Thanks, Rick! It has certainly been a labor and a love, but I’m creeping toward the finish line. I hope to complete my final edits by the end of Jan, and then off to my editor. I’m thinking she will work on it for about 6 weeks. After that, I’m sure I’ll tinker with it for another month. With a bit of luck, by the end of April, I’ll publish it. Of course, we have two seniors graduating from high shool in the spring, and we are moving to a new house as well, so…we’ll see if I hold my schedule.

Comparing the plots, there is…well…almost no comparison. Mine is an entirely different story. And there are other superficial differences: My protagonist, Kira, is 18. Jyn seemed to be about 32. Kira has a love interest while Jyn seems to have no romantic interest at all. Also, in my novel, there are essentially two large empires colliding, neither of which is perfectly bad or good. In Star Wars, the rebels are a collection of aliens and societies (all of which seem to be “good guys”) against the monolithic bad guys in black led by Darth. In my novel, Kira’s mother is a much more important character than Jyn’s mother is in Rogue One. In my novel, Kira is guided by an old man who becomes her mentor. Jyn does not have such a companion. In my novel, the lack of technology is a real issue for Kira and her society. In Star Wars, everyone has access to all kinds of technology all the time.

I could go on, but where I think it matters most — the plot — there is really only a superficial similarity. As I said in my blog post, there are enough similarities that it caught my attention. But given that I’ve been working on my story for 3 years and it has already been posted and reviewed by dozens of people at CritiqueCircle, no one can argue that I leveraged Rouge One in any way.

Of course, given that they say “all publicity is good publicity”, I would be happy to see a viral report that I leveraged Rouge One in some way. I’m sure it would help my sales! 🙂