Diana Gabaldon was in San Francisco briefly yesterday before an appearance for a signing of her newest release, “Written In My Heart’s Blood”, the 8th in her multi-genre award-winning Outlander series.  Outlander chronicles the time traveling adventures of a nurse from the 1940s Claire Randall who encounters a circle of standing stones while on vacation in Scotland with her husband.  She falls through a portal to the past, and wakes up in 18th Century Scotland in the middle of the Jacobite rising against the English crown.  Unaware of how to return, Claire finds friendship and kinship from a local Lord and his clan, and meets Jamie Fraser.  By meets I mean she marries for protection and eventually falls madly in love with Jamie.  The 8 books chronicle Claire’s life, and the amount of historical goodies and tie-ins are completely exciting.  I will say don’t let the overall description of the series as “romance” or “historical romance” throw you; it is so much more than that.  Read the novels for the characters, for the dialogue (witty and wonderful), and the adventure.  It is also a tv series Ronald D. Moore (Battlestar Galactica, Helix) is bringing to Starz network this summer.

I was lucky enough to get a small bit of Diana’s time before she had to get to Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park for her signing:

 

AG:  It’s so nice to meet you, Diana!  Thank you so much for taking the time out of your schedule, I know it’s crazy busy for you today.

Diana:  Oh, my pleasure, thank YOU.

AG:  I just started reading “Written In My Heart’s Blood”, got it on Tuesday on my Kindle, still one of the coolest things in the world to just click a button and have an instant book.  It’s pretty awesome.

Diana:  Instant gratification.  (laughs)  Oh especially when you’re dealing with a rather large book, rather convenient.

AG:  My news feed Tuesday morning was filled with folks picking up physical copies of the new book and all I could think was ‘My word, that’s a hefty tome!’

Diana:  A lot of people still say ‘oh, I really want to feel the book’, and you’re definitely going to feel one of mine.

AG:  I will forever love the smell of books, that’s one thing kindle can’t get right yet.

Diana:  Absolutely, and it’s why many folks buy both now, which is good for me.

AG:  So this is the 8th in the Outlander series.

Diana:  Yup, 8th in the Outlander, my 14th novel as I’ve done other things along the way.

AG:  I have to say, I love how you write conversations.  They flow so naturally, and it’s part of what has really brought the series to life for me as a reader and fan.

Diana:  Oh, thank you, I appreciate it.  Dialog is the single most important tool you have for depicting character.  I mean you can tell who a person is by how they talk no matter what they look like.

AG:  Again, with the dialog being such an integral part of the books, it makes me more excited to see what Ron Moore does with the tv show.

Diana:  Oh yes, I’m thrilled with what he’s been doing with it, yeah.

AG:  I watched the Outlander press conference Starz did for the Fan Days live from LA, and just listening to the two of you talk back and forth about it was so fun.

Diana:  Oh yeah, that day was a lot of fun.

AG:  How do you deal with the crazy amount of ravenous fans??  Are they always at your heels for info?

Diana:  Well, yes, but I mean what are they gonna do, I do kind of hold all power in this relationship.

AG:  You never hesitate to respond to the fans, I follow you on twitter, which can be quite entertaining at times.

Diana:  Where you there this morning?

AG:  NO, what did I miss this morning?

Diana:  Well I was stuck in LAX this morning waiting for my flight up here, I was messing around on my iPad on Twitter, and someone asked me how the signing the night before went, and I said ‘oh it was great’.  And I added in a comment from last night, where someone came up to me and said about Sam Heughan ‘I want to lick him like a lollipop, all over’ (laughs) and there was a certain amount of feedback on that.  And apparently Sam was sitting in his trailer watching this.  He’s pretty quick on his feet, and popped back with ‘whiskey flavor’.

AG:  (laughs)  Of course he did!  I love the humor of everyone associated with the show, and the entire pocket Jamie thing?  Goodness, it’s adorable and fun to watch.  If you don’t know what ‘pocket Jamie’ is, it’s a paperdoll of Sam the actor playing him on the show and it’s done like a Flat Stanley thing where fans take photos of him in different places and situations and post it on twitter.

