Gridlocked on the Information Superhighway

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had gotten back to work on a novel that I had been writing on and off with much more time off than on over the last couple of years. Shortly after that, I realized that I am not comfortable enough writing in the third person to make a full book that was and decided to start over yet again using the first person point of view. Then I made the choice that in order to prevent myself from scrapping my work anymore before it got seen by anybody I would write it as a blog with posting dates going backwards from years in the future so the beginning would be on top. Seemed like a good plan at the time.

My writing was delayed somewhat by a mysterious cut on the finger that I do most of my typing with, but by yesterday afternoon I set out to work on it anyway using a modified typing strategy that was probably very bad for my wrist and definitely very slow. The writing that I had done so far disappeared somehow but I remembered enough to approximate what I had written before and possibly improve upon it slightly. I wrote a paragraph and took a break.

During that break, I looked up some things on the internet. First I looked up what I had named the primary location of my story to see if it had been used before and it had in an online political role playing game. It suddenly felt extremely unoriginal and not worth using. The same was true for what I had originally named the same place, and even the name of what I thought was an original type of halfling may have been thought of by someone else before me. Frustrated by this information that I probably should have known long ago, I deleted the new blog and haven't worked on the story since (even if it has only been a day).

The internet can be very useful for writers. With blogs and forums and other interactive sites it is possible to express oneself creatively to audiences that would never have been reached before the advent of the information superhighway. As a whole this is a good thing, but the increased opportunity allowing more ideas to be expressed means that it is increasingly likely for a good idea to have been thought of and e-published by someone else beforehand thus making ideas seem plagiarized even when they were not. I think most of my ideas are still original and the combination of them certainly hasn't been done before, but until I can fix the names then I am definitely stuck and even if that hurdle is cleared I'm still worried that other problems will arise.