Stephanie Laurens, Mary Balogh, Jacquie D’Alessandro, Candice Hern
It Happened One Night Anthology

A Letter to the Reader

What would happen if four authors were each to write a novella for an anthology and it turned out they had all used the same plot premise? Disaster, right? But what if it had been done deliberately? What if the four had agreed ahead of time on certain plot details they would all use and had then gone ahead and written the novellas without further collaboration? Madness, right? All the stories would be basically the same.

Or would they?

For years it has been my conviction that the individual imagination, voice, style, and outlook on life of each author would guarantee a quite unique story no matter how similar the basic plot was to someone else’s. I wanted to test the theory, but could arouse no interest in it until recently. And then I was out on a Levy book-signing tour with a crowd of other authors and idly mentioned my idea to Candice Hern and Jacquie D’Alessandro. They were instantly enthusiastic, and we talked of nothing else for the whole of one long bus journey from Chicago to Detroit. We were going to do it. But we felt that we needed a fourth member of the group and made a wish list. Candice happened to have Stephanie Laurens’s e-mail address with her, and since she was at the top of our list, we wrote to her and had an almost instant acceptance, despite the time difference between Detroit and somewhere in Australia. Our agents also loved the idea-and so did Avon when we pitched it to them.

And so here it is-an anthology of four novellas with the same plot! You can be the judge. Are they so similar that when you have read one, you have read them all?

Or are they as differently fascinating as the four seasons in which they are set?

The plot premise is this: A man and a woman, who have neither seen nor heard from each other in ten years, meet again when they find themselves staying at the same inn for a twenty-four hour period. To make the experiment a real one, we did not discuss our stories at all as we wrote them. The only artificial restriction we placed upon them ahead of time was to take different seasons of the year, since there are four of those and four of us.

Enjoy these very different novellas-even though in one sense they are all the same. Right? Or wrong?

Mary Balogh