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A long, long time ago, some of you may be old enough to remember when the Harry Potter book phenomenon exploded across the world. This was immediately followed by several lawsuits against J.K Rowling, who, according to lesser known authors, stole everything from plots to the name Harry. Too bad they were mostly just cries for attention.
Now Twilight author Stephenie Meyer can relate. Two weeks after allegations came out that she'd plagiarized portions of her novel Breaking Dawn from relatively unknown author Jordan Scott, she's gone ahead and filed a suit against Meyer. Scott says the novels bear a striking resemblance to her novel The Nocturne, citing 'plot lines, themes, dialogue, mood, setting, pace, characters, sequence of events [and] ideas'.
Now, not to discredit Scott, but this SCREAMS 'free publicity for my book no one knows about'. First of all, there are legitimate cases of idea theft and plagiarism where sentences in books are very slightly reorganized to pass as original, so this guy's claims are pretty far-fetched. Not to diss on the horror genre, as a fan, but don't MOST vampire books share a similar theme? Meyer has actually gone to some lengths to make her vampires, well, glittery and fangless. They can go out in daylight and knock you up. That's not standard vampire lore.
Meyer's people agree with me. They issued a response to the lawsuit, calling it "completely without merit and simply a publicity stunt to further Ms. Scott's career" and pointing out that Meyer wrote Breaking Dawn to follow up Forever Dawn, which was copy-written years before Scott's novel appeared in portions on the internet.
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