S.KRAUSE

The Opal Mehta Fiction Project

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15 Minutes of fame are really too few these days. Memories of Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass will fade in time. While the latter was immortalized in Shattered Glass (2003), I cannot imagine Ms. Viswanathan's story being committed to film. Thus it is up to us (the me-me generation, so to speak) to keep her memory alive, and to that end this 1st of May, 2006, I wish to begin The Opal Mehta Fiction Project, aka The Kaavya Viswanathan Memorial Fiction Project.

The fiction project is divided such:

• Steal-this-text: The writing/creation of new texts entirely from multiple documented excerpts of other texts.
• Paragraphs and Paraphrases: Reader's Digest Condensed Books on Crack—short, to the point, but with literary pretensions.
• Breaking the Language Barrier: Some works will never receive authorized translations into the world's myriad languages. While some might welcome a Shoshone or Hopi edition of The Da Vinci Code, we tend to think that Albanian and Basque editions of chick-lit represent a more immediate need.
• Wholetale and Retale: Why stop at 40 or so slightly altered passages? Slightly rewrite whole passages, chapters, etc.