👂 Listen to this email here

Last week there were 139 of you. 

139 subscribers representing respected email carriers from across the Kingdom of Internet.

I scrolled through your names, bursting with secret pride. 

• AmandaPanda99, from House Gmail.

• Iggle_Piggle32, from House Hotmail. 

• Thomas_Hartly from the distant realm of Yahoo.

And many more of you from provinces far out in the sprawling empire of Custom Domain.

All of you, welcome!

Welcome at my great table.

A place where every Friday I host grand feasts, and somewhere between 72% - 80% of you tuck into heartily prepared secrets. Clandestine cuisine cooked up in the kitchen of my memories. 

Until yesterday, that is. When one in our number betrayed me.

A bold ranger from the empire of Custom Domain. 

A small business owner just like me. 

And I found out because they complimented my work. Told me how much they’d been inspired by my emails. Told me they’d even written new emails because of me. 

So fool that I am, I subscribed to their list. 

And the first email I received contained my own words. 

Staring back at me. 

…My first reaction was like, what-in-the-Game-of-Thrones-plot-twist am I looking at right now.

My second reaction was just sad, pal.

And I’m going to drop the pageantry now because only plain old straight-from-the-broken-heart words can tell you how f*cking disappointed I was to read someone plagiarising my work, again.

Because no, this isn’t the first time. 

And I’m so f*cking tired of it, I’ve decided to stop addressing it in private, and start airing it in public. Like a town square beheading, where all of you get to watch.

Because on this list, plagiarism is an act of treason. Punishable by death. 

Death = immediate deletion from the Extremely Secret Email Club list.

So today I write to 139 of you (someone joined after I deleted the other sub, metaphor absolutely ruined 😂) and now I’ve had to kill off a club member, I hope the message is clear. 

This isn’t the Pied Piper of Hamelin Email Club, hun.

I’m not playing my flute for rats.

And look.

The kind of thing I’m calling out in this instance is word-for-word copy/paste stealing of my words and ideas. 

Every single day we’re inspired by writers, artists, poets, stories, emails, websites, blog posts, movies, shows, TikToks and social media posts. It’s impossible not to be inspired by others.

We might even unintentionally draw on these things when we sit down and begin our work. It happens… And when it happens, and you finally notice (or someone helps you notice) your similarity to another source, you do the right thing and fix it. Take it down. Edit it. Credit it. Whatever you have to do to make it good, you do it. 

Hell, I’ve done it.

But I want to see more of us calling out the bad stuff. The illegal stuff. The livelihood impacting stuff. The Taylor Swift 🐍 saga stuff.

A lot of you on this list are writers too. And I know you know how I feel. Any person who has ever been called to create should know how I feel. I talk to many of you about these things in DMs on the daily. But that’s where the conversations sort of stop.

And I don’t want them to stop.

When I tell you I will be calling out plagiarism of my work here, I also want you to call me out if you ever think I’ve pulled something f*cked up too. This is a two-way street, and if I’m going to make a public spectacle then I hold myself accountable too. I insist on it. And I hope to God I never have to kick myself out of my own damn club. 

So let’s just…not do this again, yeah?

And use Plagiarism Detector x