I'm fit to be tied. I'm beside myself. I'm out of my skull. I'm any number of cliches that express frustration, amazement, disappointment, and extreme perturbation.

A friend of mine sent me a link this morning: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20020205/en/television-wb_1.html

In this entertainment news article, Yahoo! reports that Variety! reports that the WB! television network has announced their acquisitions for the next television season. On that list, under COMEDIES (for crying out loud) was the following item:

- ``Do Over'' a man gets the chance to return to the 1980s and relive high school

AAAAAAAHHHHHHGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Actually, my first response was to laugh, because I thought it was a joke. See, a friend of mine will often copy news articles like this one, insert a line that is completely inappropriate and then send the article to me as if it were entirely legit. That one altered line, though, is usually a killer. So I saw this, and because the comment about a comedy called "Do Over" was so exactly like the premise of my novel by the same title, I laughed because I thought it was funny that this guy had inserted my book under a list of WB comedies.

Then I realized that the friend who sent me the link wasn't the same guy who kept sending me the slightly doctored Yahoo! news reports. Then I realized that the link was actually on the Yahoo! news site itself, and not some other server.

Ah, but wait! The friend who sent me the link is a notorious practical joker who is very skilled in the art of making computers do wacky things. Maybe he hacked the site!

Well, I wouldn't put it past him (he's a very clever practical joker), but I checked the alleged source of the news (Variety), and they had even more details about this abomination. It's apparently being "written" by Rick Weiner and Kenny Schwartz and executive produced by Warren Littlefield. In other words, people who really exist.

AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!

It's too similar. It's just way too similar. They must have stolen it. Yeah. I've been talking about this project for two and a half years. I've been posting about it on my web site now for at least two years. I have friends in the entertainment biz; maybe one of them talked about it with someone who knows someone, and what the hell, who do I think I'm kidding, IT DOESN'T MATTER. Whether this is a case of sabotage or theft or just plain old coincidence, my novel that has taken me two and a half years to get *almost ready* for prime time -- I'm *this close* to having a presentable version -- shares a premise and a title with a $%@#! WB $@#!% sitcom.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Memo to my grandparents: please turn your tender eyes away from the screen for a minute while I say something that I need to say. Thank you.

"FUCK."

Okay. You can look back now.

I had calmed down a little bit by the time I mentioned this minor setback to Paulette. She said that she'd run into similarly bizarre coincidences in her research days when she worked in microbiology. She'd pursue a topic of research, and then discover that somewhere, someone had done the exact experiments that she was planning to do for her thesis/project/whatever. She had good advice for me. She said she was always told when something like that happened, "Well, you know that you're on the right track."

Great. So, I know that this concept is at least able to get funding by the $%#@! WB television network. So, I know that the title wasn't necessarily ALL bad. So, there's at least some kind of market for stories about men who go back in time and relive their high school years in the $#%@* 1980's. Just great. Glad I found that out while I'm a mere three and a half weeks away from completing the stupid two-and-a-half-year project.

Nothing to get upset about at all.

But I'm better now. I'm not upset anymore. Maybe still a *little* beside myself, whatever that means, but I can cope. The big question at this point is:

"What are you going to do now?"

The answer is:

I'm going to finish the $%#@^ novel. And if there was ever any urgency to finish this thing with all due haste, I'm now quadruply motivated. (Why didn't my spell checker flag 'quadruply' as an error? Is it really a word? Zoiks.)

I'm not just going to finish this bastard (no one knows who the mother is) by the end of February. I'm going to send out the first three chapters -- after I've further revised and polished them -- out to my agent-of-choice no later than February 28th. No more playing around. I gotta move on this before the entertainment industry does anything else to mess me up or discourage me.

And yeah, you better believe I have to change the $#%^& title. No novel of mine is going to bear the title of some $%^#@ WB @@#% sit-com.

Ah, $#@%.

For whatever the $#@% it's worth, I finished Chapters 13 and 14 today. Since 20 is also done and the rest in between are already mapped out and delineated, that leaves five more to go before I revise the first three. 17 and 18 should be a walk in the park. 15 has one big scene yet to be written, and 16 will require a bit of restructuring. 19 is a mess.

Twenty-three days to get it all sorted out.

That's the news. G'night.

--Allan

PS: a gracious THANK YOU to my friends who were kind enough to point out this tidbit of information to me. Forewarned is forearmed, or something like that.