The Outlandish Companion

by Diana Gabaldon

  Q: Have the Outlander books been translated into other languages? How many countries are they available in?

  A: Yes, several to date. They’ve been published (or are in process of being published) in the UK (including the Commonwealth nations, Australia and New Zealand), Sweden, France, Germany, Canada (Double-day Canada distributes the U.S. editions), Spain (and Latin America), and Italy.38 Books have been sold to (but not yet published in) Holland, Russia, Poland, and Korea as well. Appendix VI gives addresses for the various foreign publishers, and a list of the foreign edition titles and ISBNs.

  Q: How did Fergus and his wife get to the New World? They weren’t on the boat (that got wrecked by the hurricane) with Claire and Jamie.

  A: True. We assume that Jamie sent for Fergus, as soon as they got dried off. The Frasers would have spent a few weeks at Les Perles, waiting for Claire’s broken leg to heal, before beginning their trek northward through the Carolinas, and this would allow enough time for a message to reach Fergus in Jamaica, and for him to come and join them. Marsali, of course, stays behind in Jamaica, awaiting the birth of their first child, and joins them later, after they’ve established the settlement on Fraser’s Ridge.

  Q: I have a question in regard to the La Dame Blanche story that you refer to in a couple of these novels. Did you invent this story or does it have significant traces in history? The reason that I ask is that I am studying in a Chaucer class here at Bucknell University and I found a reference in one of his poems that reminded me of the “White Woman” story within your books. If this is in fact an historical legend, then I would love to research it a little to find out more about the story.

  A: The “white woman” is a well-known figure in Celtic mythology; I’d found brief mentions in several different sources on Celtic folklore and mythology. See the Annotated Bibliography, and the essay “Magic, Medicine and White Ladies” [Part Two], for more details.

  Q: Has it ever been revealed who hit Jamie in the head with an ax before he went to the French monastery to recover? Was it Dougal or one of his men?

  A: It hasn’t yet been revealed, but we may find out, one of these days.

  Q: What becomes of young Hamish MacKenzie? Will he come to America?

  A: Since I haven’t yet written all of the last two books, I can’t say for sure exactly what we’ll find out about Hamish MacKenzie and the survivors from Leoch. For what the observation is worth, though, a good many MacKenzies did settle on Prince Edward Isle and in Nova Scotia—and a regiment of these MacKenzies did come down across the border to fight (on the American side) in the Battle of Saratoga, in 1777.

  I know Jamie and Claire are in that battle, because I have written about the events that transpired after it.39 I’d be really surprised if they didn’t meet Hamish again, but you never know. A heck of a lot of things happened during that battle.

  Q: I read an excerpt on your Web page from King, Farewell, in which Jamie writes a letter to Claire, and was distressed that he seemed to have lost his charming Scottish accent. Why is this?

  A: Well, it was a letter, rather than dialogue. Most people who speak with accents don’t write with accents, you know. A Southern gentleman, for instance, would probably begin a letter to a female acquaintance as “Dear Mary,” rather than, “Hey, darlin’,” even if the latter was his common mode of address in person.

  Q: I’m confused about one thing; if Geillis went through the stones in 1968, for the first time, how is it that she was there before Claire?

  A: We don’t yet know everything there is to know about the intricacies of time travel (though I imagine we’ll find out more as Claire, Roger, and Brianna put their heads together and compare experiences and make deductions). Remember that Gillian Edgars used a blood sacrifice when going through the door for the first time—it may have been that she was right about this giving her power, and thus traveled farther—or the sacrifice may have been irrelevant, but some other factor was operating.

  Q: When Claire, Brianna, and Roger were trying to find out what happened to Jamie at and after Culloden, couldn’t they have saved themselves a lot of work by reading Frank’s books? I don’t recall seeing it mentioned anywhere that anyone actually read his books, and didn’t he write of that time period? Had he followed up on Jamie?

  A: Claire couldn’t bring herself to read the books because—convinced Jamie was dead—she couldn’t bear to relive the days of the Rising. Roger is a scholar of the period, though, and Brianna loved and admired her father, and wanted (originally) to follow in Frank’s footsteps as a historian. They’ve almost certainly read the books—and since they didn’t mention anything in them connected to Jamie Fraser, there probably was nothing in the published books about him. However, Frank’s correspondence with the Reverend

  Wakefield makes it clear that he not only looked for Jamie Fraser—he found him. Now, what he found, and what use he chose to make of the information… well, that we may learn in time.

