Some kind of Tuesday

Tuesday
A few years ago I was deeply immersed in writing a novel about a guy who dies of a totally unexpected heart attack while working late one Christmas Eve. He wakes up in some nondescript conference room in some corporate office, where an old man named Gilbert explains that sure, he's dead, but no, there's no cause for concern.

Gilbert stopped and looked at the code on the cubicle to our left. “We’ve gone a tad too far, just a tad. But we’re already a bit late.”

We backtracked ten rows or so and took a right. This new aisle ended in a beige wall with an open double door. We joined a few other stragglers who were filing into the room, which Gilbert informed me was the D5 Large Conference Room. At the front of the room was a podium, and five young men in navy blue business suits were huddled beside it, conferring. Forty or fifty rows of long tables, 50 or so office chairs lined up behind each row, faced front, the seats filling up as people found their places. Most of them were wearing the beige shirt and pants, but a few dozen of the suits were scattered about, mostly near the front of the room.

“What’s with the suits?” I asked.

“Vice Presidents and above,” said Gilbert. “Corporate casual is the general rule, but the Vice Presidents, Presidents and the Big Guy all have the suit. Lots of important meetings, you know.”

“The Big Guy?” I asked. “…the Big Guy?”

Gilbert’s chin fell to his chest, and he made a noise like he was choking. Before I had a chance to panic, he reared back his head and let out a long, hearty laugh, an all-out guffaw that I wouldn’t have guessed he had in him. “My goodness,” he gasped, “I certainly don’t think so! I’m sorry to say, Jack, but this is most definitely not heaven.”

Anyway, I was pretty obsessive about it for a while. It was going to be absurd and satirical and profound all at once, and I found the characters and the story drawing me in, practically writing the damn thing for me, the way real writers sometimes say it happens. It was only 100 pages of a shitty first draft, but I felt like I was on to something.

And then -- okay, maybe I lost steam even before this happened, but this seems to have been, in retrospect, the nail in the coffin -- Hugh discovered Dead Like Me, a Showtime series from 2004/2005 about a cynical young woman who dies and ends up back on earth WORKING IN AN OFFICE. Hugh loved it and begged me to watch, and even though the little bits I did see were promising, I refused. In fact, I was PISSED. It was too close to my idea.

No matter how Hugh cajoled, no matter how he assured me of the many ways it was fundamentally different from my story, I refused -- bitterly -- to watch.

For one thing, it seemed as if watching would somehow taint my creative process. How could I ever trust that my fantastic ideas of this surreal office life after death were my own, even though I'd already written 100 pages?

But the thing that REALLY burned was this: surely, most certainly, the show was doing it better than me.

And so. That was pretty much the end of that!

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Ever so lamely, here's why I'm re-living the death of my novel: it's those Facebook memes, 25 Random Things and all the others since. Not that Top Ten Tuesday was an original idea, but still! I can't very well be asking you to answer random questions or list your favorite this or that or... you get the drift. Top Ten Tuesday is feeling tainted, and... sigh... inferior!

Have you ever had something bigger, better, newer, cooler or just plain-old more popular come along and knock the wind right out of your sails? Had your discovery usurped? Your inventive idea brought to market by someone else? Something uniquely you adopted by the masses? Your best joke appropriated? Your ; a bright idea you had dimmed by someone's superioryou hadn't fully fleshed out, or an invention you knew would make millions?

Poor Top Ten Tuesday. It may just have to go into hibernation or a bit. Perhaps I'll bring back Word Count Wednesday for a bit in its stead...