I posted this same message up on my website yesterday, but for people who don't read my website, I will post this here, to explain why this story has been removed:

I've been expecting this day to happen soon, considering this has been happening to many people around FictionPress.

"The Importance of Getting Revenge" has been plagiarized. It's been placed on Quizilla by someone named ThugMuffinz11. Of course, she did not ask my permission to post it. Of course, she didn't say that I was the one who wrote it. Of course, she is pretending that SHE is the author.

Can you imagine how livid I was when I discovered that this afternoon? Yeah. So anyway, I actually had to go through the bother of SIGNING UP with Quizilla, just so that I could report each and every chapter (she's only put up 6 so far, because she's on vacation until the 14th of July) as being stolen/plagiarized. Then, I had to link to each individual one of my chapters on FictionPress so that they could compare. That was this afternoon. When I got home from work this evening, I expected them to have all been removed. Instead, they have only removed chapter 3. WTF? Maybe they will continue to remove more later on. I sure hope so, or I'm going to have to get Medieval on their asses. Either way, I sent her a scathing message, which she has not yet read, AND I left a comment on one of her journal entries, where she has the gall to say that she would LOVE people to make and send her banners for her story! Hopefully, she feels so bad about herself that she removes the story (if the mods don't first) and gives me an apology.

Yeah, right. Like I'm sure that will happen.

So now I am officially pissed off about this whole plagiarism thing. Don't people understand that A.) Stealing something that is copyrighted is illegal, and B.) copying a story verbatim and sticking it on the Internet (especially a story that has over 2,000 reviews on FictionPress) makes it incredibly easy for people to find out that you've plagiarized?

Either way, I feel as though we, as the authors of these stories being plagiarized, are being backed into a corner. On one hand, it makes us automatically want to take our stories down off of FictionPress. If we take the stories down, no more people can plagiarize them, right? Sure. But then, if we take them down, that makes it incredibly difficult to contact other sites and report these stories as stolen, as there are no longer any links to point the mods to, as proof that they were stolen. Because I'm sure, in most cases, these idiots have already downloaded your entire story (or what there is of it so far) anyway.

So right now, to be perfectly honest, I'm on the fence about FictionPress. I would like to remove most or all of TIOGR. And I have already decided that the rest of the rewrite of "Once Bitten", while I will continue to write it, will never see the light of day on the Internet. Which makes me incredibly sad since I know I will never get it published, which means that the only person who will ever get to read it is my fiance, or anyone else in my non-cyber life who may want to check it out.

I guess the same goes for any story I may decide to write in the future. Why should I work so hard on something that someone is just going to use and abuse and pass on as their own? Because I put way too much time, effort, blood, sweat and tears into everything I write, and it makes me sick to see someone else take two minutes to copy and paste it onto another website, and then get all the credit for it.

So give thanks to ThugMuffinz11 and every other plagiarizer out there for taking the fun out of the FictionPress experience. I know the shitheads are few and far between, and that most of my readers are good people who just want to read stories. But it only takes one person to ruin a perfectly good party.

I'm ending my party now.

I sincerely apologize to anyone who may have discovered this story recently and wanted to finish it. For right now, I will not be granting requests to send anyone the remaining chapters via email. I may change my mind, but for right now, I've decided to remain paranoid.

I will still be self-publishing this book in the near future if anyone is interested. I am going to attempt to make the price of the book as cheap as I possibly can, without actually having to pay you all to get copies. This will mean heavily editing the content of the story, and making it a lot shorter than the first draft was.

If you have any questions about this, feel free to either send me a PM on this site, review this chapter, or contact me through my website, which is linked to in my profile.

Again, I apologize. And thank you all for your (hopefully) understanding and support.