Name: IrishxCoffee

Nickname: IC, Coffee-kun

Sex/Gender: Female

Age: No comment

ATTENTION: I have something important I want to say.

It's taken me a while to sum up the courage to say this: Don't plagiarize.
I know what you're thinking, 'seriously? It took you a while to say something a ton of other people say not to do?'

Well, I've actually had an incident with plagiarism before.. And, I wasn't the one who got plagiarized. So, this is really awkward and embarrassing for me.
But, honestly, the girl who I took from, got it way worse. She got plagiarized, and I wasn't the first one to do this to her!

Now, when I did that, I was 12. My definition of plagiarism was it was plagiarism if you took massive chunks, and didn't spread your own stuff in with it.
Everyone here knows that's wrong right?

When I was 12 I wanted to write fanfiction, and have people read it, reviewing saying it was awesome. But my self esteem was far too low for me to ever believe I could do it, not to mention, I honestly sucked at writing. My worst area by far was describing the scene.
So, I went to the author I had been reading for quite some time, who was by far my favorite, and inspired me to write... And I stole from her.

What a nice thing to do! Go to someone who's only ever given me entertainment and cared about what I had to say about their story, and just took from them. I didn't know what I was doing was plagiarism though. Because I only took the descriptions, while adding in bits of my own ideas. Someone PM'd me, telling me what I was doing, and told me to either delete my story, or she'd report me.

My heart stopped. I rushed as soon as possible to the woman's story, and looked at her reviews to see if the PMer had told her. She had. You see, I was hoping I could apologize before she even knew, or delete it before the PMer got a chance. I deleted the story as soon as I could. After reviewing to the girl I had stolen from, and giving her a horrible apologize.

The basic breakdown of it was: "OMG, I'm so sorry." "GOD I'm the stupidest 12 year old I know" "SO SORRY GOD".
A pretty sh*t apology. Ever since then, I haven't been able to read that girl's stories, or even think about it without a tremendous feeling of guilt. And, I wanted to get it out here because maybe I could stop people from doing what I did.

Now let me get this clear, nothing of what I did above is an excuse. I should have looked up the definition if I was unsure. Instead of stealing the descriptions I should have worked on them myself, that way I could get better. But instead, I was a lazy girl who thought no one would notice, and that she wasn't doing anything wrong.

I finally gathered the courage today, to PM the author an apology I felt was up to the standard she should of received in the first place. So, I thought I should put this on here, for anyone who stumbled across my profile, and felt the way I did.

Like my story wasn't good enough, because of one thing, and I would never get better at it.
If you work on the one area you feel isn't good, you'll get better. Don't steal, and take the lazy horrible way like I did. Be honorable and do it yourself. So you can be an amazing author. You won't have to say 'yeah well I got 25 % from this one girl'. No, that story is yours. And that's the way it should be.

I apologize profusely to the author I stole from, and anyone else who has experienced plagiarism. You all deserve better.