I picked up today Lois McMaster Bujold's Paladin of Souls. Bujold is a favorite author of mine, so by page two I was grinning, enthralled with her words. I've been reading rapturous, for the last hour, but it just now hit me why I like this story so much.

I wanted to write it.

Well, not exactly this story, the details aren't all there, but a story I developed three years ago opens along the same premise as this. One woman, nominally mistress of her domain, feeling more like she's been clapped into the attic by very loving relatives. She was powerful once, one of her godess's chosen in her youth, but those days are long gone, and now her keepers have convinced themselves that such acts were greatly exagerated. In defiance of all that, with the keening of her ladies in her wake, she rides out, seeking new horizons to find herself.

Essentially, it is fantasy's version of the midlife crisis, but damnit, I had the idea too. And now I can't write it, because someone else has written the story a thousand times better than I ever could. The lady's idle dalliance even gets caught up in a war for the very souls of her country.

Bah. It's still a good book. I have no intention of putting it down. But now I have to rethink the set up. Granted, beyond the beginning the details were a little hazy, based on the closing couplet of Tennyson's Ulysses, but I shall still ahve to work on it. Or I can take the lazy way out, mentally change the main character from a fine lady to the abbess of a monastic order, and read the book as if I had written it.

Edit: It occurs to me that not every has had the pleasure of as many English literature classes as I have. Therefore, I include as a footnote this extraction from "Ulysses"

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Edit2: Book completed. It took quite a different path han naything I would have thought of, so that's good news.