If you're an avid reader, or a writer, or if like me you're both, then you may have noticed there are years when it seems that a whole bunch of books come out with a certain same word in the title, or with very similar titles, or even sometimes with the exact same title by different authors (publishers are supposed to watch out for this but they don't always succeed). I first noticed this in a particular year when it seemed like every mystery author was coming out with "Bone" books. This is an interesting phenomenon, I think.
My explanation is this: The Muses, who are responsible for the ideas that come into writers' heads, sometimes get together and decide on a word-of-the-year. Who knows why they do this. Maybe they're just bored and want to stir up some action, something slightly different they can keep watch on. Maybe they decide to have a competition among themselves, with a different muse throwing out a different word, and at the end of the year they count up to see who had the most authors choosing their title word. It could happen.
Sometimes those same Muses maybe throw out a whole concept instead of a word. Thus we hit years when a whole bunch of people seem to be writing about, say, the Shroud of Turin, or anything to do with Leonardo da Vinci. This doesn't always -- maybe doesn't even usually, there's no way to know about usually -- happen after one author hits it big with the idea, the way Dan Brown did with The Da Vinci Code. I'm pretty sure there was more than one author who had a similar idea, but Brown got there first and perhaps best. I know for sure I'd been playing with those concepts myself but I hadn't gotten serious about them yet. I guess I wasn't paying enough attention to the Muses. Anyway, how else do you explain whole decades when everybody seems to be writing about vampires? Or how else did so many people seem to start switching to fallen angels in addition to (I wish it were instead of, but that isn't happening) the vampires. I think the Muses are behind it.
And now, oh curses, damn and dang it, the Muses may be doing it again, with something I thought was my idea.
If you've been reading this blog, you'll know I thought I had a whole new idea going with the concept behind this thing I've begun calling FIREFLASH: A Tale of the Latents. Remember The Great What If? That's in post #2, I think. Over the weekend, I discovered another author, more extremely well-known and much more highly paid than I've ever even dreamed of being, has already experienced a very similar What If. Not only that, she's got a new book out on such a concept and it immediately went onto the bestseller list, which is how I found out about it. OK, so her main character is a 28 year-old pastry chef from Marblehead, not an older woman from the Northwest Coast; also, her book is intended to be hilariously funny whereas mine is intended to be only occasionally amusing, while provoking deeper thought later on, but still....
OK, because I don't want to be a tease, the name of the author who has done this is Janet Evanovich.
I'm bummed. And I'm ticked off at the Muses, because I thought it was my original idea. They sure know how to put a person in her place, darn it.
Do yours anyway. It's a different twist on a theme and THAT's done all the time with books.
ReplyDeleteCaryn
I agree with Caryn! Do yours. I have not read any of JE's work for years and do not intend to start again now.
ReplyDeleteYes, I'm going to do mine. It was just a blow to think I had an original idea and then find out that not only was somebody else doing something similar, it was somebody as big and successful as Evanovich. Hers is meant to be funny; mine will not be meant as that, though I expect there will be some amusing moments.
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