This weekI hit that problem that only happens to creatives; someone made my thing.

You know thatidea you had for a novel? Someone wrote it. And it happened twice.

It hadnot been a good week, anyway. Waves hand at... you know... everything.

But yes,I read two books that matched pretty closely ideas I had ages ago for twodifferent novels. I started writing them and stopped at a good way in and threwthem away. Trunked them.

The ideasare not exactly the same. A bunch of writers given the exact same prompt willalways write different stories.

InElizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic, she talked about a very specific story idea thatwinged its way over to her friend's head. She swore they had not discussed it,but perhaps they both saw the same source material? Or they did talk about itand both forgot? She thinks that an idea will bugger off if it thinks you don'twant it. And she might be right, hey, who am I to argue with Elizabeth Gilbert?

Storywill find a way, she intones in a serious Ian Malcolm voice.

And ofcourse, my negative self-talk had an excellent week. There were a lot ofshoulds, a lot of if onlys, and a lot of nasty words. I know it doesn't help,but it's kind of hard to stop it on those days/weeks where you are strugglingwith other things.

So that'smy week, how about you?