Robbed!

Today I was browsing through Spring's profiles, adding pictures to our Facebook, and I came across something that honestly surprised me. The long and short of how I made this discovery is this. When the Seasons stories were actually started, I hadn't yet met Allie or Kiki. The character profiles were set up on two different threads, one for Allie and one for Kiki, but Allie started both of them. So when we copied the profile thread links over to our page after taking over Allie's characters, the link to her profile was still at the top of the page.

While searching for information on the profiles, I happened to see Allie's avatar and the link to her profile. Despite the bad blood between us I still think she makes the most adorable avatar outfits. Curious to see which items she'd used, I clicked through her her profile. And there I found a link to her most recent story. Of course curiosity led me to click the link, and while scrolling down I made the maddening discovery that all of Allie's posts contained MY post formats!! Grant it, they were old and hadn't been used in years, and a few of the colors and words were changed. But there it was. All my hard work and she was getting all the credit!!

I didn't say anything, of course, but it's so frustrating to see your work taken by someone else and seeing them get all the credit for it. That made me mad. Not mad enough to confront her and bring up all KINDS of bad blood, but still mad.

Has that ever happened to you? Have you ever had something stolen from you?

Thank you, Drama!

One of the players to join my story was a girl with the screen name Queen of the Drama. She asked to be called "Queenie" so that's what we called her. My screen name was Black Dragon Bride so, through no direction of my own, people started calling my "Dragon." Cool name right?? Anyway... For the first week of the role play, things were going very well. People were involved. They were all communicating and writing a lot. But after the first week one girl stopped writing without warning. The next week two more join, but two left. By the end of the third week we were down to four people who were constantly posting. I was one. Queenie was another. To make matters worse, we were the only two of the four who wrote more than three sentences at a time. The story was going no where, and for us, the more experienced players, it was getting to be a chore to write with the other two girls. After a few days more, Queenie emailed me.

I won't transcribe the entire conversation here, though I very well could. I won't, for two reasons. Firstly, because the conversation was long and relatively boring in retrospect, and I'm sure you're not interested in the tedious details of what exactly was said. Secondly, I'd rather not dwell on the past shared with this girl. Despite the fact that she became a great influence in my life, we are no longer on speaking terms of any kind and I'd rather like to keep it that way. (Whoa... just wrote that in a British accent... Weird...)

The long and short of it is this. Queenie PMed (private messaged) me on the website, expressing her extreme frustration with other the two girls (I assume they were girls) we'd been writing with. She said, in short, "I can't stand writing with these one-liners! It's hard enough to come up with good paragraphs for my characters when I'm responding to a good writer. When I have to do the thinking for both characters it's practically impossible and so stressful!" And it was obvious she was stressed. It didn't take me long to decide what had to be done. That night I closed my RP. For good.

Or so I thought...

After closing it, Queenie and I continued talking. I told her about an RP idea I'd had that was similar to the one I'd just closed, but "better." She agreed to help me open it so we set to work that night.

Of course I was excited about it, but I was even more excited when Queenie sent me this:

And that is how I met my best friend. =)

Too Much Drama

When I first starting writing these role plays, I was bad. And when I say bad, I mean baaaaad!!! Where other people would write two or three paragraphs for their character, I would write one...barely... My proudest accomplishment of the time was a post I'd written consisting of about four long sentences and a quote. And I was writing with the beginners. It was that bad. But I met a boy who wrote with me and showed me the very basics of how to write fuller posts. I took his advice and ran with it. At first, I was just writing with him. A simple story about a girl and a boy traveling together on a quest to find his family. Of course there was quite a bit of magic thrown in there to keep the story going. When I could write an average of two paragraphs per post, even on a bad day, I decided to branch out. At first, I tried to join more experienced RPs. Stories that were just starting with a minimum requirement of three paragraphs per post. I could handle the writing, but the people I tried to write with were rude and stuck up. To the point of kicking me out of a story where I was really the only one trying to even interact with other people. It was harsh. After the third try, I took what I'd learned and put it into my own stories.

First, I would like to say, I'm not proud of how one of my most successful stories started out. See, what happened was, I was browsing the forums for a new story when I stumbled upon one about eight people living together in a house. The story went that when these eight people met, they'd been in high school, but for whatever reason they'd all either left or run away from home. Now they all had to live in one house, paying their share of the rent by working minimum wage jobs and trying to make their way in the world. The characters were split into four couples. Each individual had person problems that translated into couples problems as the story was to progress. I tried to join this story as a girl who's lost her family so moved into this house with her boyfriend and her best friend. I wrote the profile, carefully chose a reference picture, then sent both in an email to the story's creator. The next morning I received this reply:

"Sorry. Another girl asked for this first. Just waiting on her profile. Try another story."

I didn't get it, really. Hadn't his personally written rules stated that he wouldn't reserve characters without a profile? And yet, that's what he was doing for this girl. About an hour later I saw the other girl's profile. Not only had she stolen my reference picture, she's used half of the things I'd written in my profile word for word! That was the last straw. I didn't care about the story or even the fact that she'd stolen my work. What made me upset was the rude and hypocritical acts of the story's creator. I hated that these people thought that because they made the story, they could treat their writers like crap. I wanted to write with people who just wanted to have fun. I wanted to have a place where you could go no matter what level of writing you were, just to enjoy writing. So, I stole the story.

Mind you, I didn't take things word for word. I took the general idea, added a few more of my own to up the character count to ten. Added my own pictures, wrote the description in my own words. By the end of the day, my "better" version of his story was up and ready for people to join. Instantly, there were three profiles in my inbox. All three were added and the posting began.