by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I have talked to a number of people about the conceit of the novel I’m working on and every once in a while something will pop up in my Webstats that will make me nervous. I mean, why did someone from “Wholesale Internet” look at the “Writing about Writing” tag for eight seconds? And they apparently got it via an email, because there was no referring link.
In large part because I have an extremely over-reactive imagination to begin with, I always automatically assume this means someone is actively working to screw me over. That someone knows the basic conceit of the novel and is going to “steal” the idea from me.
I have no ready answer to that paranoia.
I do know that, at least as far as I’m concerned, you could know the conceit of the novel and you would still have a lot of work ahead of you. I guess — maybe? — you could write a quickie screenplay — but that’s so far down the rabbit hole that, again, there’s not much I can do about it.
I think in large part my paranoia about these types of worse-case scenarios come from what happened with Annie Shapiro and ROKon Magazine. She really did “steal” my idea and so I automatically assume that is going to happen to me again.
If the worst does happen, I have a scifi concept I can pivot to pretty easily. And its development would go very rapidly because of all the hard work I’ve put into this novel.
But, in the end, you can’t lockup out of what MIGHT happen. You have to wait until something actually happens and then go from there.
