There’s a quote in some movie that says there are no coincidences, just plans other people make and don’t tell you about. I always found that really funny. In my work as a writer I have found a number of coincidences and odd connections that I always find fascinating. I thought I’d share some of those with you.

My first retold fairy tale was Midnight Pearls which is the Little Mermaid story. A large, black pearl plays a key role in the story. A few months after the book came out Pirates of the Caribbean: the Curse of the Black Pearl hit theaters and my husband and I laughed because outside of Polynesia you never hear about black pearls that often. When the fourth Pirates movie actually featured mermaids it made us smile again.

When signing books at my first Comic-Con I was sitting next to a fellow writer. We got to talking and realized we both had pitched a story to the exact same editor at Simon & Schuster within the past month. Both of us had pitched retellings of Little Red Riding Hood which featured an actual werewolf playing the part of the wolf who was also the love interest for Red. One key difference was mine was set in a fairy tale setting and his was a modern day story. We had never met before and yet we were stunned at some of the similarities between our books.

It was while working on Scarlet Moon that my editor left the company and another one was assigned to me to finish the book. She was also the Charmed editor and she bought Charmed: Pied Piper from me. (Which has the character of Piper suddenly being the Pied Piper of children and deals with the Pied Piper fairy tale.) Because I had written a Charmed novel I was invited to write an essay for an anthology dealing with the television series. I wrote mine on fairy tale elements in the show.

Of course, writing these two things for Charmed was great fun because my parents were fans of the television show and because I had just finished writing the Wicked series with Nancy Holder (which is all about witches).

We mention the existence of Cursed Ones in the fifth Wicked book, Resurrection. They are vampires. The Cursed Ones are the villains for the Crusade series. The prequel to the series is a short story called Passing which was in an anthology and which is now available by itself as an ebook. The Crusade series has a werewolf as a key character. Wolf Springs Chronicles is all about werewolves. While Wicked is like Romeo and Juliet with witches, Wolf Springs Chronicles is like King Lear with werewolves. Don’t look for an overt Shakespeare theme in Crusade, though, since it’s patterned more off of events of World War II.

And for the final connection I’m going to mention (though certainly not the last there is), for a guest blog post on the Damned blog tour for the Crusade series, I wrote a ghost story dealing with our werewolf from Crusade and the fairy tale character of Little Red Riding Hood.

What connections/coincidences have you noticed in my books?