Dammit.

[avevale_intelligencer]

For years now (since I was working at Mole Valley, so at least sixteen years) I've been thinking about a novel in which Doctor Pretorius and the Bride of Frankenstein escape from the exploding laboratory and journey through Europe. I have a chunk of it somewhere, in longhand on pages from a spiral-bound notebook, and I wrote a short story featuring the same characters in present time, my first and only professionally published work so far, in the anthology Thoroughly Modern Monsters (still available from Story Spring Publishing).

Tonight I discover that in 2007 Elizabeth Hand published a novel based on exactly the same premise, Pandora's Bride. Licenced by Universal, no less.

Mine would have been funnier.

But still, dammit.

Comments

[dickgloucester.livejournal.com]

That sucks. *hugs*

[much-of-a.livejournal.com]

I love that short story, it's beautifully done. I nominated it for a Hugo that year, and still think it stands well in the company of the stories that got onto the ballot.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

*falls over*

*gets up again* Thank you!!!

[feetnotes.livejournal.com]

don't be put off!

- not unless the mental & thematic challenges your major characters will have to meet, and overcome
- or fail to overcome - or to evade, or to circumnavigatecircumnavigate -
- have all been anticipated by her, and your story-thread developments, also:

if i gave the same idea(s) to several authors, and some, or even each of them picked them up and wrote storiesstories

- everydamnedone would be different - and usually radicallydifferent

- especially, from what i'd expected (& sometimes, from what i'd hoped) they'd come up with. :grin:

(the only ones where it rankled - still does, some - are where they didn't offer me/the publisher whose sf&f list i was effectively running - the finished work even to bid for.)