MissBellatrix

Hi! 

Thank you for your unequivocal rejection of the "whore" comment in "Dead Politicians Society". It's great to see strong women who don't accept that type of judgement

@help-me-think-of-one At least she was apologetic toward you, even if she was being blaise to readers. And thank you!

To be honest, I did look into notifying Wattpad about a copyright infringement because even after the slight changes it was still hilariously similar. But I had a look at the complaints page that Wattpad has and I had second thoughts about who they would side with - like maybe I was exaggerating the similarities in my mind and if a person from Wattpad compared the two stories together, they would tell me I was being too paranoid. So basically I dropped it and hoped that asking her to change a few things was enough. Obviously it wasn't, and it still bothered me. Like I couldn't shake off the feeling that I'd been stolen from, which is irrational. But seeing as I'm the least confrontational person in the world, I didn't take it any further. 
          
          And yeah, in terms of how she made it sound coincidental, that bothered me too. I tried hinting that it was definitely NOT coincidental, and that I knew crystal clear that it was an intentional act of plagiarism. But the thing is, she was very apologetic about the whole thing and she wasn't defensive at all - even though she tried to save face and pretend to her readers that she hadn't completely copied someone else's story. So I just put on a smile and pretended it was all good. But seriously though, I would never have found out about her story in the first place if it weren't for fans like you. Thank you for taking time out of your day to inform me that my story had been stolen, even if it had already been taken care of. You're actually the best, and I wanna thank you for reading Red Leather and being such a cool person. :)

@help-me-think-of-one yeah I mean I could understand there were similarities between your two stories, but it wasn't until like halfway through I realized the plot line was heading in the exact same direction yours did, and then exact quotes from your book were in hers, too. I didn't notice a lot of backlash in the comments from her story, except for myself and my friend who also noticed. And to be honest I assumed the same (about her just being young & impressionable) but there's a difference between maybe trying to write a similar story or whatever and just essentially plagiarising. 
          I don't know if you know, but she did change the ending of the story because "of a recent comment about a story similar to mine" (which was before I commented, so someone else must have noticed). I was just surprised that she made it sound so coincidental when there were so many exact same scenes/quotes/characters, and I couldn't come up with any explanation how she could write her story without knowing about yours. So she sent me a vague message about how it's been sorted and I couldn't reply because by then she was already inactive. 

Hi! To answer your question, I HAVE spoken to the author of Beautiful Evil about her story and its similarities with Red Leather, and I worked out a list of things in her story that were either incredibly similar to Red Leather, or were just flat out copyright infringements. Keep in mind that in this list, some of the things I wanted changed were quite vague (I mentioned that the character dynamics were way too similar) so in truth she hadn't altered the story enough. And I can totally understand why - it's difficult to change an entire character, especially in a completed story. But I had a choice between making a huge deal about it, making her change everything or take the story down altogether, or to just let it go and ignore my discomfort over her story. I chose the latter. Remember, this is probably an incredibly young, impressionable girl who found inspiration from my story and didn't know how to write in her own voice.
          
          I don't quite understand why she's deleted her account and all of her stories in general, since I hadn't really checked her account after the incident. But you aren't the first person to message me about her, so I'm gonna take a guess and say that it may have something to do with the out lash she may have received by some fans.

Oh...well, thanks. 

great comment on the makeover i totally agree with you on that people need to stop being so judgmental. They say someones a slut or whatever then the person that says it says that shes being bulled and that that persons a slut. Its like stop being such a hypocrite keep your shit to your self 
          any who great comment
          peace out niggas