I have never gone back and reloaded my bookmarks* from when I weaned myself from the teat of the Internet while I was studying for my exams. That means that if I want to look at blogs, I have to 1. remember the URL, or 2. make the effort to dig my bookmarks out from where I’ve hidden them on my hard drive. I am a lazy person at heart, so I’ve stuck with method 1 for a while; I just wish I had a better memory. The other day, though, I had to look something up for John on his computer, which contains my core bookmarks from back when we were a one-computer family. The lure was too great to resist, and I found myself skimming my old bookmarks. Aha! I thought. Let’s see what Mr. John Scalzi is up to.

Now I am thinking of giving up writing.

It was this article that really did it for me. Does this main character/story-line ring any bells, Kee? Does it remind you of a certain short story I was working on last year?

Last time something like this happened to me, I thought, Hey! My story ideas aren’t total crap! Someone else out there thought it was a publishable idea. This time, my confidence has taken a bit of a beating.

I guess I know the saying, beat by Miss Snark into her readership, that ideas are a dime a dozen, but the real test is in the execution. But that doesn’t make me feel much better. I guess I thought my idea was unique, but apparently someone else’s brain works similarly to mine.

What’s really stupid is that I didn’t even have any plans to publish my story (I don’t *think*, but the brain is a treacherous organ).

Also, I hadn’t written a word on it in months and months, even though I had recently dusted it off mentally and was working out some necessary revisions. Maybe that is why I felt like someone had pulled the rug out from under me. If my story were still buried in a box in my closet or in a file on my hard drive, it would have been like finding out that my one-of-a-kind tchotchke was actually part of a set. As it is, it feels more like discovering that someone cloned my child and gave her a better upbringing—complete with private tutor and pony—than I could.

Maybe I should just get over myself. I mean, look what happened to this guy: When he wrote a book from the point of view of an ogre, Shrek came out. When he wrote a book about some kick-ass princesses, Shrek 3 came out. And yet, he didn’t let him get it down, and those books all got published.

* Yes, I know there are sites where you can store your bookmarks online, but I haven’t had a chance to look at them yet.