Great Minds Really Do Think Alike
While surfing the web the other day, I saw a review of my colleague Janice Sims' new book, an Arabesque romance called Constant Craving. The names of the hero and heroine jumped out at me. Franklyn (with a 'Y') and Elise (with an 'I'.)

I was momentarily horrified. Not because I knew unpleasant people with those names and it brought back bad memories, but because the manuscript I am currently writing for my 2008 mainstream novel, tentatively titled The First Fifty Years, that features a couple named Franklin (with an 'I') and Elyse (with a 'Y'.) Except for the interchangeable 'I' and 'Y' in their first names, my characters have the same names as those in Ms. Sims' novel! (I'll have to e-mail Janice and ask what last she gave her characters. If it's Hughes or Reavis - the surnames I gave to my characters - you'll hear my scream, even if you're in San Diego.)

This probably doesn't really matter in the great scheme of things. Ms. Sims' book is coming out this month, December 2006. My manuscript isn't even due until next summer, and will probably be published sometime in 2008. And while Ms. Sims' Franklyn and Elise are at the center of her novel, my Franklin and Elyse share center stage with multiple other characters (The First Fifty Years is about four lifelong friends turning fifty.)

But when I think about it, there are several times when I've gotten nervous when I saw that another author had a similar plotline or title to mine. Just recently I was asked to change the title of my upcoming (June 2007) mainstream novel. The publishing company's marketing department didn't think the original title of The Edge of a Dream; didn't think it had enough oomph. I then suggested Anyplace I Hang My Hat, which they liked, but rejected because Susan Isaacs has a book coming out with that same title. We finally settled on If These Walls Could Talk.

I even found myself at the root of another writer’s anguish. My colleague Angie Daniels was shocked recently to learn that my next romance, A Love For All Seasons, carries the same title as her upcoming romance for a different publisher. I don't know what they decided to do about it. (My books comes out first, so any changes will have to be on their end.)

Back when I was writing my first mainstream novel, The People Next Door, I read in a publisher's forecast that Connie Briscoe had written a potential blockbuster called P.G. County, all about life in an upper middle class neighborhood in Maryland. I went into a panic that it was too similar to my book, which was about life in an upper middle class neighborhood in Florida and would be published after Ms. Briscoe's. My agent assured me that my book, written in my own voice, would be sufficiently different from Ms. Briscoe's. Of course, it was. But that didn’t stop me from worrying about it. There will probably be more similarities in the future, and more worrying.

It’s just a hazard of my profession.