Two of the Worst Things That Could Happen Just Happened (Continued)

Thing 2:

A few days after I got The Letter I went to the library to find a book to read. I was too lazy to check my list of books that I need to read, I just wanted something to relax and entertain. It would be nice to be able to to say that a sense of foreboding settled over me as I approached the New Books rack, but it didn’t. I just picked a likely looking book, The Last Days of Madame Rey, skimmed the blurb, and checked it out. It was several days before I got a chance to sit down and begin reading it.

The prologue was titled “The Fool”. Oh good, I thought, a book with a tarot theme. When I got to the first chapter and it was titled “The Magician: I began to panic. I looked ahead. Sure enough, the second chapter was “The High Priestess” and the third was “The Empress”. To my horror, A.W. Hill, the author, continued chapter by chapter through the major arcana. He’d beaten me. My idea was no longer original.

Not only that, he’s done a good job of it. He knows his tarot and he’s done his magical and geological research. The book is one of several about a private investigator in Los Angeles named Stephen Raszer who runs a detective agency named Raszer’s Edge. His edge is that he’s a shaman. His specialty is freeing people from cults and returning them to their families. In this book, a lawyer and one time political candidate hires him to get his son away from a group of neo-nazis living on Mt. Shasta. They believe a forgotten civilization lives inside the mountain and is about to take over the world. The Hermit is a seismologist/mythologist who lives in a tiny shack on the mountain and monitors it’s rumblings for the USGS. A sequence of earth tremors, evenly spaced and of exactly the same magnitude, warns him that something strange and possibly dangerous is happening. The Empress is, of course, Mt. Shasta.

The High Priestess in Hill’s book is Madame Rey. The High priestess in my book is Madame Rue. A character in his book describes the tremors as feeling “Like some humongous snake slithering right beneath your feet.” About a month ago, I wrote a blog titled “The Earth Serpent” and described earth tremors this same way.

Synchronicity strikes again.

Jessica, my editor says not to worry. My book is young adult fantasy, a different genre, and the story is completely different. “Look at the way it’s blurbed,” she said, “and pitch your book the same way. Learn from it.”

OK fine.