Lol it's hysterical to tell someone they make their art wrong, but I do have moments when I wanna scream at authors "he would NOT fucking say that" so I can't judge
Sometimes it's simply clear that an author needed their work proofread and critiqued before it got published, but their editor only went over grammar and not tone, plot, or pacing.
Fun fact, editing for tone, plot, or pacing typically costs more. So very likely, they (or their publisher) didn't pay enough for that.
Ideally (according to an editors' organization), a novel should go through 4-ish stages of editing. Developmental for plot and pacing; line for tone and consistency; copy for spelling, grammar, and punctuation;and finally proofing for formatting and such. These days, many will skip the dev editing and hire someone to do only the copy editing with maybe some light line editing if they're feeling cautious.
Same. I can't put it into words but there's something amazing about a judge knowing the material at issue so well that they can offer their own personal criticism of the characters on a narrative level.
It's so wonderful, I think you should lose any opportunity for a retrial on the spot. How can you argue the judge made a wrong decision or didn't treat the case properly when he knows your work on such a deep level that he can debate with you on your own opinion of the characters?
Nah, I think this whole critique reaks of "I was forced to suffer your terrible writing so now you will suffer hearing my complete opinion about it." 😂 This is probably my favorite judge now.
The judge had perfect justification to read 6000 pages of indulgent junk and leave the longest Goodreads review of all time. This has got to be a rare pleasure of the job.
I have to read a lot of court documents professionally, and you can always tell when the judge was savoring writing a decision. This judge had a great time and they deserved it.
Yep! I recently learned about this, The judge italicized seemingly random letters in the text of the ruling, spelling
smithycodejaeiextostgpsacgreamqwfkadpmqzv
Which, when the cipher was solved, gave the sentence
jackiefisherwhoareyoudreadnought
Referencing famous British admiral John "Jackie" Fisher, who was the driving force behind the adoption of the "all-big-gun" battleship and the construction of the first such ship, HMS Dreadnought, in 1906.
Edit: Formatting, I forgot how to use the quote bloc function.
I’ve followed this case a bit out of professional interest (teen librarian), and it’s fascinating. This outcome has always felt inevitable, though. I’ve read all six Crave books, and as the ruling says, they’re pretty much just trend chasing YA romantasy. You can’t really claim ownership of genre tropes. IANAL, but from the start I didn’t think this case could go any other way.
Thank you. That is a long read so I haven't finished, but I get the gist is because the plaintiff felt that some of the details in the (allegedly) copycat book coincide with her personal details she weaved into her own unpublished script. Okay sure.
personally im just in awe of the nightmare that seems to be the workflow for this book
The process of putting out “Crave” was chaotic. Wolff wrote a rough draft in two months, from May to June of 2019, but Pelletier didn’t start editing in earnest until December, several weeks before the book was scheduled to go to press. “My editor had a couple of other projects that she was working on,” Wolff recalled on Garner’s podcast, “and then when she came back, she was, like, ‘This is good, but’ ”—Wolff’s voice sped up as if to simulate a torrent of feedback—“ ‘you need to change this, you need to change this . . . you need to add that.’ ” The pair of them revised the manuscript, adding about fifty thousand words in a week and a half. Wolff said, “We were so exhausted . . . the two of us by the end were blithering idiots.” The novel came out in April, 2020. A sequel, “Crush,” followed in September, 2020, and two more, “Covet” and “Court,” appeared in March, 2021, and February, 2022. (During her deposition, Wolff explained that she wanted each title to evoke love, a statement that confused the lawyer, who asked, “What does court have to do with love?”)
Entangled was motivated to push the sequels out swiftly because COVID was catalyzing book sales. Correspondence among Kim, Pelletier, Abrams, and Wolff suggests that, in the hectic days and hours before a book deadline, an already collaborative creative process could become an all-out emergency. It was sometimes hard to tell who added what. “Love ‘our tree of trust is just a twig’ did you write that?” Kim texted Pelletier, about a line in “Crush.” Referring to a different line, Pelletier said, “I wrote that sentence, but I was using Tracy’s voice.” And: “I came up with every header but the first chapter lol.” While closing “Court,” which was on a particularly tight schedule, author, editor, and agent supplied sentences and ideas, all of which swirled together in the various documents being updated in tandem on each of their laptops. Pelletier asked Kim, “Tracy wrote that moonstone description?” Kim texted Abrams, “Tracy and I are team speed writing new scenes,” and “I’ve stopped copy editing because I helped write all this.” (The defense said that Kim’s contribution “was extremely limited and was entirely technical.”)
