imkittymyers at hotmail dot com
Thursday, May 18, 2006
AND THE WINNING PLAGIARIST IS ...
Not yours truly, but I do think the winner's sly wit deserved to win.
What am I talking about? It was called Sloppy Seconds With Opal Mehta: Inspired by recent events, we wondered not “why does anyone plagiarize,” but “why aren’t more people better at plagiarizing?” And so we are launching a contest to see if there is a “writer” out there who can create a coherent and original piece of fiction completely made from the works of others.
They announced the winner today: Responding to the recent announcement of our plagiarism contest, 54 people assembled stories that were not entirely theirs and sent them in for review. We read them all. Most were creative, some wonderfully so; some were so good we hope their authors will try to sneak them into credible magazines. But it was Bonnie Furlong’s “The Parlourmaid’s Tale, or, MS in a Dustbin” that won us over with its wit, variety and use of citations, and obvious delight with the form.
I discovered two other entries:
1) New Orleans, 1960, which used the minimum of five books and had a mere 5 footnotes.
2) The Tortured Artist, who had eighteen "liftings" but who didn't exactly follow the correct procedure.
For my story, I color coded the nine books I used (pictured above) in order to keep things in order, partly because I had 94 footnotes. I was relieved to see that the winner had 79.
Here is my story: How The First Jewish Kimberly Got Her Life Stuck In A Groove
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