When I was thirteen, it took me three whole years to write a novel.
All right - a novella - called Various Shades of Blue. It was about a society living inside a dome made from carboxygememtellan: carbon, oxygen, and a miraculous, unbreakable, breathable gel.
At the age of thirteen.
Clearly, I was a genius.
The dome was known as the Blue Dome. You could tell a person’s status by the shade of blue they wore, and there were rumours of distant domes - red, green, and yellow.
So you can imagine my shock when Logan’s Run was released in the mid-1970s and I realised it bore an alarming resemblance to my story. An apparently idyllic society. A population convinced that the planet beyond was uninhabitable, destroyed by natural and man-made disasters. Whispered rumours of a Safe City. Strict population control through euthanasia at a fixed age. A group of protagonists who flee the dome, risking everything to discover the truth.
Suspiciously familiar, wouldn’t you say?
My own story concluded with the surviving characters - those I hadn’t killed off (sorry, BFF Shelagh; I know you never fully forgave me for that) - huddled in a cave, drawing up ten new rules, or rather commandments, for future generations to live by, ensuring the planet would never fall into such a sorry state again.
A genius, I tell you.
The final descriptive passage made a subtle reference to gills in the characters’ necks. Make of that what you will.
Naturally, upon discovering my story had been cruelly stolen, I drew up a list of suspects.
My parents? No - they were the ones who alerted me to the film, and Dad was still driving his distinctly unimpressive Cortina. The three teachers who had read, and spell-checked, my masterpiece? Possible.
And then there was the aforementioned Shelagh, who might still have been harbouring a grudge.
Thankfully, before court proceedings were initiated, I discovered that Logan’s Run was based on a book published in 1967 - two years before I came up with the idea. When most of my beta-readers were commenting on my work, I was living in Cyprus, which may explain why none of them had read the book. News travelled slowly there; the more fashionable or noteworthy something was, the longer it took to arrive.
If someone produces an idea eerily similar to yours, people will tell you to console yourself with the phrase “Great minds think alike.”
No? Didn’t help me either.
But history is full of such coincidences. Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray filed patents for the telephone within hours of each other. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz independently developed calculus at roughly the same time. And in 1992, Susie Blenkinsop turned up at improv night in the upstairs bar of the Dovecot Theatre in Stockton wearing the exact same Laura Ashley midi-skirt and Romanesque sandals as I was.
So believe me when I say - I understand your pain.
I could dwell on those three “wasted” writing years, but I prefer to think of them as earning my writing chops. (Whatever that means.)
Anyway, the novel I’m working on now is about a girl on a train.
I just know it’s a winner.
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