Diana’s most helpful advice IMHO is: “Writing is an active skill; the only way to learn is to do it, to actually sit down and write every day.” I think that is the best advice ever for a new writer.

And Diana has LOTS of writing tips and examples of how she does it on her Writer’s Corner webpage at:

http://www.dianagabaldon.com/resources/what-i-do/

Scroll down that webpage to “How To Write – Tips For Aspiring Authors,” a great place to start. Diana’s Writer’s Corner is always accessible under the Resources menu on her website.

Best of luck in your endeavors!

Loretta
Diana’s Webmistress

Is this the book to which you were referring?
http://www.formsofaddress.info/

Look what I found while I was googling that:
http://www.irishroots.com/id4276.htm
cool, huh?

I hope your office renos are coming along well. There’s nothing like dry wall and dust to clog up the creative juices, I think.

Well, let’s see…

Rosina/Sara is a friend I knew on Compuserve lo, these many years back. She was writing her first book at the time, and those of us who were writers all tended to discuss what we were doing. I’d mentioned at some point that I intended to deal with the battle of Saratoga in a future book (though I didn’t know at the time how _far_ in the future [wry g]), and some time later, Rosina emailed me privately with a brief scene she’d written, in which one of her characters–speaking twenty years after the battle (her book is set in the 1790′s, I believe)–is recollecting a minor incident that happened then, in which a woman known as “the White Witch” came across the lines with her husband, Colonel Fraser and her husband’s nephew, and took care of a little boy who was sick.

(That’s it. She isn’t “using” Claire and Jamie as characters; they don’t speak or do anything _in_ her story; they’re just referred to by one of her characters. The whole mention occupies perhaps two paragraphs, if that.)

Anyway, she showed me the scene and said she’d done it on an impulse, but wouldn’t include the scene if I had any objection. I laughed and said–since she wasn’t in fact “using” my characters, but only mentioning them as though they were real historical people of the period–that I thought it was fine; go ahead and see whether anybody noticed.

Anyway, about titles–British titles, anyway–there’s a helpful book called FORMS OF ADDRESS, which lists all the ranks of British nobility (and their wives and children) and tells you how to refer to the wife of a Marquis, or what the second son of a duke’s title is, versus the title for the daughter of an earl. I’m not where my books are at the moment, so can’t give you the specific publishing information, but if you remind me in a couple of weeks, when I can get back in my office (it’s being remodeled at the moment, and I can’t get at any of my books. argh), I’ll get that for you.

I wanted to find out about titles, i.e. Milord/Milady, My Lord, etc … who used what, when and to whom? I never could get anything useful on that one.

May I please put in a very big, strong vote for a podcast on your class? (I know you won’t know until after the FF, but I thought I’d place a vote anyway)

My stories seem to flow from themselves … how do you know that you have 2 more Outlanders and then a 3 book prequel? Do you know the outcome(s) ahead of time?

I’ve always wondered … when Sara/Rosina bumped into your characters, how did you feel about that? I’ve been SO tempted to do that in my first novel.

Thanks for all you do. You’re an inspiration! I hope your tour brings you to Nova Scotia this time.

Well, the simple truth is that a) I don’t know [g], and b) to some extent, it’s the historical events that dictate the arc(s) of the story–i.e., in this series, at least, the first three books are defined (in terms of history) by the Jacobite Rising: OUTLANDER deals with Scotland in the lead-up to that war, DRAGONFLY is _about_ the Rising and how it affected both the story’s characters and Scotland itself–and VOYAGER deals with the lingering aftermath of that upheaval, which not only destroyed the Scottish Highland culture, but scattered shards of it all over the world.

The second part of the series then deals with the American Revolution–echoing and amplifying the earlier war. Many, many Highland Scots (and “Scotch-Irish”–these being Scots who had emigrated to Ulster in the previous century) fought in the Revolution, and we see the contrast of ideals between that war and the earlier one–how people fought by choice and from commitment, rather than by obligation and necessity, and what they were fighting _for_: individual liberty and God-given right, rather than to put a particular king on the throne.

That’s oversimplifying, of course–and taking no account of the _personal_ arcs of the characters within the story–but the historical arcs are at least one major strand of the structure of the series.

Don’t know if that might be helpful to you, but fwiw.

Kat

Um. If you read it on my website, keep reading. [g] Until you get to the part that says I won’t have an itinerary until the various publishers give them to me–that will be sometime much closer to pub date–and that once I _do_ have any specifics, I’ll be sure to post them.