The Companion to the Fiery Cross, a Breath of Snow and Ashes, an Echo in the Bone, and Written in My Own Heart's Blood

by Diana Gabaldon

  I also assume that you may be familiar with my novels, as they occupy quite a bit of shelf space in Barnes & Noble bookstores.

  I likewise assume that you’re familiar with a bookstore chain called Hastings. They may not be B&N, but they aren’t chopped liver, either.

  Now, I assume that you don’t know that Hastings sells 40 percent more of all my titles than you do.

  I do assume that you’d like to know why that is?

  Well, I tell you, Steve—they’re not putting them in the effing romance section.

  ***

  Cordially yours,

  So I sent this missive off by registered mail and it was received, by someone with an illegible signature, but I heard nothing and had dismissed it as a failed effort. Six weeks later, though, I got a call out of the blue from Mr. Riggio himself. We had a reasonably civil ten-minute conversation, at the conclusion of which he said he would “have somebody look into it.”

  I figured that was that and returned to work. But sure enough, twenty-four hours later, I got a call from the B&N VP of marketing, who said briefly, “We checked into it, and you’re right. We’re moving the books.” And they did. God bless you, Steve.66,67

  * * *

  1 One who doesn’t is rare and refreshing fruit indeed.

  2 Oddly enough, she was the only journalist who’s ever expressed the slightest sense of embarrassment about this.

  3 It saves wear and tear on my molars.

  4 A couple of people have suggested doing such a thing now. I think I’d rather wait ’til I’m dead, frankly….

  5 The last time I looked at it, I discovered that someone had added my middle name—but they’d got it wrong and put it down as “Jane” (it’s “Jean”)—and someone else had removed my mother’s name and replaced it with my stepmother’s name.

  6 “Myths and Mountain Birthdays.”

  7 And a lot of tiresome suggestions by people who think one should be doomed to write only about one’s own ethnic heritage, that I should write something with a Mexican setting.

  8 I hate this sort of stupid ethnic hyphenation. What’s the point? You’re an American or you’re not, and everybody comes from somewhere, or multiple somewheres, none of which make the slightest difference to anyone’s real life. My mother’s people come from Yorkshire, for heaven’s sake—with one German branch (though the family name there was “Schweitzer,” which means “the guy from Switzerland,” and his father was apparently born in Ireland, so your guess is as good as mine). Should I be “British-American”? Nobody’s British-American, because it’s a pointless distinction. The hyphenation is generally used either to discriminate (in the meaning of “point out how this person is different”) or to brag (“Kiss me, I’m Irish!”), and I’m having none of either.

  9 Los Gabaldones—my father’s side of the family—come originally from a small village in Spain, called (reasonably enough) “Gabaldon” (I’ve read something that says it derives from a local—extinct—Celtic tribe called the Gabaldi, but I haven’t the slightest scrap of evidence that this is the case). The first Gabaldon of my branch in the New World settled in Santa Fe in about 1591 (there is documentary evidence of that, at least). Not huge adventurers (though see the next footnote), they stayed there for the next five hundred years. With perhaps the odd Apache, Comanche, or Pueblo Indian inserted into the genetic mix, they remained citizens of Spain until 1810 and the War of Mexican Independence. At which point, they became Mexicans, until 1848 and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo made them Americans—all without moving a step.

  10 There is, however, a family legend that we were at some point conversos—Jews, forced to convert to Catholicism by the Inquisition. If true, that would probably explain how people as apparently allergic to travel as the Gabaldons ended up in Santa Fe in the first place.

  11 I have the strangest-looking publicity photos from Germany—in part because the airlines invariably lose my baggage (so far, British Airways has lost it four times, and Lufthansa only twice. I will say Lufthansa gives you a nice amenities bag that includes a T-shirt to sleep in) and I’m being photographed in whatever I could grab out of the nearest airport store in fifteen minutes. (Should you ever find yourself in this position, buy black or navy blue, and include a loose-fitting top and a patterned or colored scarf or wrap, which you can drape around your neck for distraction from the rest of your clothes.)

