Author2Author: Kyra Davis & Lynn Messina, pt. 3

As promised, here's the time when we talk about what's up with chick lit murder mysteries all of a sudden, and what it's like for your book to get caught up in a "trend."

Kyra Davis: Here's a quote from Mim Warner's Lost Her Cool: "The zeitgeist is a strange animal. Sometimes I'm convinced it doesn't exist, but then something truly inexplicable happens--Isaac Mizrahi and Jean Paul Gaultier showing Nanook of the North-inspired collections in the same season--and I realize it's there. It's always there."

Sex, Murder And A Double Latte is about a woman who finds herself the target of a killer who is intent on reenacting the murders in her own novel. Michael Malone's new book The Killing Club is about a killer who reenacts the murders that take place in a book written several years earlier by a bunch of college students. Fashionistas came out approximately one month before Lauren Weisberger's The Devil Wears Prada hit the stands. The zeitgeist is indeed a strange beast and authors are obviously not immune to its influences. There is a long time that passes between writing a novel and getting it published and during the wait there is always the chance that another book that is eerily similar to yours will be published first. Is this something that you concern yourself with as an author?

Lynn Messina: I worry about it all the time. I had barely finished Mim when I told a friend about it and she said, "Hey, William Gibson's new book is about a coolhunter." I think for the most part overlap between stories is inevitable, and--of course--just because there are elements in common, it doesn't mean you've written the same book (I must remind myself of this frequently). Fashionistas and The Devil Wears Prada were vastly different. Also, I'm not sure being part of genre like chick lit makes overlap more likely to happen; after all, William Gibson is known for futuristic sci-fi.

What worries me more these days is that the overlap, while perfectly organic, will be perceived as calculated. When Fash came out, I was accused of jumping on the "backlash lit" bandwagon started by The Nanny Diaries (I believe the quote was something like "caused young writers to look around them and wonder who they could screw in a fictional format"). Which struck me as somewhat disingenuous because anyone who reports on the book industry knows--as you yourself observed--that it takes a lot more than a year for a book to be written, sold and published. (Do I sound defensive? I suppose the charge still chafes. Hmm. I seem to be chafed by lots of things.)