Sunday, October 9, 2011
The Plagiarists - a wordmap
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
The Plagiarists - Synopsis
In the soupy blackness of a mudslide, Jake -- a fifty-something, irredeemable cynic, the Danielle Steel of science fiction -- loses the only copy of his nearly-finished novel. In the vein of Wonder Boys and Super Sad True Love Story, my novel THE PLAGIARISTS tells the story of a father and his son, and the absurd stories we tell ourselves the more we try to assert control over the slippery world around us.
Jake moves in with Finn, his estranged college-aged son, and rather than rewrite his own novel, Jake decides to pilfer the final manuscript of his award-winning, dead ex-wife. And then, in the middle of a massive pop culture convention, all hell breaks loose. Jake's missing novel starts to appear online, sentence by sentence. It's fed by a program that steals lines from each of Jake's books and rewrites them -- and soon is remixing passages from hundreds of writers in one big, sprawling, nonsensical online creation.
As the site grows into a huge, messy hit, Jake discovers he's pissed off a lot of people in his time, and the list of culprits is long: rival writers, spiteful fans, digital pirates, a lantern-jawed film star, a communications tycoon, and the ghost of his wife -- with whom he's still in love, very much to his surprise.
I received my MFA in Fiction from New York University, and I live and teach in Northern California. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize, my work has appeared in LA Weekly, Nerve, Opium Magazine, The Modern Spectator and Painted Bride Quarterly, among other publications.
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