What Happens When a Romance Writer Gets Locked Out of Google Docs

On the evening of March 24, 2024, writer K. Renee was doing what she often does: curling up on the couch and watching hockey with her husband. It was the Dallas Stars versus the Arizona Coyotes. Renee has followed the Stars her whole life. She was born the season they won the Stanley Cup. As she watched, she got a strange message: a friend texted to say the shared Google folders where Renee kept her works in progress were no longer accessible. Her friend had planned to read and make notes on one of Renee’s stories and was surprised to be locked out.

“You no longer have permission to view this document,” said the pop-up message. “If you believe this is an error, contact the document owner.”

This was how Renee experienced a moment that most of us have heart-pounding 3 am stress nightmares about. All 10 of her works in progress—some 222,000 words across multiple files and folders—were frozen. Not just frozen, but inaccessible on her phone and tablet. When her husband fetched her laptop, Renee logged into Docs and tried sharing the documents again. Then she received her own message from Google.

“Can’t share item,” was the header. “You cannot share this item because it has been flagged as inappropriate,” read the body text.

Renee writes hockey romance. People who get to see her drafts first, her community of alpha and beta readers, all have that in common. Renee describes her work as “open-door spice.” Aside from being an amazing name for an overpriced cocktail, the term serves as a descriptor for the level of explicitness in romance fiction. Simply put, “open-door” means more explicit; “closed-door” means less. Reading an open-door romance is like watching a John Wick movie. You see the knife go in. Closed-door romances are like watching a Marvel movie. You know something is happening to someone’s body, but you never really see it.

When she saw the word inappropriate in the notification, Renee worried her work had been dinged for its spice. “I thought I was the problem,” she says. “I thought I had somehow messed it up.”

But she hadn’t. At least, she hadn’t messed it up in any way she could hope to avoid in the future. Google never specified which of her 222,000