The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [218]
21The appearance of time-travelers during such time might also affect events of the time, without anyone noticing particularly, owing to the general state of social upheaval.
22Recorded Books produces audiobooks mainly for libraries, but does rent or sell books to private readers as well. Call 1-800-638-1304 for details, or check the Recorded Books Web site:www.recordedbk.com
23I spent nearly six months, all told, doing promotion for Drums of Autumn, owing to foreign publishers getting into the act and wanting me to go to Australia and New Zealand and the UK, etc. It’s fun, and I like to meet readers—but I don’t get much writing done on the road.
24I don’t know where to start, either, but that’s a different question.
25See “Research,” Part Six.
26Why two? Well, I have a lot of friends who are writers, and I thought it would make a great Christmas present.
27The next-to-last thing I do to a manuscript is to go through and fill in all the little empty square brackets ([]), indicating missing pieces of information that I didn’t manage to look up yet.
28I point this out with great regularity to people at conferences who come up to me and demand, “How did you dare to write a novel in the first person?” “Easy,” I reply. “I just sat down and typed ’I.’”
30This was not, by the way, a conscious decision. I didn’t realize I had done it, until someone wrote to ask me how I’d done it. Oddly—or not — The Fiery Cross seems to have five main voices. (The fifth voice is Young Ian’s, by the way—for the benefit of readers fearing that I had abandoned him to the Mohawks.)
31The photo on the back cover of the dust jacket was taken at the Clava Cairns.
32And kindly went beyond the call of duty in constructing the Gaelic pronunciation guide for this book, as well.
33And is at least a partial answer to the people who ask, “Where do you get your ideas?” Everywhere.
34The truth, polite or not, is that authors have exactly nothing to say about casting, in the event of movies being made of books.
35Evidently not nearly as common as I thought, considering how many people ask this question. Don’t people take geometry anymore?
36The Latin equivalent of “SEE?”
37Actually, I do. I don’t intend to tell you here, though. All I can say is that you will eventually find out. At least I think you will.
38Only the first book was published in Italy, under the title Ovunque Nel Tempo (which a friend of mine facetiously translated as “Never without an Egg-timer”). The resultant volume was roughly one-quarter the size of Outlander, and featured a raven-haired wench in a low-cut bodice on the cover. I promptly recovered the Italian rights.
39This part of the story was published as a “short story,” titled “Surgeon’s Steel,” in Excalibur, a fantasy anthology edited by Richard Gilliam, Martin Greenberg, and Edward E. Kramer, and published as a trade paperback in 1995 by Warner Books, Inc.
40I recall a poet friend once telling me of a heated academic controversy regarding whether another (well-known) poet’s work should or should not be regarded as “black poetry.” I said that I’d met the poet in question, and… um…she is black, so where did the controversy come in? Evidently, some critics thought her poems did not deal with “The Black Experience”—that is, what they thought/said Experience was—as though an entire race, composed of dozens of cultures, was only entitled to one. I said I thought this was silly, and I still do.
41Which just goes to show that you really can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, I suppose. It also goes to show that it pays to do research.
PART TEN
CONTROVERSY
When I read my mail, I sometimes think I’m not writing novels, I’m writing Rorschach tests.
—David Gerrold, fantasy and science fiction novelist and screenwriter
COMMUNICATION
nterviewers are often curious as to why I continue to post excerpts of my work in electronic venues such as my Web site and the various CompuServe