Dailey's Return To Romance
Janet Dailey is back, which is no small piece of news for fans of the romance novel. It has been more than two years since she has released a new book - and since she faced a scandal.
In May 1997, someone read Dailey's novel Notorious back-to-back with Nora Roberts' 1989 novel Sweet Revenge. The reader noticed similar scenes and passages and posted a note on a romance novel Web site. Roberts discovered the note, checked it out and found that Dailey, indeed, had plagiarized her work. Other plagiarized passages were discovered.
[For an interview with Nora Roberts, click here]
In the end, Dailey reached an out-of-court settlement with Roberts and publicly apologized.
"Actually, I was going through an emotional, physical, mental, psychological problem," the author tells CBS This Morning Co-Anchor Thalia Assuras. "I had lost two brothers to cancer, as well as my husband had been in surgery for cancer."
She says she did not consciously know that she was plagiarizing.
"It was one of those things, when you're dealing with family grief, when you're dealing with business pressures, when you're dealing with all that, you're not coping," she says. "There's no rational explanation for what is essentially an irrational act."
She went into therapy for a year, and says she found it very helpfulin putting that part of her life behind her.
"That was a chapter in my life," she says. "That wasn't my whole life. But, at the same time, can you remove the chapter and still have the same story? I don't think so."
Dailey's new novel, Calder Pride, is the fifth book in the Calder family saga. But it is her 94th book all together.
Calder Pride focuses on Cat Calder, the daughter of Maggie and Chase Calder, who started the whole series four books ago. (The Calder books have been optioned for a TV miniseries.)
"She's such a wonderful person to write about," the author says of Cat Calder. "She's filled with so much pride. For many years, she had been a pampered darling, letting everyone else direct her life. Now she has to take charge of her life. She made a mess of it at first and then got it together."
She and her husband-manager Bill live in Branson, Mo. She gets up at 4 a.m. most days and turns out a set number of pages six days a week until the book is done.
"God blessed me with a great imagination and an abundance of ideas," she says.
Dailey wrote her first novel, No Quarter Asked, in 1975 after she read a romance novel and told her husband that she could write a better one. He dared her to do it. She became the first U.S. citizen to be published by the Canadian romance publisher, Harlequin Books.
She has written a novel set in every state of the union, and these books are referred to as her Americana series. She and her husband traveled to every state for research. The aileys eventually helped establish Silhouette Books, one of the first American romance-novel publishing houses.
She's working on several new novels and a non-fiction biography of her brother-in-law, a Korean War vet who suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome.