The ‘I’ Inside

Today I have been cued by seeing the words “The ‘I’ Inside” being used by one of my Guessing Game guessers. He’s the only one in the group who has read my book and it gave me a start to imagine that he might have been referencing it in front of the others, in front of those whose undying love for me might depend on their never reading Monstrous. But it turns out this is the title of both a movie and a book (no relation), that the book predates my use of the concept, and anyhow in Monstrous it really appears as “the ‘I’ who lives inside”, though at first I didn’t realize that his usage and mine weren’t verbatim.

Took a little detour and poured through the reviews of Alan Dean Foster’s book to see if I had competition, and by the criteria I’ve been using of late, no, I did not, despite his book’s five-star average on eleven customer reviews. Mine was in somebody’s favorite three while his was in somebody’s twenty, and most of Foster’s reviewers who weighed in on the subject didn’t even think that “The I Inside” was his personal best.

Will I be doomed if I go through the reviews associated with Foster’s best according to his readers, whatever that turns out to be? Maybe…maybe not…but I’m shaking in my shoes for when it comes time to match against the one book in this universe whose title sometimes gets confused with my own, namely Final Truth: The Autobiography of a Serial Killer. It’s mortifying/thrilling to see my “But for the Grace of God” get chopped from time to time, and there was one shining day when my publisher screwed up doubly, truncating my title while listing my book under my real name.

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