‘Someone Else Published My Idea. Now What?’

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Dear Yanyi,

How do you deal with the fact that a work you’ve been working on for years has just been published...by someone else?

It’s not just that it deals with similar themes, or has a similar setting, or whatever, but genuinely has an almost exact copy of characters and setting and themes. Like it’s been plucked directly out of my mind by the author.

It’s not plagiarism, because they can’t possibly know what they’ve done, it’s just the incredible random chance of the universe...