Diana:  My favorite so far is a photo of pocket Jamie in a photo copier with his head sticking out and the copy coming out is of a kilted man with his kilt flipped up.  (laughs)  And someone captioned it “pocket Jamie getting cheeky’.

AG:  The series has such an amazing diverse fanbase.

Diana:  Oh yeah, you name it, they’re there.

AG:  It at times seems like there are more men drawn to the series.

Diana:  Originally, most of the fans were women because of the way the books were marketed.  This is always a problem when you have a book that can’t be described in 25 words or less, so labeling it as a certain genre can be a big problem.  And to begin with, they called it romance.  And I said ‘WHAT’, because I like well written romance, but I’ve read enough of it to know that’s not at all what I wrote.  And they said ‘well, you’ve got two problems with that, a romance will never be reviewed by the New York Times’, and I said that wasn’t a big problem, I could live with that.  But what WOULD be a big problem would be cutting off the entire male half of my readership, which it largely did for several years til I finally forced Barnes & Nobles to take them out of the romance section and start putting them in fiction.  And then Borders went out of business due to their intransigence.  Bad karma, catching up with them.

AG:  I do a lot of historical reenacting, and many of the people I do it with were obsessed with the series, and loved the ways it depicted the battles and the things of that nature.

Diana:  Real?

AG:  Yes, very very real.  Totally one of the other things about the series that fans really love, is how genuine the characters are in the situations you put them in.  They’re not just a character.  In a book.  Doing a thing.

Diana:  Well you know I don’t make them up, I listen to them.

(Editor’s Note:  Then I make a fool of myself by quoting an interview a year ago, where the interviewer goaded Diana into saying she tosses the historical points in when she has writer’s block, WHICH IS NOT THE CASE!, reminding me to never believe everything I read in interviews.)

AG:  There was an interview you did last year at some point where you mentioned that some of the time, the historical scenes get put into the story when you get writer’s block, and I was wondering if that was a REAL thing, or just something you said at the time.

Diana:  Oh, did I say that?  I never get writer’s block, so I’m surprised I would have responded to it like that.  I’m not saying I didn’t, it would have depended on what I was thinking in that moment.  But no, I never have writer’s block nor do I ‘throw in’ the historical points, they sort of just weave their way into the story.  It’s just one of the things I use, it’s part of the fabric of the story.

AG:  So getting into the upcoming TV show, when it was announced that Ron Moore was doing the series for Starz, I wondered immediately if Bear McCreary was doing the score because of their history with shows together, and McCreary’s use of the celtic sound.  What do you think about Bear’s score thus far, particularly the bagpipes?

Diana:  Oh, well, I love his music.  And I love what I’ve heard of it so far, and I don’t think I’ve ever met a bagpipe I didn’t like.  And I certainly like what I’ve heard so far with the pipes and the bodhrans and the other celtic instruments are very very effective with what he’s doing.  And according to Ron, and I’m not sure if this is true or not, that Bear is a Jacobite himself

AG:  I think Ron said in several interviews that Bear’s disertation in college was on the Jacobite uprising?

Diana:  Oh yes, he even said that, “Yes, I wrote my dissertation on the Jacobites.”  Well, I mean most people don’t talk about what their disserations are.  I mean I do, but just because people laugh.

AG: …..well what was yours?!?

Diana:  It was a 400 page opus entitled “Nest Site Selection of the Pinyon Jay, Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus”, or as my husband says, “Why Birds Build Nests Where They Do, and Who Cares Anyway?”.

AG:  During that Fan Day conference, one of the things Ron said fans would NOT be seeing in the show is the Water Horse, and I was really sad about that.

