The things that drive a writer to drink (heavily)

This is a sentence I wrote about a year and a half ago for a book that's still in progress because--well, I'm sure I've had really good reasons for shoving this one onto the back burner.

"During what I consider a previous lifetime, I’d been married to Nick for about ten minutes."

This is from Janet Evanovich's LEAN MEAN THIRTEEN, PAGE 4:

"Is this the Dickie you were married to for fifteen minutes in another life?"

So, you might be thinking that I can somehow hack into Ms. Evanovich's computer and lift such a little gem from her hard drive. Or possibly, I'm psychic enough to lift thoughts form her creative brain?

No. It's just one of those horrible coincidences. For me anyway. I now have to delete that line from my manuscript. No, it's not plagiarism. Even if I left the line the way I wrote it. I'm sure Ms. Evanovich wouldn't even furrow her brow if I kept my line. But it would come off looking like I didn't have enough creativity to think of my own smart lines.


What's a little weird to me is that I bought the first Stephanie Plum book as soon as it was released because I was working on a mystery (my first, which explains why it no longer exists, even on my hard drive) that I had entitled "One For The Money". Yes, I wanted to write a series with numbers in the titles. I'm pretty sure Janet and I weren't the only writers who had that idea. Anyway, I wanted to read an author who'd had a similar idea to mine--even if it was only for a title. And I was impressed. I remember telling my sister about it. She read the book and loved it too. At the time she managed a bookstore and hand sold that book and all of the subsequent Plum books.


Still, even though it's just a couple of strange coincidences, I'm hoping that it means I can aspire to write as well as she does.