Look! Space Wizards!
So my good friend Muffy recently unveiled the cover art for her upcoming book, The Sail Weaver. It's pretty great. I'm really looking forward to reading it, but above all, seeing the cover sent me down this long, weird rumination about the nature of inspiration, the creative process, and how much outright stealing might be just the right amount.
See, sometime early last year Muffy sent me an email with a very brief description of a new book idea she had, which essentially boiled down to three words: wizards in space. It sounded awesome to me. In fact, for the next four or five hours until I got home from my day job, it was all I could think about, and I came up with a whole bunch of fun ideas for the premise. I called her that evening, and it turned out that she already had this huge, sprawling universe pretty well worked out. We talked for a while about a couple of plot points, overall structure and stuff, and that was that. I was happy to be of service as a sounding board, and went merrily on my way.
The thing is, MY wizards in space story wouldn't let go of me. It was completely different in tone from what Muffy was working on, so I couldn't even pitch her my ideas to see if she wanted to use any of them. But in the shower, on the stairmaster, staring at the ceiling at night while trying to drift off to sleep… all I could think about was wizards in space. For a while I was obsessed with the idea of doing it as a webcomic (working title: WIZARDS IN SPACE), then I thought it would be a perfect Chooseomatic. Lately, I'm starting to see it as a standalone novel. Basically, I'm still utterly in love with the project. But I can't get myself over one little thing.
I totally and completely ripped off the idea.
It's not that I think Muffy has the market completely cornered on space wizards (um, Obi Wan Kenobi? Hello?). And it's not that I think my story would take anything at all away from hers — seriously, my entire springboard was really just three words, and one of those was "in." If I saw that idea on a movie poster or somewhere I'd have no qualms at all about coming up with a riff on it. But the fact is, my friend came to me and said "What do you think of this idea?", and every ounce of my psyche responded with "IT IS THE BEST IDEA EVER, I WILL DEVOUR IT AND SUBSIST UPON ITS FLESH OM NOM NOM."
So now Muffy's The Sail Weaver is almost upon us. Will my own wizards in space project ever see the light of day? Who knows. I still really like my ideas for it, but they're all intertwined with this inner nugget of thievery and betrayal. I'm sure Muffy would be happy to see me do it — if I called her, she'd probably even help me work out the plot.
They say that creativity is the art of disguising your influences. Looking back over this post, maybe that's something I need to work on?
