You ever have that feeling that you've come up with an idea for something new and brilliant, and then while you're making that something a reality you find that someone else is already selling it? Yeah. Well, I found out in Waldenbooks yesterday that the feeling sucks worse for writers.
For a little over a year now I've been working on a work of fiction -original, not fanfiction (gasp!)- called "O'er the Ramparts We Watched." It's a post-apocalyptic story set in the aftermath of World War III, and the survivors of Humanity have converted the few surviving cities into fortresses to protect themselves from the mutants and wild nomads that now roam the landscape. Into this setting, a race of Humans-turned-Demons called the Lightbearers (a loose Latin-to-English translation of the name Lucifer) emerges, bent on destroying or converting the last remnants of Humanity. They are opposed by a group of "Knights" called the Guardians, wielding weapons forged from Excalibur, the newly recovered sword of King Arthur. Sounds kind of new, right? I mean, no revolutions in content, but at least they're being combined in a way that I hadn't seen done before.
And then I walked into Waldenbooks yesterday.
There was a book in the Sci-Fi section (I forget the author) entitled "Age of Ra," in which the Egyptian gods have annihilated the gods of all other pantheons and have thus emerged into the realm of reality to conquer Humanity, bringing about World War III. Kind of interesting, I thought. Sort of a Left-Behind-meets-Stargate setup. Then I read farther down the plot synopsis and found that the Human rebellion in this book was rallying around a mysterious figure who appeared out of nowhere to oppose the Egyptian Gods, but who was not all that he seemed to be. And the name of this mysterious, deity-defying figure?
The Lightbringer. Another translation from the same source. And yes, I flipped through a few of the latter pages and found out this person was, as his name suggested, the Devil in Human guise, much like the Lightbearers in my own story.
I don't need to tell you I put the book down immediately. Here I was, having convinced myself that I had finally come up with something in the fantasy/sci-fi community hadn't seen before, and Poof! There it is on the bookstore shelves! And it's selling like candy, on top of everything else!
"Look on the bright side," says my ever-optimistic wife. "At least now you know the story was a good idea."