Better Than Dead

Okay, so the plot of that novel is nothing like any of my vampire novels (all 3-1/2 of them), but there are certain elements in the worldbuilding which really sounded familiar:

• A 1500-year-old vampire
• A group of powerful supernatural being overlords called the Congregation (mine was the Covenant)
• Vampires who can eat normal food but don’t, mostly because the smell is abhorrent (especially garlic)
• Vampire growth spurts, in which the vampire gets larger and more of an apex predator after being “changed” from mortal
• Other piddling things that slip my mind at the moment

Now, none of these elements are earth-shatteringly similar, but chances are that if any of my vamp novels sees some form of publication someone will surely think I’ve ripped off Ms. Harkness, even though I did this worldbuilding twenty years ago now. It no longer depresses me when this sort of stuff happens, no longer even irks me especially hard, because I have been through this same thing so many times before. Seriously, click on the “simultaneous invention” tag if you want to listen to more hardcore whining on this subject. No? Can’t say as I blame you.

The thing is, the concept of simultaneous invention is quite well-known in science. And if it’s true for the tech fields, it’s also true for creative fields. It happens all the time—to me, to my friends, to writers and artists of all sorts. It’s just the way the zeitgeist operates, propagating certain ideas into the culture when their time has arrived. Some individuals are quick to pick up on them and “get them to market,” while others (like me) are painfully slow about the whole thing or otherwise blocked from getting their version before the public eye time. As with Ms. Harkness and I, nothing sinister is involved, no one has stolen anything.

Most of the time. Ideas do get stolen. It’s happened (verifiably) to friends of mine, it’s happened to me—which is one of the reasons I decided I didn’t want to be involved with Hollywood anymore. But most of the time, I firmly believe it’s just a case of that ol’ zeitgeist playing with folks, hoping somebody will take the idea ball and run with it.

The strangest example of this for me happened about a year before Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out. I started working on this idea about a guy name Roy who was a state trooper. One night when he’s out on patrol on a lonely stretch of highway, he has a close encounter with a bunch of UFOs that radically changes his life. He loses his job, his marriage breaks up, and he spends the rest of his time obsessing about and trying to solve the mystery of these strange alien craft. Sounds familiar, huh? I never heard a word about the movie in production until I was about six months into the worldbuilding on my own idea. The thing that is really freaky to me is that both my character and the Richard Dreyfuss character in Close Encounters had the name of Roy. The zeitgeist was working overtime on that one.

So, onward. If I do publish any of the old vampire stuff, I’m sure there are many elements in my books that have been used in other (and many) books since I first came up with the concepts. They can’t help but be labeled “derivative.” I guess the answer is to just keep writing new things, to keep moving forward.

Oh, and what did I think of A Discovery of Witches? I quite loved it, despite the cliffhanger ending. Which is all I’ll say about that ending—but you have been forewarned.

Random quote of the day:

 

“Self-plagiarism is style.”

—Alfred Hitchcock, The Observer, August 8, 1976

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

 

“Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; riches take wings; the only earthly certainty is oblivion…”

—Horace A. Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life

I’m fascinated by the way some quotes get transformed over time.  This quotation is often and widely misquoted as, “Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; riches take wings; only character endures.”  Nice quote, but not exactly what Mr. Greeley said.

In Horace A. Greeley’s autobiography, Recollections of a Busy Life, he writes at the end of Chapter 18:

Fame is a vapor; popularity and accident; riches take wings; the only earthly certainty is oblivion; no man can foresee what a day may bring forth; while those who cheer to-day will often curse to-morrow: and yet I cherish the hope that the journal I projected and established will live and flourish long after I shall have mouldered into forgotten dust, being guided by a larger wisdom, a more unerring sagacity to discern the right, though not by a more unfaltering readiness to embrace and defend it at whatever personal cost; and that the stone which covers my ashes may bear to future eyes the still intelligible inscription, “Founder of the New York Tribune.”

Pithy stuff, huh?  And wow, amazing usage of commas and semi-colons, huh?  I think you can see why the full quote isn’t often used and has been amended with time. But where and when, that’s the question.

