McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

Great, its Ruined!

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Cooper:
Have you ever had one of those moments when planning/writing a novel that when you stumble on a book in the genre your writing in and has the exact, or somewhat, same information and/or concept(s) your writing about, without ever realizing it existed at all?

It happened to me and I wanted to strangle somebody.  I was moving through the fantasy section of my hometowns bookstore, finding something for some inspiration and ideas for my novel, when I found E.E. Knight's Way of the Wolf.  The cover was good, but the summary really made me pissed.  The same concept and the same evil alien race was the same thing as my reason (don't ask) and conclusion for my story.

Good thing it didn't have my top secret race of special humans.  I didn't buy the book.  So now I have to think up a whole new conclusion, evil alien race, and many more information to fill in.  Besides that, I am new to novel writing and I have a thought that you guys can help me with.  Should I keep my conclusion and idea as it is or re-think it if its similar to something else?

Kali:

--- Quote from: Cooper on December 31, 2007, 05:50:56 AM ---Good thing it didn't have my top secret race of special humans.
--- End quote ---

Um... it sorta does. The Cats are more secret than the Wolves, but the whole training thing they go through is secret. And they're not normal humans, they've been augmented.  Semi-mystically, but it really falls under science so advanced it's indistinguishable from magic more than anything.

Mickey Finn:
May I introduce you to Identity and  Final Destination?

My version of both stories were more cerebral (FD= not kids, and ends with Death and a chess game, ID= very similiar setup, different villian, but same freakin' idea), but it was close enough to scrap mine.

The Idenity one may get written, much later.

seradhe:
That is the bane of my writing existence.

... and that's all I have to say on the subject

blgarver:
Gaiman's Neverwhere almost nixed my WIP. 

But the more I read, I realized they had similar elements and similar situations.  The context is completely different.

Both have a girl from another world closely connected to our own that runs across a normal guy with a ho-hum life and pulls him into her flight from the bad ass superagents from the other world.

I am still a little discouraged about completing mine, but I'm over 300 pages into it and I can't stop now.

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