My "Duh" Moment

A Story by dbstevens

Dbstevens realizes someone has stolen both her penname and her story to post in another writing forum and gives a heads-up to other writers. The original piece can be found at her blog.

Following the advice of an old writing friend, I check my penname every once in awhile on Google, especially now that I'm producing stuff more frequently and (hopefully) proficiently. While there are a few other dbstevens people out there, "my" penname -- linked with my writing -- has usually come up within the first 10 search items, which I've been relatively proud of. But over the last month it's slowly climbed up to the seventh item, maybe the fifth...

Imagine my joy, then, when I checked again last night and saw this:


(Click on the image for an enhanced view)

Nice, huh? Fiiinally. Number one search item is my name, my profile, my writing... but wait? I don't use that site.

Waaait a second.

While I do use other writing forums to promote my blog -- if you look at the picture again you'll see "Writer's Cafe" and that's me -- because that's what some of the best writers and bloggers suggest you do to grow your readership, I always reference my excerpts back to Kicking Corners. This profile didn't.

Upon further research of the Runonwords site, it's completely legit, it's actually a really cool writing forum, and my writing/penname is pretty popular on there. So much so that it rocketed my writing/penname to the top search item in Google.

The only problem, then, is that it wasn't me posting there, no one had asked to use excerpts of my writing, and there wasn't anything pointing readers back to my blog.

They say that "Imitation is the highest form of flattery," and in a way I suppose I am flattered, when I don't think about the reality of the situation, which is that I put a lot of hard work, thought, energy, hours and hours and more late hours, into my story. I'm excessively tired pretty much all of the time. I don't appreciate someone else picking it up and running with it so lightly. While I'm grateful this person used my penname, rather than just reposting my writing in another name (who knows, maybe that's going on too? I need to check), it's not kosher to do.

So.

While I've contacted the team at Runonwords and they've deleted the account there (hats off to them, they were really quick to reply and great to work with), I've decided I need to seriously re-think my blog. For now I'm taking down my story while I process everything that's happened thus far with it.

All y'all other writers out there? Learn, somehow, from my "duh" moment. I'm not sure what you want to learn, or how you want to take it -- I have as yet to figure that one out myself -- but we all have a little bit of angel and demon in us. If you're reading this, learn, and you are hereby forewarned...