In A Memorial to Horace A. Greeley, published in 1873 shortly after Greeley’s death, Rev. E. C. Sweetser quoted Greeley’s autobiography:

Fame is a vapor; popularity and accident; riches take wings; the only earthly certainty is oblivion; no man can foresee what a day may bring forth; while those who cheer to-day will often curse to-morrow…

Sweetser went on to muse, “His character stands out in glorious colors before the world…”  Later he again quotes Greeley, talking about his life, saying he was “grateful that it has endured so long, and that it has abounded in opportunities for good…”

Somewhere between 1873 and 1900, the quote got switched up enough that Dr. John Barnett Donaldson in his sermon, “Through Thorns To A Throne,” (in The Two Talents, with Other Papers, Sermons, Leaders) turned part of Greeley’s words into a deathbed speech:

Horace Greeley sighed as he fell asleep, after a bad hour at the last, “Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; riches take wings; those who cheer today will curse tomorrow; only one thing endures; character.”  He might have added that only one character survives oblivion, and that is Christ.

Dr. Donaldson is even more creative in the usage of semi-colons than Mr. Greeley.  I don’t know if Dr. Donaldson is the originator of the “character” variation on Greeley’s words—the Good Lord knows a poor, beset Rev is sometimes hard-pressed to get historical figures to spout the Proscribed Truth—but I know Donaldson’s variation has been amended and widely used since.  It has also been variously attributed to Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman—and others, I’m sure.  In the case of Twain, he actually wrote in his Notebooks, “Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.”  He was quoting Greeley, but many have not realized this and gone on to attribute the quote to Twain.  As to Roosevelt and Truman?  It sounds like something these gentlemen might have said, doesn’t it?  And in the vast world of misattribution, sometimes that’s enough to get someone’s name plastered on a quote.

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

 

“If we are honest with ourselves today, we will acknowledge that the ideal of Democracy has never failed, but that we haven’t carried it out, and in our lack of faith we have debased the human being who must have a chance to live if Democracy is to be successful.”

—Eleanor Roosevelt, The Moral Basis of Democracy, 1940

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

I read a number of interesting things in the last week and it’s been difficult choosing “most interesting,” so I’ve settled on something of a smorgasbord. First up, two somewhat-related articles:

USS Monitor Faces

Nearly 150 years after they went down with their ship in a fierce Cape Hatteras storm, two members of the crew of the famed Civil War ironclad USS Monitor have come back to life in the form of newly created facial reconstructions.

The Ever-Amazing Ötzi

Since it was discovered in 1991, preserved in 5,300 years’ worth of ice and snow in the Italian Alps, the body of the so-called Tyrolean Iceman has yielded a great deal of information. Scientists have learned his age (about 46), that he had knee problems, and how he died (by the shot of an arrow).

Now, researchers have sequenced the complete genome of the iceman, nicknamed Ötzi, and discovered even more intriguing details. They report in the journal Nature Communications that he had brown eyes and brown hair, was lactose intolerant and had Type O blood.

Honorable mentions:

A Romani Mystery from Dr. Beachcombing’s Brizarre History

Scientists found Romani mitochondrial DNA in a cemetery in Norwich in East Anglia in use from the tenth to eleventh centuries when conventional wisdom says they didn’t arrive in England until the 17th century.

And Scott Turow on how lack of competition amongst booksellers hurts authors.

Random quote of the day:

 

“No crime is vulgar, but all vulgarity is a crime.  Vulgarity is the conduct of others.”

—Oscar Wilde, “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young,” The Chameleon, December 1894

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

 

“Soothsayers make a better living than truthsayers.”

—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

 

“The time of longing in your life is beautiful. All possibilities are ahead of you. You think you want to make something happen, but when it does—you finally publish a story, you publish a book, someone reviews your book favorably—you realize that the bliss lies in the moment you pluck a metaphor from thin air. It lies in the time spent at your desk.”

—Patricia Henley, “The Potholder Model of Literary Ambition,” Glitter Train Bulletin 20, September 2008

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

This is both joyful and heartbreaking. A friend helps a dying young man find out what happens next in his favorite Harry Turtledove series (The War That Came Early):

You can read the whole story here.

Random quote of the day:

 

“There are amusing people who do not interest, and interesting people who do not amuse.”

—Benjamin Disraeli, Lothair

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.