Diana G. Gallagher Biography (1946-)

Diana G. Gallagher has two talents. She can devise plots and adventures for popular television characters, and she can craft these into novels on deadline. This ability has earned Gallagher as much work as she can handle writing novels based on such television shows as The Secret World of Alex Mack, Smallville, and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. Gallagher broke into publishing with a science fiction novel for adults, The Alien Dark. That book, and her work as a visual artist, helped to establish her in the writing community. Assignments for the television tie-in titles followed, and she enjoys the special challenges of that particular line of work.

"The requirements for writing in someone else's universe are fairly simple," Gallagher said in an interview for the Web site Writers Write. "The writer must know the show: background, episode storylines, characters, etc. It's also imperative to maintain the flavor of the particular series." She added that with tie-in fiction, the production company must approve each novel that presents the characters from a given show. "I've never found this to be a difficulty, just a necessary consideration," Gallagher added.

Gallagher was drawn to fiction writing by her interest in the Star Wars and Star Trek films. She has written Star Trek novels based on both the "Voyager" and the "Deep Space Nine" series, as well as Shadows, a tale based on the Smallville television show about the younger years of Superman. In Shadows, young Clark Kent becomes suspicious when a farmer he knows dies from unexplained causes. Other people begin dying mysteriously as well, and the strange malady seems to affect animals too. Clark and his friend Chloe investigate, but their progress is closely followed by the daughter of a scientist who is new in town and who may have ties to secret experiments. According to Kristine Huntley in Booklist, "The satisfying tale builds to an exciting climax that [Smallville] fans . . . definitely will want to read."

Gallagher told SATA that she lives in Florida with her husband, writer Martin Burke, "five dogs, five cats, and a cranky parrot." She still enjoys attending science fiction conventions, and she once turned her garage into a Halloween bookstore and gave away signed copies of her Halloween titles.