Our other Selection this month is an interesting and complicated one: Mercedes Lackey’s Diana Tregarde Investigates, a 3-in-1 of contemporary fantasy novels a lot like those written by Laurell K. Hamilton, Kim Harrison, Charlaine Harris, and similar writers…except that Lackey wrote these books over fifteen years ago. I’ll let her explain:

The Diana Tregarde books were all written quite some time ago, and actually predate Buffy, Charmed, and a fair number of other “witch-centered” movies and TV shows.  While I would love to think that Diana had something to do with kicking off a trend, the truth is that it's probably just coincidence.  Though in fairness I think that they're probably the most “cinematic” of the books I've ever written, and I would love to see them on the big or small screen.  One of these days I might well revisit the characters.

One of the oddest of the coincidences around the books happened shortly after the publication of Burning Water, when several college students were murdered down on the border of Texas and Mexico around Brownsville, and early media reports were that the murders seemed to be related to a pagan cult of some sort.  The initial and very sketchy information made it look almost as if it might have been a copycat working from my book.  Now this is something that every author that describes violent acts in prose either should or does have to wrestle with — that someone might take what they had written and go out and actually do what was described.  So do you self-censor?  Or do you go ahead with what the story demands?  As it happened in this case, there was no copy-catting involved, and the case was far more complicated than those early reports suggested but still...it gave me, at least, pause — and a great deal to think about.

Here is a link to what really happened:

http://www.francesfarmersrevenge.com/stuff/serialkillers/constanzo.htm

Which in itself is certainly fodder for someone's book.