We don't think our books are that great, we're just two fangirls writing stories about people we love as imaginatively as possible while having fun doing what we love doing: writing and football. That's it. There's literally nothing more to it.

AND YET, people feel the need to copy our stuff.

Repeatedly.

Every one has a limit, some sort of patience level which they stick to and when other writers in the football fandom of wattpad began to copy our stuff, we tried to be patient and forgiving.

And there's a point beyond which no sane person can be patient and forgiving.

We've reached that point.

And so we must be bitchy.

People copying our stuff is not a new thing at all. Even when Omegle was just a few chapters old, when it was just us writing and a small group of people reading it, copycats had got hold of it.

Our loyal readers will remember the time, a person literally copied EVERYTHING off Omegle and just replaced the words "Cristiano Ronaldo" to "Neymar Jr.". And when we say literally, we mean literally. All the jokes, all the dialogues, even the time when Cristiano introduced himself as Cristiano--yes, Neymar introduced himself as Cristiano in their book because they forgot to change that one, we suppose. It was sickening but we let it go and somehow (maybe because our readers complained to us?), the story was removed.

And then Omegle became kind of popular.

As you must have noticed, we do write about RM guys but we spend a lot of time, effort and creativity into making their characters unique, so they stand out as our distinct characters. Maybe this is why people seem to like our particular brand of characters. Toni is a love-pessimist, Isco is a fanboy, Keylor is a cynic, Arbeloa is a love-guru and ofc the Cristiano-Gareth-James bromance.

We kept these characters constant as we wrote Snapchat and we were thrilled that you guys liked it.

And now people have graduated from copying our stories to copying our characters, from copying Omegle to copying Snapchat and Love Lessons with Toni.

If there's a slight resemblance, we seriously don't care, however if you take our creativity and put it in a book that you say belongs to you, that's plagiarism. A criminal offence. A stinky cowardly unoriginal uncreative piece of shitty offence.

Even today, I was casually browsing through wattpad and I saw a snapchat book in the football section. I thought, "Yayyy, my type of book. This looks pretty cool."

And then imagine my disappointment when I see prefatory chapter with its themed playlist image etc. appearing very similar to "Snapchat". "Okay," I think, "patience. Patience because it's a preface. I can handle this."

So I good-naturedly move on to the chapter which was okay too and just about when I'm done, I see something that makes my patient blood boil.

Inserted very nicely, there is a request for a shipname and THEN FUCKING WONDERING IF ISCO COULD HAVE HELPED!???

Dude, this is literally the first thing Isco does in all of our fanfics…MAKE A SHIPNAME BECAUSE HE'S THE FANBOY GAH.

Maybe the old us would have let it go, swallowed yet another bitter pill handed to us by our very own football community, quietly endured yet another experience we have come to hate.

But after our baby "Omegle" gets copied 10 different times, after "Love Lessons with Toni" gets copied within days of its publication twice, and now even "Snapchat", we've thought of our new year resolution:

Take no shit from people.

Moving on, there was this girl (let's call her Julian) who was a very active and loyal reader of ours who would vote and comment asap on our updates back in the Omegle days. Then one day, another reader of ours (thank you, Caroline) tags us in Julian's story. There we find out that Julian has been copying our jokes and details in her own book. Changing our famous punchline from Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton won't make you innocent.

Can you imagine what this can do to someone's trust in others? Like we were close in a writer-reader relationship. This is probably a good time to tell you guys, that if you read our books, we love you, we think of you as our friends and if you ever need help or advice we will help you, no matter what.

We didn't say anything to Julian. We just laughed about it, in pain.

But then we posted Love Lessons with Toni and Julian brings up a very similar book, there goes another one of our creative ideas. So we messaged her this time, telling her that she is talented and she can use her own creativity and not copy from us. We didn't get an apology. In fact, we got no reply but the book was deleted and that was that. We don't intend to create tension or bad blood. It's a matter of ethics and respect for your fellow writers.

If you use someone's graphic/idea, you have to ask permission and give credit.

If you are "inspired" by any story, you have to ask the author's permission and if they agree, give credit.

If you have an urge to plagiarise someone else's work, don't.

We didn't make these rules. It's common knowledge.

On the other hand, we have been blessed to find amazing readers and friends here and so we will continue doing what we do best: bringing to you creative stories about the people we love, hoping to make you happy with our work.

And taking no shit from anyone.

Because that's what RM taught us.

*mic drop*