Diana:  Yeah, the Loch Ness Monster, it is too bad in a way, but it would have been very expensive and difficult to do.  And in fact, he’s correct from an artistic point of view because the Loch Ness Monster is the only thing in Outlander that is not directly connected and an integral part of the story.  I attached it very loosely via a reference to the witchcraft trial where the Rover denouces her for consorting with the water horse, and everyone thinks he’s drunk and no one believes him.  THe thing is, when I wrote Outlander, and it began to occur to me that I might at some point get it in front of an editor, because I wrote it without thought of having it published or read by anyone, as I was going along I was thinking ‘well what if an editor reads this’, because it had struck me that it IS quite a large book, and it’s an unusual book, and in my limited experience with editors at that point they always see it as their job to take things out.  Wanting to cross things out whether the needed to/should or not, they always want to seem to be doing something, and so they’ll take things out.  And I didn’t want people messing with my very carefully designed structure, so I said I tell you what, I’m going to write a scene that is so over the top, that any editor will take it out thinking ‘well we can’t have THIS’, and I will gracefully giveway and it won’t affect the story at all because it’s not integral to anything.  But it’s the one thing no one’s suggested I cut out.

AG:  Oh I love that part though, it’s one of my favorite moments, I laughed for about five minutes afterwards.  It wasn’t laughter like ‘ha-ha, how funny’ it was that is such a fantastic touch.  It’s probably the moment that helped me go full bore into the rest of the book and the series, I mean I liked it before that moment, but the Loch Ness scene is what sold me.

Diana:  Oh, thank you.  Different things resonate with different people.  “What do people like so much about your books,” because it’s such an enthusiastic fanbase, and the list of things they like is endless. The like their herbal medicine, they like Claire’s medical proceedures, they like the battles, some of them like the historical details, and the overviews.  Some of them had never heard of the Jacobite rebellion and why it was important let alone how it influenced the American Revolution, some of them like the politics, many of them don’t but they’re stuck with them anyway.  Some of them like the familial relationships, the domestic economy, the formation of a community and how that works.  And some of them like the love stories, which there are many of.  And you know love story does not actually mean a literate bodice ripper, it means people who have fondess and affection for eachother and behave as though they did.  Which in fact people in romance novels don’t.

AG:  I was never a romance novel reader, and that’s why when the series was brought to me as such, I was a little leery.  But by the time I finished the first book, I realized that’s not a fair description of the work at all, and that it would make people not want to read it.

Diana:  No, it’s not a good description of it.  Exactly so.  Well, as my agent put it, when he called me to tell me how they finally decided how to market the book, it took them 18 months.  And in such a time, they came very close to canceling the contract and giving me back the book, because they said ‘we’re just going to put this out here and it’ll fall flat on it’s face’, because if no one can describe it, no one will want to read it, which was a valid fear.  But I had no idea about this, they had given me a three book contact, and I was busily working away on the second book.  So he called and said the hardcover was no problem, because at this point, the hardcover fiction just went upfront as hardcover fiction, it didn’t matter what genre it was, but that they’d like to sell the paperback end as romance.  But I said what I did about male readership, because men in fact see different things in these books, they respond to different things.  And he said ‘well as a man, I understand, we could insist they sell it as science fiction/fantasy, which the first book really isn’t, but the rest of the series as a whole if you look at it is.

AG:  Oh yeah, it’s one of those rare times a series can fit into so many different genres, and doing it well, so hats off and kudos and all that fun stuff you.

Diana:  (laughs) Thank you.  And so he said ‘well yes, but bare in mind a best seller in science fiction/fantasy is 50,000 copies in paperback, but romance is 500,000’, and I said oh well you’ve got a point there.  Because as my first editor memorably said “These books have to be word of mouth books because they’re too weird to describe to anyone.”  Which is totally true.  So taking it like that, it makes more sense to market them to the 500,000 people who will then go tell their friends, because if they read it and then tell their friends about it, they’ll instantly go “oh this isn’t a romance!”  And people are inclined to read books as you may have noticed by their friends suggesting them, even if it’s not something they would read normally.

AG:  Yeah, and then they’re usually more inclined to give an honest review.  I very much hope the signing tonight goes well.

Diana:  Oh, me too.  We have 800 people coming, I was glad to see this hotel has room service after 11pm, so I can eat when I get back.

AG:  Oh my goodness, yeah, I was watching the ticket sales.  I’m honored to have gotten to meet you, thank you so so much Diana for your time today, hope to see you again some time.

Diana:  Wonderful, thank you.

“Written In My Heart’s Blood” is available now, and the Outlander tv show from Ronald D. Moore and Starz premieres in August.