The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [217]
In short, far from the Scots objecting to my appropriating their voice—I rather think they’ve appropriated me.
1The Outlander prologue wasn’t actually written as a prologue; I just began writing a bit of something, and instead of growing into a scene, it stopped. Since I couldn’t see where to go with it, I left it alone, and later decided that the reason it wouldn’t grow was that it was complete as is. Since the rest of the book was in Claire’s voice and this might or might not be, it was obviously the voice of the book talking; ergo, it must be a prologue.
2A common question to writers is: “Do you write according to a regular routine, or wait for inspiration?” If one waited for inspiration all the time, there would be very few books written. Most of the time, you write whether you “feel like it” or not—but there are times when you have to wait for Something to speak to you.
3Like everything else about these books; I don’t know why I should be surprised.
4Book contracts often give the publisher an “option” on the author’s next work; which means that you can’t sell another book to someone else until the first publisher decides whether they want it. This is a simplification of the situation, but that’s essentially how it works.
5Published by Signet in both hardcover and paperback.
6The anthology is titled Out of Avalon (stories set in Arthurian times); to be published in Germany by Droemer, sometime in 1999. So far as I know, the book doesn’t yet have an American publisher.
7Not with people breathing down my neck about where the next novel is, anyway.
8Yes, the same Lord John who appears in the OUTLANDER novels. “Hellfire” is set during 1757—a period in his life when he was not interacting with Claire and Jamie, but was tending to his own affairs in London.
9They’d like a year, but they seldom get it.
10Frankly, you’re better off just searching on “Gabaldon.”
11Family legend holds that the first of that name to settle in Belen was one Henrique Gabaldon, who led a small troop of Spanish explorers to New Mexico in the late 1500s. Family legend reports that he was the leader because he was the only one who had a horse. I couldn’t say whether this is true, but there have certainly been Gabaldons in New Mexico for a good long time.
12My husband was mildly put out that I refused to take his name when we got married. I told him, though, that I’d been spelling “Gabaldon” for people for twenty-five years, and I was attached to it.
13The production people tend to scream loudly and suffer mass coronaries when I turn in a manuscript, as it is.
14I was actually born in Williams, Arizona, a small town some thirty miles from Flagstaff. My family lived in Flagstaff, but the family doctor was having a difference of opinion with the board of the Flagstaff Hospital, and was therefore practicing out of the hospital in Williams—thus causing my twenty-one-year-old parents to drive thirty miles over icy roads in the dead of winter when my mother went into labor. At the age of two days, though, I returned to Flagstaff.
15Including one Hessian mercenary named Schweitzer (who, judging from the name, must originally have come from a Swiss family).
16The net result of this interesting heritage is that people most commonly ask me if I am a Cherokee. While I undoubtedly have some small quantity of Native American genes among my DNA, they’re most likely Aztec, Maya, or Yaqui, and they come from a loooong way back.
17Or, as my husband says, “Why Birds Build Nests Where They Do, and Who Cares, Anyway?”
18This was the job where I butchered seabirds.
19Torturing boxfish.
20While holding the postdoc at UCLA. It was very convenient; I lived in Burbank, and could drop off my comic scripts at the Disney studios on my way to UCLA—sometimes also pausing at the NBC studio across the street, where the film technicians were obligingly