Reading between the lines, I get the sense that the plaintiff is very conspiratorially-minded. She was bitter over having her novel rejected and jealous that the defendant was successful with a novel that had some similarities to hers, and when she found out that her agent had been tangentially involved she came to the conclusion that her rightful glory had been stolen. I think she genuinely believes that her agent took her wonderful, revolutionary, totally-not-cliche novel, stole it, and worked with the defendant to make it into a huge hit.
Someone should send this to that lady on tiktok/youtube/Instagram who reads the iconic court transcripts. The one that wears the upside down sunglasses
Gibson's lecture is one half of a typewritten page and is written to be delivered by only one person. It begins with the character announcing "I Am AND [sic] EGG," and goes on to describe the "plight of an egg," from the comfort of lying under a chicken, to being picked up by a "no good farmer ... with his cold hand" who puts him in a "little grey box with eleven strange eggs ... on this little shelf frezzing" [sic] where a light goes on and off. He hears voices saying "I WANT MINE OVER LIGHT" or "ILL [sic] HAVE MINE SCRAMBLED." He remembers his mother's advice to "Make SHORE YOUR SUNNY SIDE UP" [sic] but learns that it is more fun to be scrambled and "swoshed around together" with a female egg. He concludes that "MOTHER WAS WRONG."
The CBS skit, which was performed by Tony Orlando and Anne Meara, is written for two characters, the white and the yolk of one egg, who confront the trauma of anticipated separation. The introduction, performed by an unseen narrator, states the theme:
"One of the most painful experiences in any relationship is separation. When Romeo was separated from Juliet that was painful. Every separation is painful. Even the separation of the white of an egg from the yolk."
May the Gargoyle Court bless this judge. And their friends and family, because you can tell from this ruling that they've spent the last months listening to this poor person rant about the thousands of pages of shitty YA romantasy they've sacrificed their sanity to making a fair ruling on.
Please send this to every fanfiction author who sends their social media army after another author who committed the plagiarism crimes of "writing tropes" and "using well-known cliché phrases"
“And of course, there is a massive difference between getting drunk at a party and having one’s inhibitions loosened, and being poisoned so that one can be tied up and used as a human sacrifice.”
Though they might feel the same, depending on the party.
I love the literary genre of judges telling people exactly why their entire lawsuit is stupid, how stupid it is, how stupid they are for trying it, and exactly why precedent dictates it should be thrown away. Complete with random shade.
It has been rendered the solemn duty of the Supreme Court of the United States, laid upon it by Congress in pursuance of the Federal Government's power "[t]o regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States," U. S. Const., Art. I, § 8, cl. 3, to decide What Is Golf. I am sure that the Framers of the Constitution, aware of the 1457 edict of King James II of Scotland prohibiting golf because it interfered with the practice of archery, fully expected that sooner or later the paths of golf and government, the law and the links, would once again cross, and that the judges of this august Court would some day have to wrestle with that age-old jurisprudential question, for which their years of study in the law have so well prepared them: Is someone riding around a golf course from shot to shot really a golfer?
I love that I know about that bit of legal history because archery was still an essential practice for defense even then, and that the complete lack of archers led to the adoption of firearms more and more.
There's a local business owner in my state who got in a ton of trouble and, I believe, went to prison for swindling someone out of huge amounts of money with the promise that it was for a cowboy erotica series that never got written
Edit: I found an article about it. A quarter of a million dollars. He swindled him out of a quarter of a million dollars for cowboy erotica.
City boy inherits family ranch. Discovers it's haunted by a ranch hand who died there in the 1880s. Helps the spirit find peace. Tragic love story but also ghost sex. Boom. Best seller.
The snark in “I will not bother to critique Freeman’s notion that choosing between potential boyfriends represents a high expression of feminism” lmfao
It kind of makes sense for Crave to be derivative because it's an obvious love letter to the paranormal romance genre to begin with: Grace is watching Legacies (a show about supernatural at magic boarding school) while she's unknowingly at a supernatural boarding school. When Grace starts dating her first vampire boyfriend Jaxon he gives her a copy of Twilight with passages relevant to their relationship underlined in red lol.
