Echoes in a Hollow Space

Okay, so the plot of that novel is nothing like any of my vampire novels (all 3-1/2 of them), but there are certain elements in the worldbuilding which really sounded familiar:

• A 1500-year-old vampire
• A group of powerful supernatural being overlords called the Congregation (mine was the Covenant)
• Vampires who can eat normal food but don’t, mostly because the smell is abhorrent (especially garlic)
• Vampire growth spurts, in which the vampire gets larger and more of an apex predator after being “changed” from mortal
• Other piddling things that slip my mind at the moment

Now, none of these elements are earth-shatteringly similar, but chances are that if any of my vamp novels sees some form of publication someone will surely think I’ve ripped off Ms. Harkness, even though I did this worldbuilding twenty years ago now. It no longer depresses me when this sort of stuff happens, no longer even irks me especially hard, because I have been through this same thing so many times before. Seriously, click on the “simultaneous invention” tag if you want to listen to more hardcore whining on this subject. No? Can’t say as I blame you.

The thing is, the concept of simultaneous invention is quite well-known in science. And if it’s true for the tech fields, it’s also true for creative fields. It happens all the time—to me, to my friends, to writers and artists of all sorts. It’s just the way the zeitgeist operates, propagating certain ideas into the culture when their time has arrived. Some individuals are quick to pick up on them and “get them to market,” while others (like me) are painfully slow about the whole thing or otherwise blocked from getting their version before the public eye time. As with Ms. Harkness and I, nothing sinister is involved, no one has stolen anything.

Most of the time. Ideas do get stolen. It’s happened (verifiably) to friends of mine, it’s happened to me—which is one of the reasons I decided I didn’t want to be involved with Hollywood anymore. But most of the time, I firmly believe it’s just a case of that ol’ zeitgeist playing with folks, hoping somebody will take the idea ball and run with it.

The strangest example of this for me happened about a year before Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out. I started working on this idea about a guy name Roy who was a state trooper. One night when he’s out on patrol on a lonely stretch of highway, he has a close encounter with a bunch of UFOs that radically changes his life. He loses his job, his marriage breaks up, and he spends the rest of his time obsessing about and trying to solve the mystery of these strange alien craft. Sounds familiar, huh? I never heard a word about the movie in production until I was about six months into the worldbuilding on my own idea. The thing that is really freaky to me is that both my character and the Richard Dreyfuss character in Close Encounters had the name of Roy. The zeitgeist was working overtime on that one.

So, onward. If I do publish any of the old vampire stuff, I’m sure there are many elements in my books that have been used in other (and many) books since I first came up with the concepts. They can’t help but be labeled “derivative.” I guess the answer is to just keep writing new things, to keep moving forward.

Oh, and what did I think of A Discovery of Witches? I quite loved it, despite the cliffhanger ending. Which is all I’ll say about that ending—but you have been forewarned.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

I am moving forward on the WIP, but some days it's just not there, or I only get a little bit done. I don't feel stuck, exactly, but it's definitely inching along. Rather than waste my precious writing time on the days when the WIP isn't moving, I've been working on other things. Stories. Older novels. Novels-coming-up-next.

*sigh* This book has really blown my novel-a-year pace out of the water. Maybe I'll get back to that pace some day because the imagination certainly hasn't deserted me.

One thing that's been tickling my mind is an old novel, my second, Blood Geek. Not the novel so much as the world I created for it: a small, very strange carnival traveling through the Midwest in 1938. Sound familiar? When people started telling me about the HBO show, Carnivale, I despaired and was glad I wasn't trying to market my carny novel. Subsequently, I've learned that while the outer trappings of that show are the same, my novel is very different.

Besides, what's tickling me these days is not really the old novel but a character who played a minor role in it. Those who read the novel expressed a lot of interest in her and I've always thought she deserved her own story. I guess I must be seriously considering it because I just went online and ordered volumes one to three of A Pictorial History of the American Carnival by Joe McKennon. There are a number of books on carnivals now, but back in the day when I was doing research for Blood Geek (1992ish), there was not a lot to be found. Tons of stuff on the history of circuses, but carnivals are very different fish. Although they've featured prominently in fiction and movies, there wasn't a lot of hard facts to be had, or it was in rare book collections and hard to get access to (for someone with no travel budget like me). McKennon's book was a lifesaver when I found it at a local library. The used book trade online wasn't really up and running at that time, so I still had to depend on the UC system library catalogue (online/offline) and etc.

And what about Blood Geek? I did try to market it back in the day, but I probably won't be marketing it again. It's the closest thing I've written to a paranormal romance, but it's not really a true paranormal romance. Loads o' sex, sure, but there are some very dark elements—and it is an early novel, after all. I haven't reread it in years, and shudder to think what I might find there, but there are characters in it who really think they deserve books of their own and who might be rather interesting protagonists. Maybe they'll get a novel of their own—one of these days, if I can ever finish the current WIP.

I seem to have this annoying habit of coming up with ideas and writing novels about them not when they’ve become a hot-hot-hot new trend, but maybe the year before they become hot.  Just about the time I finish my first draft I start seeing key elements of my novel every-fricking-where in the literary universe.  So I am anticipating the trends, in a way, but not anticipating them enough, obviously. 

Clearly, I need to write faster.  Or find a way of disseminating trend retardant into the literary air until I can catch up. 

I’m not the only one this happens to.  I’ve seen it happen to others.  I don’t think it’s quite as big of a setback for someone who already has a publishing deal, but for someone like myself, it makes me look like a copycat when really‑swear!‑I wasn’t seeing much of anything like this when I started formulating the novel. 

I’m sure one of my writing friends will tell me it’s what I do with the familiar material that counts, my original take on it, and I would thank them if they did, but…it wouldn’t be as cool as hitting the marketplace before the trend was seriously launched.

Such is life.