Here’s an interesting story. A guy who loves to read and wants to be a great writer starts finding that his work is much improved when he spices it up with big chunks of text lifted from famous authors. He goes to college (I’m guessing English Lit), graduates, works in a bookstore, and all along is writing, with small successes here and there (a poem in a major anthology, a well-received short story).

This all culminates in a spy thriller book that receives great initial reviews and is selling well, until three weeks in it’s discovered that the first fifteen pages include twenty plagiarized passages from everyone from Robert Ludlum (creator of Jason Bourne) to the James Bond novels (created by Ian Fleming, but it’s not clear if he took anything from Fleming’s original books). All the books are now being recalled, and customers are being told to return them for a refund (though I wouldn’t, it might be worth something on Ebay one day).

The plagiarist tells his story on an addiction support site, and talks a lot about AA. Interestingly, as one commenter points out, he doesn’t actually apologize in the entire piece.