  12 Vide the mass of trivia I quoted above regarding my own personal record.

  13 No, I’m not cynical; I just read a lot.

  14 You know why the majority of accounts of the American Revolution deal with battles and incidents in the northern colonies, with relatively little attention paid to the Southern Campaign? It’s because the North won the Civil War, and most of the overview/perspective accounts of the Revolution were thus written by writers with a distinct northern bias. (Or at least that’s my notion…. )

  15 There are probably a lot of writers who do work this way, given the number of people who find Scrivener the bee’s knees. I’ve tried to use it two or three times, because I hate and despise Beastly Word, but I find that I just don’t think the same way it does.

  16 People always ask what “special writing software” I use. Alas, there is no such thing. Your brain is the special writing software—what the computer is using is just a word processor, and any of them will work just as well as another for the basics. Which one you get along with personally is purely a matter of individual preference.

  That said, some are more amenable than others. I used WordPerfect 5.1 for years and loved it. It did everything a word processor should do: let me use two documents at once, and let me change the colors for text and background; other than that—it kept the heck out of my way. Then they “improved” it to make it look and work like Microsoft Word. Blech. If you’re going to have a program that junks up your screen with ten billion bells and whistles you don’t need, does incomprehensible things, and jerks your cursor off the spot where you’re typing every time it refreshes the page…you might as well use Word, since it’s the de facto standard for business, and if you’re lucky, you’ll one day need to exchange files with agents, editors, and copy editors, and having a common software program helps.

  Yes, there are alternatives; I’ve looked at several of them. Unfortunately, Word is the only one that lets me use different background colors for pages. This has nothing to do with organization per se, but I normally keep a dozen or so documents open at once, and making them different colors helps a lot when flicking to and fro among them. Besides, I like colors.

  17 I do write grocery lists. Sometimes. I have to, if I want someone else to do the shopping, or if I’m doing the shopping for something like Easter lunch or a dinner party for sixteen people. More often than not, I write such a list and then forget to take it with me, or I shove it into my pocket as I’m going out to the car and then forget I have it when I reach the store.

  18 I often have enthusiastic readers tell me that they’d happily read my grocery lists. One Christmas season, the husband of one such reader wrote to me to ask if I would send him one of my grocery lists, signed, as a present for his wife. I did, and apparently she enjoyed it.

  19 I hasten to add that I don’t normally do this, but it was one of the interviews in which the journalist, having conducted no research at all (if they start out calling me “Diane,” it’s a bad sign), asked every single clichéd question possible. To be honest, when someone says, “So…how did you get the idea to write these books?” it’s like pulling the string on a Chatty Cathy. (Chatty Cathy is a doll from the 1960s. I never had one—my parents being much too smart to let something like that in the house—but I saw the commercials. I think she said sappy things like, “Do you want to be my friend?” and “I like to have my hair brushed,” but I don’t swear to that. It wasn’t absorbing conversation, though.) You’ll get an intelligent, coherent, somewhat amusing answer—it’ll just be the same answer (word for word) that’s been printed in (literally) hundre
ds of blogs and articles over the years.

  P.S. If you actually want the answer to that question, it’s in The Outlandish Companion, Volume One, Revised and Updated Edition).

  20 Reading a truly absorbing book, writing, and sex being the main ones….

  21 The university where I worked at the time had a more-or-less generous maternity-leave policy, which amounted to, “You can take off as much time as you want, but we aren’t going to pay you for any of it.” “Fine,” I said. “I’m on a nine-month academic-year contract; you don’t pay me in the summers anyway.” Which is why all the kids were born in May.

