the-beehive

When I first started taking my writing seriously, one of my first hangouts was a message board on E-Harlequin.  At the time it was called the Writing Round Robin, and the participants would take the beginning passage posted by a pubbed author and write follow-up chapters.

I had, in fact, subbed my first ms to Harlequin a year or so before, and received an encouraging rejection.  The heroine of my ms was named Roxanne St. Claire, and her friends called her “Rocki”.  She was very independent, drove an old Vokswagon Beetle, and her story involved being stranded in a small cabin with a hunky piece o’ man. :popcorn:

You may imagine my surprise when the first author I encountered in the Round Robin was named Roxanne St. Claire, called “Rocki” for short—and the story snippet she wrote involved an independent young woman who drove an old Volkswagon Beetle being stranded with a guy in a cabin by a storm… :shock:

I’d submitted my ms to more than that one publisher well before the author Roxanne St. Claire was pubbed, so no, I’d never heard of her before.  (She has heard this story since then and, being the nice person she is, thought it was hilarious).

Maestro?  Cue Twilight Zone music, if you please… :poke:

The point of this is not that I’m particularly weird.  (I am, but that’s not the point).

The point is that I’m AMAZED at how often I hear about similar things happening to LOTS of people.  Friends have come up with kick-ass plot ideas or unique twists to storylines—only to see that someone’s publishing something that sounds VERY similar around the same time (after they’ve worked their buns off on it, of course).

New twist on an old mythology?  Whoops—there it goes, out of all the mythologies in all the world, to ABC publishing.
Did a lot of worldbuilding, created thousands of years of history, even made up your own name for a race of people?  Shazaam—there it is, being released by XYZ publishing.

Not long ago, on this site, I posted a snippet from an unfinished ms about two girl’s schools in the Victorian era teaching the intimate arts, one of which was run by a man named Mr. Pettibone.
Well…surprise, surprise…
The Education of Mrs. Brimley

I know there’s nothing new under the sun—but geez!! :roll:
Have you ever had this happen to you?  Know of anyone who has?
What would you attribute it to—and does wearing tinfoil on the head really help?