Welcome to Gully Brook Press

The website of freelance writer Gina
Giuliano

Saturday.
The biggest adjustment of freelancing - well, not the biggest but one of the many - is scheduling. It seems there is either nothing to do, or too much to do. This is true to some degree for a regular job also, but co-worker chatter and assorted other time wasters fill up the nothing to do times, while in all my jobs except one, too much too do didn't mean that you worked 24/7.

Right now I am experiencing a too much to do episode. That, plus technical difficulties, explains my lack of journal posts this week. Blogger is great, but the last time I posted, I think it was Tuesday or Wednesday, after I got finished, the page crashed or refused to publish or something. I didn't bother to re-type it, since I am in a too much to do period, and this is really about writing, and not about posting...

For the first time, I got a lot of Easter cards! I'm not sure whether things are different - I mean post 9-11, and that explains it, or if the greeting card industry is gradually making inroads in this holiday, also.

Every day I chip away a little at marketing/promotion/visibility, regardless of how busy I am with teaching and consulting. With the donation money from my website ($52, wow!) I joined the National Association of Women Writers.
Writer's Digest listed the site as one of the ten best, and I discovered it via the Writer's Lounge newsletter. Originally I thought I'd wait until my book is published, so I could list it for sale, but then I thought, why wait? I am a woman writer now!

Now, on a totally different subject - back to the plagiarism subject from earlier this month. A recent Ellen Goodman column really irritated me! She recounts the Ellis, Goodwin, Ambrose controversies - then focuses on Goodwin, whom she admits is a friend. She seems to believe she was treated unfairly, and more harshly than the others for a "mistake." And, somehow, she equates this to the discrepancies in the movie A Beautiful Mind, since the movie omitted some elements of John Nash's life that were in the published biography. She thinks it is wrong, or ironic, how the movie could win Academy Awards, while Goodwin is paying the price for her failure to properly attribute passages in her book. I couldn't believe what I was reading! Now, I know Op-Ed columnists may not be the sharpest tools in the shed - or anyway, that they write to be obnoxious, sell newspapers and generate controversies. But I guess I deluded myself into thinking that all writers know there is a difference between plagiarism - i.e., cheating, and a Hollywood movie that is loosely based on someone's life. For a supposed scholar - even a popular one - it is quite simply unethical. It can mean academic dismissal. I'm not debating the merit, or lack of merit, of the movie. I saw it, I liked it, I knew there were omissions, and that means what exactly? Yes, I was happy when Ron Howard won for best director, because what person my age doesn't have a soft spot for Opie? I don't pretend to know that it was the best directed film, and I don't care. No-one is alleging that the scriptwriter stole hunks of text from some other movie, and that is the issue. I really can't comprehend how Ellen Goodman could try to draw a parallel. But as I have written before, with this sort of logic going around among professionals who should know better, how can I expect the undergraduates I teach to understand that citations are not optional?