Remember my post about pets? Well, I’ve adopted one . . . from a distance.

Meet Clover. She’s a black-footed ferret from the Black-Footed Ferret Adoption Program. How I heard about her is a long story . . .

Cassie Edwards has been writing romance longer than I’ve been reading it. I’ve always seen her books in stores–I even read a few back when I first started reading romance. They weren’t to my taste, but every time I saw her books after that I felt a tug of nostalgia. Not for the books themselves, but because she’s a familiar name.

For that reason, it made me horribly sad to see that sections of her writing so closely matched passages in a variety of non-fiction and fiction. When you compare the passages, it seems like a clear case of plagiarism.

You wouldn’t expect a story like this to have a positive result, but something positive came out of it. Romance readers learned about the near extinction of the black-footed ferret. Nora Roberts even kicked off a fundraiser for the ferrets.

So that’s how I got involved–I adopted a ferret. Clover will be well taken care of by the people at Prairie Wildlife Research. And I got to contribute to an endangered species.

Now I want one of these . . .