Arcanum 101 reaction post

Once upon a time, I was a teeny little Mercedes Lackey fan. Forget the many different kinds of fail, which 14 year old me was blissfully unaware of. Forget the repetitive plotlines, strangely similar main characters, and self inserts that would make the kids on ff.net blush. I had just started high school and I thought her books were very cool, and the Diana Tregarde books especially so, and Children of the Night just the coolest thing ever. (A witch solves magical crimes and winds up with a vampire boyfriend. If Twilight had hit when I was that age, I would have been all over it. Just sayin'.)

But the books didn't sell that well (at least compared to the Heralds series) and at some point, some fans who apparently possessed a more fragile grasp on reality than an imaginative 14 year old decided that Lackey wasn't making up fictional stories about super powerful witches, she *actually was* a super powerful witch, or at least knew someone who really was a super powerful witch, and the Di Tregarde books were some kind of wacky Roman a Clef. Long story short, she vowed publicly that the series was dead.

So, imagine my surprise when her recent anthology has one of those never published Diana stories that my little teenage self would have really really loved to get her hands on.

I considered doing the snark and nitpicking on twitter, but this is a bit easier. So, I give you snark and nitpicking, more or less in order:
( snark and wallbanging thataway... )