The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [206]
A: I like the American hardcover art very much. As for the others… well, there are quite a number of different ones, counting all the foreign editions, and some are remarkably beautiful (I particularly like the first edition of the British Dragonfly paperback—no longer available, alas). Some are just remarkable.
Let me just state for the record that I really, really, REALLY hate any art that attempts to show the actual features of any of the characters. Since an artist can’t possibly imagine what Jamie, Claire, et al really look like, the result is bound to be unsatisfactory to someone who does know what they look like. I much prefer such details to be left to the reader’s imagination.
Q: Are the books available in audio format?
A: Yes, in various versions. Bantam Audio-books owns the right to produce abridged commercial versions of all the books, and all four published books have been recorded and are available. The tapes are beautifully produced and beautifully read (the reader for all four books is Geraldine James; a very fine British actress, who does a wonderful job), but they’re very much abridged; only about one-fifth of each story is on the tapes (each book is a six-hour, four-tape set). These tapes are a good companion to the books, but certainly no substitute.
The unabridged versions of Outlander and Dragonfly in Amber have been produced commercially by Recorded Books, Inc. (Voyager and Drums will follow, sometime in 1999).22 The unabridged version doesn’t have music or sound effects, but is beautifully read (by Davina Porter, a terrific Scottish/English actress who sounds a lot like Claire), and does include the complete text of the book—on thirty-two-plus hours of tape per book.
There aren’t any UK audiobooks available as yet, I’m afraid.
In addition to the commercial audiotapes, there are two noncommercial recorded versions of the books, produced for print-handicapped readers in the United States. I’ve been a volunteer at Recording for the Blind for the last seventeen years, and as a special treat, they allowed me to read Outlander and Dragonfly—normally, I read scientific, medical, and computer texts for them. All books available through RFB are provided free of charge to qualified borrowers, and are read in their entirety. (Perhaps they’ll let me read Voyager or Drums, too, once I’ve finished the eighth edition of Biology of Microorganisms.)
I’m told (I haven’t heard them) that all the books are also available from the Library of Congress’s Talking Books program, also in unabridged form.
Q: How long does it take you to write a book?
A: It took me eighteen months to finish Outlander, about two years each for Dragonfly in Amber and Voyager, and roughly two and a half years for Drums of Autumn. The books got longer, and slightly (ha) more complicated; also, I spent more than four months on the road, doing book tours and promotional appearances for Voyager, which tends to cut into the writing time.23 I’m extremely slow and snaillike, and I rewrite and edit as I go, word by word, sentence by sentence… then go back and change the words again. I average maybe two to three pages a day, except at the very end of the book. At this point, when I know what I’m doing, and where everything goes, I will be writing ten to fifteen pages a day—and sleeping very little.
Q: What kind of research do you do for your books? How do you know when you’ve done enough research? How long do you research before you begin writing?
A: I know a lot of people do all their research and then begin to write, but that wouldn’t work for me—since I never know what’s going to happen, I wouldn’t know where to stop!24 So I don’t—I read and research during all the time I’m writing, and I begin writing immediately.
It’s the writing that’s important in a book. In terms of research, I often don’t know what I need to know until I find it.25 If something turns out to be wrong, I can change it. If I come to a spot where I really must know something specific before writing it—then I can go and look it up, or I can skip to a different place