As is becoming my tradition, the new reviews for November have been posted today. You can click on the little “Reviews” button up there or click here to read them. The six (okay, seven) stories for this month were:

• Blond Over Blue by Montana
• Surrealistic Emotions by Keryn
• Burn by Toona
• A Man On The Moon by Elisabeth
• Trampled Underfoot by Taye
• Music of the Dead by Renee P.
• Fallon by Nat

You may notice that’s a slightly different list than the one I gave last month. I added an extra Underneath Era review because I didn’t like my original plan to do sequels separately, as I did in September and October. Consider that extra one me playing catch-up. More on the other changes in a moment. The stories up for review in December are as follows, belows the read more link:

• Walls and Roads by Sheryl
• The Quiet One by Krystal
• Shades of Blue by Bethany
• Look to the Stars by Leigh and Amy
• Blue Sky by Megara
• The Zac/Ivey Chronicles by Sabrina

As I said, I’ve made some changes to my original plan as to what I was going to read each month. I have multiple reasons for that. First, I try not to give myself too many stories to read each month, since some are long and/or have sequels. I also try to focus on finished stories, although I do make a few exceptions to that. It’s kind of important, at least to satisfy my OCD, that I have the stories in the right eras, too. Lastly, there are some stories I just don’t feel comfortable reading and reviewing, for various reasons.

On a somewhat related note, I’d like to talk about plagiarism for a moment. It’s not fucking cool to rip off someone’s story. I guess some people think that because we’re not getting paid for this, it doesn’t matter. They’re wrong. Just because there’s no monetary value to what we write, it doesn’t mean there is no value at all. We authors pour a lot of ourselves — our time, emotions, etc — into these stories. Having someone come along and claim all of that for themselves when they know they didn’t put in the effort… it’s just bullshit. I can’t think of any more eloquent way to put it.

It takes a lot of arrogance to steal someone’s writing and slap your name onto it. Do the people who do it think no one will notice? The Hanson fandom isn’t big these days. Most authors know each other, in some way or another, and we’re pretty supportive when it comes to reading each others’ writing. If you plagiarize, someone is bound to notice.

It’s not even about what it does to the original author, though. Think about yourself. I promise you’ll like yourself a lot better if you actually write your own stories. You can take pride in having accomplished something. Even if you aren’t great at first, there’s no way to improve if you don’t start somewhere. It isn’t easy, but it’s worth it. Stealing? Not worth it.

So just don’t plagiarize. It’s not fucking cool.