The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [151]
http://fregalry.interspeed.net
And for Something Completely Different … Fay Zachary offers the Free Gallery of Authors’ Voices, a site that features brief audio (RealPlayer Audio) readings by novelists and poets, reading from their own work, in several different “halls”: The Mystery Hall, the Fiction Hall, the Poetry Hall, the Science Fiction Hall, the Vampire Hall, and so on. Fay asked me to do readings for her from Drums of Autumn, and from the short story “Hellfire,” for her Fiction Hall.
The site does change its content from time to time, with new authors being added, but since Fay lives near me, it’s easy for me to dart over to her house to record a new sound bite or two, and she’s promised to keep at least one of my readings “live.” (Frankly, I sound just like Donald Duck on speed, but if you’re really curious …)
In addition to the readings, the Free Gallery offers many other fascinating features, like free digital postcards, online book-ordering, links to e-publishing sites, and (I’m told) will soon feature “virtual book-signings” as well.
COMPUSERVE: READERS AND WRITERS INK GROUP
[Back to DG, here:]
This is my normal electronic haunt. CompuServe is another of the giant online services (recently acquired by AOL, but still run as a separate service), containing a large number of “forums,” or special-interest groups. The forums operate on a bulletin board basis, though most forums do also sponsor regular live chats,6 special live conferences with guests, and maintain libraries of files and transcripts.
Readers and Writers Ink is a group of affiliated Forums: the Writers Forum, the Literary Forum, the Authors Forum, the Romance Forum, the Poetry Forum, the Erotica Forum,7 and the Book Review Forum. All have something to do—surprise—with reading, writing, or both, and there is a certain amount of overlap among the subject matter of the Forums, though each has its own particular flavor.
While it is a subscription service, Compuserve can be accessed (free) from the Web, at www.compuserve.com. I can’t say for sure which services are available to a person coming in from the Web, since this changes fairly frequently. Worth looking at, though.
I mostly “hang” in Writers, where I co-lead a section called Section 8,8 “Research and the Craft of Writing,” and in the Literary Forum and Authors Forum.
1 I am not nearly so prompt, but I do answer most of my E-mail—eventually. Bear in mind, though, that at the moment, the urgent E-mail is about a year in arrears.
2I will occasionally post chunks that I’ve written or am writing in the CompuServe Writers Forum, but this is a temporary venue; messages remain on the board only a few days. Web pages are at least semipermanent. Publishers of the books and stories may occasionally have a small piece of work posted on their Web sites, but these excerpts are limited to one small sample, in order to publicize a new book.
31 got an E-mail from someone a few days ago, telling me that there was a rumor that the Companion would be published in January; her bookstore was havingto cope with “hordes of angry Gabaldon fans” looking for the book. “You might want to do something about this,” my correspondent finished helpfully. Well, Rosana and I do our best.
4No, the “prequel” volume does not deal with “Claire Frasers life before she passed through the stones,” as I read on one newsgroup, nor does it deal with “the life of Jamie Fraser as a young man.” These subjects would both be Really Interesting material for future reference, perhaps, but the fact is that the prequel book I have under contract deals with Jamie’s parents, Brian and Ellen Fraser, and the 1715 Rising. If Jamie appears in it at all, he’ll be a really young man—that is, about three months.
5 Hearing that I wrote novels, he asked whether I might be inclined to use him as a cover model sometime—to which I hastily replied, “Oh, I don’t write that kind of book!”
6I don’t “do” chat, myself.
7Er, no. See the hit about world and time. Not enough.
8Yeah, yeah, I know; very apt.
PART SIX
RESEARCH