implied rebuke for violating a rule of anonymity with which I was not familiar is hereby taken to heart and indelibly engraved upon that organ, which is a mass of similar memoranda."
"Carpe diem!"
"The official name of Switzerland is the Swiss Confederation, which in Latin is 'Confoederatio Helvetica'; hence the "CH" in e-mail addresses."
"You can't roller skate in a buffalo herd."

So what's going on?

I'm having no luck at all vending (or even giving away for free) my own mind's output, so what I need is a Platform. See? See the platform?

No? Well. Here's how I figure it. I do this novel that is made ENTIRELY of stolen sentences. I force it to make sense, for some value of "sense." Then I self-publish it and start a huge publicity campaign. A publicist and various press releases wouldn't hurt, and maybe a stint on talk shows. I might get on TV and denounce various political candidates or Talking Heads Pundits, just to get visibility. ("Ann Coulter is mean!") Then people will want copies of the book so they can see what this nutcase has come up with. I'll call a huge press conference and read from the book. Then everybody will buy copies so they can find what-all I've ripped off.

"But wait!" you exclaim. "That'll get you your 15 seconds of 'fame,' for certain values of 'fame.' Yet it would be a real embarrassment!"

(As if this journal and the rest of my life isn't enough already?)

There's more. I shall announce a contest! I shall tell folks who buy the book that if they'll go through the book and footnote EVERY QUOTATION correctly, they can WIN BIG PRIZES! Contestants will use handwritten, subscripted numerals(1) to annotate(2) a physical copy of the book, and will send that to my staff(3), along with a printout or written record of where each quotation(4) originated. Google-searching is fine. Asking your Uncle T. F. who was in the Great War and learned a bunch of dorky old rhyming poems by heart is fine. Looking into your crystal ball is fine. Just identify all the stolen sentences correctly, and you win(5)!

There might be a few little bugs I need to work out.

(1) numbers. You know. Like footnote thingies.
(2) aw, c'mon, that isn't a big word.
(3) Ha! Ha! Ha! [:wiping tears out of eyes:] Okay, I don't have a staff, but I'll get a mail drop of some type where they use dogs and trained bunnies to sniff out bombs and such so the packages I get can be somewhat pre-screened for stinkbombs.
(4) In the case where someone else ripped off (say) the same Shakespearean sonnet that I did, I'll accept any of the sources that actually have the quotation. Fair?
(5) "Win" might imply prizes. Prizes I got, but it may connote "prizes of actual value." I might need some help on this one.

But hey! If Signet doesn't think there's any problem with Cassie Edwards' work, then there's smooth sailing ahead. We can test whether the Fair Use Defense will fly (even when the quotation is over 200 words or from a song lyric.) It'll be fun!

--What? You say that Signet's lawyers got a whiff of this and fell into grand mal position while shrieking, and the PR department had to issue a "we will look into this and we take this sort of thing seriously" retraction? Aw! That must've been because of Nora. Bless her heart. She did the right thing, but it's dangerous to cross people, so she's probably made a few enemies as well. I wish her well. Maybe she's a big enough name that she won't suffer any repercussions for criticizing others who work in publishing. (That, I have learned, is absolutely verboten for anyone who ever wants to be published or to work in publishing . . . and it's tough when all you were doing was speaking your mind and asking questions.)

*deflating* I can't believe it. It seemed like such a good idea.

But if you do want to donate sentences, I'll start a collection anyway. We still don't know what else might come out in the wash (we use Shout!)

Comments

I shall begin!

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

"Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled
Jo, lying on the rug.

From here, the Project Gutenberg edition of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott!

[eeknight.livejournal.com]

Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into our side, Chief. We was comin' back from the island of Tinian to Leyte... just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in 12 minutes. Didn't see the first shark for about a half an hour. Tiger. 13-footer. You know how you know that when you're in the water, Chief? You tell by looking from the dorsal to the tail. What we didn't know, was our bomb mission had been so secret, no distress signal had been sent. They didn't even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, Chief, sharks come cruisin', so we formed ourselves into tight groups. You know, it was kinda like old squares in the battle like you see in the calendar named "The Battle of Waterloo" and the idea was: shark comes to the nearest man, that man he starts poundin' and hollerin' and screamin' and sometimes the shark go away... but sometimes he wouldn't go away. Sometimes that shark he looks right into ya. Right into your eyes. And, you know, the thing about a shark... he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be living... until he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then... ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin'. The ocean turns red, and despite all the poundin' and the hollerin', they all come in and they... rip you to pieces. You know by the end of that first dawn, lost a hundred men. I don't know how many sharks, maybe a thousand. I know how many men, they averaged six an hour. On Thursday morning, Chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player. Boatswain's mate. I thought he was asleep. I reached over to wake him up. Bobbed up, down in the water just like a kinda top. Upended. Well, he'd been bitten in half below the waist. Noon, the fifth day, Mr. Hooper, a Lockheed Ventura saw us. He swung in low and he saw us... he was a young pilot, a lot younger than Mr. Hooper. Anyway, he saw us and he come in low and three hours later a big fat PBY comes down and starts to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened... waitin' for my turn. I'll never put on a lifejacket again. So, eleven hundred men went in the water; 316 men come out and the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

However this may be, the louse - like man - has, for one reason or another, failed to develop the highly complex civilisation of the bee or the ant.

(Rats, lice, and History by Hans Zinsser, first published in 1935, republished by Penguin in 2000).

I think a majority of your novel ought to go to Penguin sources. This sounds like a life-long project, and you'll need a very good outline and some sort of database so you can shift the sentences around and associate them with the right sections, but it could be very, y'now, _literary_.

Good luck!

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Gosh, this is a mammoth project. How many sentences are there in a novel? :)

Anyway, here's one for the collection.

As a drowning man in one moment passes in review the events of a lifetime, so her mind took an instantaneous conspectus of all cheeses that had ever stood in the cheese-cradle in the palmy days of Wydcombe, when hams and plum-puddings hung in bags from the rafters, when there was cream in the dairy and beer in the cellar.

From The Nebuly Coat by John Meade Falkner. (p 116 in the Steve Savage Edition)

[abbie-normal.livejournal.com]

"it was a very strange sort of a day. not even a two plus two makes five sort of a day. more like two plus two makes fish." -dave mckean

[lexica510.livejournal.com]

"Wonder grazes you like a bullet; it zips by and is gone, and all you really perceive is the zing as it goes past, or maybe the pain if it comes too close. It does no good to search for whatever it was, for it never lodges anywhere you can get a good look at it. The truly strange has no hooks of familiarity that one can catch hold of."

from The Fresco by Sheri S. Tepper

Found you via SBTB :)

[katydidinoz.livejournal.com]

Just to make things interesting, how about these? From my favourite book: Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut.
"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. "

or, the somewhat easier:

"Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt."

This could be a veeeery interesting novel!
Kate