Warning: Be ready for content relating to relationship issues and conflicts in this thread. If they turn you off, I would understand if you don’t want to read on anymore.

This is prompted by a recent event that I experienced somewhere, not among the Inkshares community. But I’m just curious to know whether most people would agree with me about the following thing that I consider writer etiquette to each other.

The event I’m going to talk about now relates to an multi-author anthology epub for which I’m one of the contributing authors.  The actual event that happened was that I was stuck on one bit on a serial short story that I’m writing for this epub and I threw out a general plea for help on the website from which all 3 of us met and then got together as collaborators. Then suddenly I found a document on the Google drive made by one of my collaborators who also happened to be the leader of this venture which basically contained large sections of my writing taken out and replace by his writing. I was instantly put off by this and I wrote him an email saying that I’m upset that he dropped this nasty surprise on me but not really angry or offended by him because I conjecture his intention is to help me out of my block. I then proceeded to advise him to not adopt such an approach again because I think this act of taking someone else’s story and re-writing major sections of it is not proper etiquette between writers. But his stance is that he is being creative in taking my story and ’playing around with some of my text’ in his words with the intention to help and then he gets worked up/get into defensive mode and end up saying I’m being petty and worked up over this incident in which he basically has no faults in, that I’m the one insulting him when I’m just telling him my honest feelings and stand up for them.

So I just want to ask: how many writers here would side with me and how many would side with my collaborator?

Thanks for lending your sympathetic ears if you have read through and now I’m hoping for comments regarding whether taking someone else’s story for your own, fiddling around it in a major way and then dumping it on the original author without a single note of explanation should be considered proper etiquette between writers. Thanks.

I’ve tried desperately to get anything of mine recognized but then again I have horrible self-esteem and barely any reliable friends, so there’s that. But all you can do is keep trying, right? The only big problem with me is that everything I work on is so different and so way-out-of-mainstream that its’s unable to "fit" anywhere. Plus I mostly work on novels, and unfortunately, I have way too many of those. The only "published" things I have are five self-published books and two things in my college’s literary magazine. And the closest thing I ever got to winning a contest was long-listing to the Somerset Literary Awards done by Chanticleer reciews. This literary world hasnt been kind to me- but, hey it’s my life, and I really hope I make it soneday.