  Q: Do you ever have any objections from Scottish readers regarding “appropriation of voice”? That is, do they object to you writing about Scottish characters and issues, when you aren’t Scottish?

  A: Well, my own opinion is that imagination is its own country. Also, I don’t think much of the notion that one can only write about a particular ethnic or geographical group if one happens to have a genetic membership in that group. Still less, the notion that one can write well about a given group only because one belongs to it.40

  Fortunately, however, I haven’t had any complaints whatever by Scottish readers. The books luckily have been very popular in Scotland; in fact, Drums of Autumn came out at number two on the Scottish bestseller list (right under the new Scottish Parliament’s Green Paper, which was number one) and I regularly get fan letters from Scotland, many of them asking, “How long did you live in the Highlands before moving to Arizona?”41

  When I did my first book tour in Scotland, I was thrilled to discover my books placed in the “Scottish Fiction” section of each bookstore I went into. Scots being very proud of their literary and cultural heritage, I was more than flattered to find my work placed with that of Robert Louis Stevenson, John Buchan, Lady Antonia Fraser, et al. I said as much to one bookstore manager, who looked at me, raised his eyebrows, and replied, “Well, Guh-BALDun is such an odd name, we thought it might quite well be Scottish!”

  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. “Hel
lfire” 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 developing my boxfish movies as a public service.

  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 forums I inhabit. After all, I already have an agent, an editor, a multibook contract; why else would anyone do this?1

  The answer is that I make small pieces of my work available electronically for one reason, and one reason only—I like people to read them.

  All art is an act of communication, and while an artist had better have some appreciation of his or her own work, no work of art is complete until someone else shares it. Some ephemeral forms, such as dance and stage-acting, don’t even exist independently of the observer. Writing at least has the advantage of semipermanence; bar disk crashes, viruses, and house fires, the words aren’t going anywhere once you’ve captured them on paper—and the creation not only can be done in solitude, but often demands it.

  Still, communication requires two parties. Having written something, I feel that some small cosmic circle remains unclosed until that something is read. Given the snaillike speed with which I work, books emerge into the light of day at fairly wide intervals; two or three years is a long time to wait for gratification. At the same time, because I write episodically, small pieces of the work are in fact “finished” (i.e., done as well as I can do them, given my capabilities at the time) a long time before the work as a whole is complete.

  I never post more than a fraction of any book—only a few pieces are really appropriate for such independent reading—but being able to share my work periodically gives me great satisfaction, and encourages me to go on working. I’m not looking for critique or suggestion when I post something—the work is “finished,” as I say—but I do enjoy hearing comments, either on posted excerpts, or on published books, both because that closes the circle for me, and because it’s very interesting to see how re
aders respond to specific incidents and characters.

  However, among the enormous quantities of mail I receive (both regular mail and E-mail), is an occasional communication that makes me think that some small cosmic circle has perhaps closed with a Moebius twist.

  Unless one is writing the sort of book that focuses on major political events—and giving very unusual interpretations of same—historical fiction isn’t often a strongly controversial subject. Still, I have noticed a few subjects of controversy in the Outlander books; subjects that have formed the basis of heated discussions among groups of readers in online venues, or are the subject of (rare, luckily) complaint by letter writers.

  The thing about communications, as I noted above, is that it takes two to tango. This means that while I intended something specific in the writing, the persons reading it will be interpreting it in the light of their own experiences and preconceptions, and may well come to different conclusions than the one I intended. I now and then read a letter with one eye shut (out of disbelief at what I’m seeing), meanwhile thinking, I’m not sure which book you read, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the one I wrote.

  Still, I do make an effort to address any sincerely expressed concern, explaining how and why I have taken a particular step in the writing that has caused concern to my correspondent. In most such cases, the correspondence draws to a mutually cordial and respectful close, as did most of the conversations below.

  I don’t really like controversy and certainly don’t seek to create it—but if one is going to have strong opinions (and I’m afraid one is), one had better be willing to explain or defend them when necessary.