A few days ago, I received a distressing email from one of my readers. She was on a fan fiction website and ran across one of my stories hosted on there by someone else. In other words, someone stole my story! My first reaction was to pull all my stories off this site. Then I calmed down, went to work and thought about what I would do.

When I got home last night, I emailed the site owner, told her what happened and asked her to remove the story. I will not be giving out the website name or URL so please don't ask me. Since the story was hosted on the owner's site, I assumed she didn't know that Leah stole the story. The site owner emailed me back and was very upset. She promptly pulled the story off her site and apologized on Leah's behalf. I don't blame the owner -- she had no idea. I then emailed Leah and ripped her a new one. A copy of the email went to my lawyer.

If Leah or anyone who would ever consider doing such a thing is reading this, realize how WRONG it is to plagiarize! Whether you use part of a story, a phrase, a sentence or the whole story, it is still WRONG! Plagiarizing is copyright infringement and you will suffer the consequences. There's a reason why I put that copyright up after every story. It's not there for my amusement. It's there to warn idiots like Leah. Obviously, she has no morals. I doubt she can even read because if she could, she would have read and heeded the copyright.

I work damn hard on all of my stories. I come up with the ideas, the plots and the characters. I put my heart and soul into every story; hence the name of my site. It really hurt me when I saw that someone had taken my entire story and claimed it as theirs. If you can't write then find something else that you're good at. How can you feel good about yourself when you're taking credit for something that doesn't belong to you?

I'm not going to pull my stories off this site because it wouldn't be fair to all my readers who love my stories and would never dream of doing such a stupid thing. The story that was stolen, My Heart (Will Stay with You) is my baby because it was my first story. It's also the first story I had copyrighted because I'm using it as a basis for the book that I'm writing.

Leah hasn't answered me yet, but she did email the site owner back and this is what she wrote: "haha, oh well, fanfiction is dumb, i dont care." She didn't deny that she stole my story, but she didn't apologize to the owner for lying and misleading her. What a loser.

I want to thank Annie for reporting this to me. If anyone sees a work of fiction that you know belongs to someone else, report it. I made a banner. It's up on the main page. Thanks to Spiral Bound Fiction for the inpiration and idea. Feel Free to use it on your sites.