  22 Mozart died at the age of 36 and I was 35. I thought I’d best get started, just in case.

  23 I call it the daily rash. Nearly every day, I get about half a dozen emails from people who have some legitimate claim on my time and effort: publishers, editors, publicists, marketing people from Starz or Sony, interviewers, audiobook producers, etc. All these emails contain demands (couched politely as requests, to be sure…) for me to write something. An introduction for a DVD booklet, a dozen hi-res photos of myself with captions, an opinion (with possible revisions) of the latest cover copy for a new book, an outline of my whereabouts for the next three months, and so on.

  24 Yes, actually, I do think that’s rude. I charitably assume they don’t intend it that way, since if I point out (politely) that how or when I write what is none of their business, I’m accused of being “harsh,” and there’s a lot of entitled huffing about what an author “owes” his or her readers. My opinion is that I owe them the best story I can write, and that’s it. They get honesty as a bonus.

  25 Disk Operating System. It’s an internal software application that a computer uses to handle and locate information. Other such systems include Apple’s iOS, Linux, CP/M, and others. But DOS is what PC computers used (and still do).

  26 If, as sometimes—though rarely—happens, I have an alternate version of some scene, I add an A, B, or X to the main part of the name. This usually happens because the file has been corrupted by the bloody Mac and the current version won’t transfer to the PC, or because the bloody Mac won’t find a file I know perfectly well is there, and I have to start working from where I know I left off and then glue the pieces together when I get back to the PC and can find the first part again.

  27 I don’t get on with the Mac mentality, possibly because I am an autocrat and so is a Mac. It thinks it’s in charge, and I think I am. You know how theoretically “Finder” will locate anything you’re looking for on a Mac? It won’t. The PC version of this function does not have a cute icon or even a name—but it actually will find things, most of the time.

  If I’m having a lot of trouble with a Mac not finding something I want, I generally end up calling the file—when I finally pry it from the machine’s reluctant clutches—something obscene, in capitals (like USE THIS ONE YOU EFFING BASTARD!!!) Oddly enough, when I do this, the Mac, evidently cowed by my fury, will obediently find it again, no problem.

  28 This group still exists, though it’s now called the CompuServe Books and Writers Community. It isn’t a writers’ group per se but rather is a group of people who like books and like to talk about books and writing. That said, there are writer-oriented sections on it. Personally, I’ve never “done” writers’ groups as such—the last thing I’d ever do would be to join a critique group (that’s a matter of my personality, rather than an opinion of critique groups; evidently they’re very helpful to some people, and if they are, more power to you).

  29 Having read the Osprey book through completely, I was aware that the Battle of Monmouth was such a huge mess that it was by no means thoroughly documented; a number of militia companies from New Jersey and Pennsylvania were known to have taken part in the battle but weren’t mentioned by name, for instance. It wasn’t a traditional eighteenth-century battle but rather a series of pitched battles, fought on the run by three different bodies of the British army and innumerable units of Continental regulars and militia, often under a command that shifted repeatedly. Plenty of room for a novelist to operate comfortably, in other words.

  30 General Clinton himself raised the British Legion, in New York, in June of 1778, and it didn’t go into commission until a month after Monmouth. However…the legion consisted of two separate units, artillery and cavalry. Now, plainly a cavalry company takes much less time and trouble to get into operation than does an artillery company. Why, if General Clinton expected trouble while leaving Philadelphia (and we know he did), would he not send a messenger to his protégé Tarleton, asking him to bring the new cavalry unit (which Tarleton commanded) down at once to help out with the hazardous removal of troops and civilians? Were I General Clinton, that’s what I would have done—and I scarcely think Sir Henry Clinton was less perspicacious.

  31 Mostly thanks to that execrable movie, The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson, for giving us the hideous caricature of Tarleton in the form of the character played by Jason Isaacs, which led readers insisting to me for years that Black Jack Randall must be played by Isaacs—a good actor whose only crime is having strikingly light eyes; he looks totally normal when wearing brown contacts.

  32 Banastre Tarleton was twenty-four at the time of the Battle of Monmouth; he would have been about twenty-one at the time The Patriot theoretically depicted. He also never burned down a church full of rebels. Not that facts actually mean anything to filmmakers in general, but they often do to historical novelists.