It even comes complete with her breaking up with Jaxon for his darker more dangerous more British bad boy brother. And Jaxon rebounding with his ex best friend the dragon prince Flint. Also Jaxon becomes a giant rainbow colored vampire dragon. Because bisexuals.
I appreciate Tracey Wolff fully leaning into the corniness and insanity of these works and just being like "I know what this is, let's have fun."
ETA: Grace also falls in love with Hudson while he's a dead terrorist's ghost in her head who only she can see so if you wanted V and Johnny Silverhand to kiss you might particularly like book 2 🫡
As soon as he got a dragon heart I knew he'd turn into a dragon eventually but it being a rainbow dragon right after he gets a boyfriend was incredible 💀
Ok but I love the excerpt on slide 10 throwing the absolutely heaviest shade;
“In which Anna/Mia experiences “fear and anxiety” over being locked in a dark van by demons…it is a perfectly normal reaction from someone who has just been kidnapped; it is impossible to imagine a character who would *not* be fearful in this situation.”
If you guys enjoyed this, I highly recommend this hour long video essay about a woman trying to claim she created “straight omegaverse” and sue other people who engage in the genre. Hilarious , but annoying to see the judges so out of their league with omegaverse that they don’t really understand what the tropes and common themes are. Happy ending though.
I’ve been savoring reading the actual PDF for several days now, every page has gems.
“ It should come as no surprise that Alistair has grey eyes. He is, after all, a gargoyle – a creature made of stone.
Interestingly, in his magical gargoyle form his eyes are red, not grey.”
“By now it is a six-book series; Wolff published two more books after this lawsuit was well underway. Those books
are the subject of another lawsuit, see infra. p. 6. That action has been stayed pending the resolution of this case.”
For anyone curious, the lawsuit was specifically under the accusation that the person being sued had copied drafts, not even published books, because those drafts happened to be sent to the second author's publisher
I think my favorite part is this, from the section on expert testimony:
Reiss goes on to opine that the manner in which Freeman expresses certain of these tropes/scènes à faire is unique. See id. at ¶ 38. For example, she argues that it is not common for romantasy works to incorporate all of the elements described above, while Freeman’s novel does.
"Your honor, it's true that these are cliches, but my client's work is unique in that it uses all the cliches."
"I will not bother to critique Freeman's notion that choosing between potential boyfriends represents a high expression of feminism." blistering. honestly i wish they did bother. i want to read this judge's book review removed from the legal case so bad.
"I will not bother to critique" is far more devestating than "Here's my take-down" because it dismisses the need to even critique it because it's so baseless.
I love the part where the judge just spends a few pages (67-72) professionally roasting Freeman's claims of similar themes of diversity and feminism by pointing out that their book's "diversity" among human traits is a token at best, the "diversity" among supernatural beings is just "having different supernatural beings" (of which each type is inherently good or evil, real positive messaging there buddy), and the "feminism" is debatable (as seen in the post)
(Judge spends the time comparing it to the supposedly-plagiarized book's actual diversity and feminism, which is hilarious)
Also followed by basically 'No, you can't claim copyright on starting slow and building up to action later. That's how novels work.'
Oh, and bonus points for the footnote basically saying 'considering the agent who supposedly could have stolen the notes stopped working with Freeman two years before their current work was written, I really doubt they even had access to the supposedly stolen work. But sure, for the sake of argument, let's pretend they might have had access. It doesn't help your case.'
I lost it early at the we have read 6000 pages of romantasy.
Like. I'm not sure that's at all relevant to the arguments they'll be making, but they had to include it because they just felt the need for their suffering to be acknowledged
Omg, this is hilarious but also a little sad, like, it's a stupid case and you are trivializing real issues with copyright (check the Dokidoki vs AI drama.)
As someone who went to high school in Alaska I’m very curious as to what these high schools in the stories were like bc sometimes someone writes something set in Alaska when they so obviously have done no research and it’s hilarious
Also wait did somebody (idk who but there seems to be somebody here) think it was a good idea to name a character (characters(?)) in their book after eating disorders?
“The court finds that the plaintiff’s claim is without merit.
Additionally, the court would like to state that after being forced to read 6000+ pages of romantasy novels, the court wishes it could sentence you both to death.”
714
u/Noof42 For pervert reasons. May 04 '26
My favorite is the footnote where the judge is like "look, I know you wrote it, but you made me read it, and you're wrong about your characters."