  33 The trouble with this philosophy is that there’s no conceivable way of knowing when you’ve done enough research, since there’s always more that could be found out. A corollary difficulty with this method is that it offers such a temptation to feel that you can’t possibly write anything until you’ve done more research—and thus never write anything. (I do know people who have been “writing” historical novels for the last ten years, but who have in fact never written a word. They never will, either—but they’ll know a heck of a lot about third-century Byzantium…. )

  34 Which I had the privilege of writing an introduction for, when it was reprinted as a Modern Library Edition in 2004. Great writing! (Tom Paine’s, I mean, not mine.)

  35 I can’t speak French, but I do read it, having been obliged to learn both French and German for graduate school, since when I got a Ph.D. in science (back in the Dark Ages), English was not yet the lingua franca (so to speak) of the scientific world, and you had to be able to read in one or two foreign languages in order to keep up with the literature of your field.

  36 I do a fair amount of psychological research, too, searching out accounts by soldiers, officers, people who have been assaulted (physically and/or sexually), people abandoned or orphaned, and so on. Research isn’t all just facts.

  37 Writer_DG on Twitter; Facebook.com/AuthorDianaGabaldon; dianagabaldon.com.

  38 Otis the pug is my son’s dog, not mine. I have two big, fat standard dachshunds named Homer and JJ.

  39 A sense of fairness and a residuum of academic responsibility made me go look at the author’s name. It’s Benson Bobrick.

  40 Oh, all right, then. A conscience is a terrible thing, I tell you…Dave Richard Palmer.

  41 I found a good, simple, interactive map of downtown Philadelphia in the eighteenth century at http://teachingamericanhistory.org/convention/map/.

  42 Electromagnetic pulse.

  43 The Outlandish Companion, Volume One, “Prologue.”

  44 Now the Books and Writers Community.

  45 My original working title.

  46 My favorite attempt is by Salon’s reviewer Gavin McNett: “the smartest historical sci-fi adventure-romance story ever written by a science Ph.D. with a background in scripting Scrooge McDuck comics.”

  47 They’d been reckless enough to give me a three-book contract.

  48 The book was published in 1991, when there were still a lot of bookstores and Amazon.com did not exist.

  49 For later reference—at this point in time, romance novels wer
e not published in hardcover, only as paperback originals.

  50 Dead right; I never have been. Having read a lot of book reviews by this time (and having written quite a few myself—I used to write reviews for The Washington Post’s “Book World”)—I think that’s probably just as well….

  51 Which, in fact, they very honorably did. Voyager, the third book, did hit Da List, and they immediately put foil bars across the flowers on the covers and put FICTION on the spines. This had no effect whatsoever on Barnes & Noble, but that’s a story for a little farther down the page….

  52 This was even before the concept of “big box” stores.

  53 As one does…

  54 As everyone does…

  55 There’s a lot of inside jargon associated with most genres, I imagine. The “H/H” of romance are the Hero and Heroine, and there are other Required Elements, like “the black moment,” and so on.

  56 See Part 4, “Sex and Violence.”

  57 Darn tootin’, Petunia….

  58 To which I would politely reply, “Easy. I just sat down and typed, ‘I.’ ”

  59 I didn’t usually say so, but having written the first novel without the slightest concern whether anybody would like it, I wasn’t about to start worrying about such things later.

  60 Writing a book with no genre has its drawbacks as far as marketing is concerned, but it’s not without other advantages.

  61 All other aspects notwithstanding, my novels can’t be romances, because a romance novel is by its nature a one-off. Romance novels do not have sequels; once the happy couple are united, the story is Over.

  62 Romantic Times, a magazine that hosted its own convention and awards (they still do, though they now refer to it as the “RT Booklovers Convention”), doubtless stunned at my temerity, gave me and Dragonfly a foot-high award in purple aluminum, for “Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Fantasy.”