A fan always,

Katie

Um. People don’t always kiss when making love. {g}

–Diana

I loved your last response. I too consider myself a recent fan of the past two years and LOVED the EXILE. What a very wonderful and expressive ways of sharing a visual of the characters that have been painted so beautifully with your words. I especially love learning more about Murtaug, the most self sacrificing characters in all the stories. I thought Kenneth was going to surface in your next story until the end. I have also enjoyed the Lord John Series and found The Brotherhood of the Blade great background to help understand who Percy was.

In addition to sharing how much I have enjoyed all your Outlander and related stories, I have had a question I have been anxious to ask but too curious to refrain. I am sure I am not the only fan to catch this but wonder is a genuine error or is there some explanation. In the Voyager there is a retelling of a moment in Claire’s marriage to Frank that is contradicted in a later story (I believe in the Fiery Cross). In the scene when Claire and Jamie are trying not to hear Fergus making love to his wife as she is in labor with their child, Claire recalls she and Frank making love before the birth of Brianna. Yet in the Voyager, Claire shares her first kiss with Frank since her return when Brianna was 3 months old. Sharing how they had not touched since she came back through the stones. Did I find an error or is there something more to explain this inconsistancy?

Your curious fan,
Eileen

Well, it takes me roughly three years to write one of the big OUTLANDER novels. The release time between books is actually somewhat _more_ than that, because of the demands of book-touring and promotional Stuff all over the world, all of the time. {g} Ergo, you wouldn’t be getting Book Eight any sooner if I _didn’t_ do THE EXILE (and as for the 20th anniversary OUTLANDER, that was entirely the publisher’s notion, though I think it will be a lovely book), or the various shorter pieces that appear in anthologies in between (there have been at least three novellas/short stories released within the last year).

I.e., it isn’t a question “getting reused material instead of Book Eight.” a) You aren’t getting Book Eight until I’ve written it, plainly. b) THE EXILE isn’t either “a cartoon book” or “reused material.” You may or may not LIKE it, but it’s a new aspect of the OUTLANDER story, and surely I have a right to do things that I think are fun? c) I imagine the publisher thought that some of the readers would appreciate having the 20th-anniversary edition to entertain them during the unavoidable gap prior to releasing Book Eight. And d) the readers obviously have complete freedom to not buy something they don’t want; it hasn’t got anything to do with personal dedication.

Now. I normally do work on multiple projects, because it keeps me from having writer’s block. For the last several months, I’ve been working simultaneously on Book Eight and on SCOTTISH PRISONER–this being an interesting book, in which the story is shared between Lord John Grey and Jamie Fraser; it kind of ties the Lord John series into the main one. I’ll be finished with the manuscript of SCOTTISH PRISONER in another couple of weeks, and it will _probably_ be out this November. 2011. So you will have had at least one book _every year_ for three years running (not counting the anniversary edition). I’ve never done that before in my entire career. I can’t guarantee that you’ll get Book Eight in 2012, because–like all the other OUTLANDER novels–it’s long, it’s complex, and it takes a lot of time, thought, research, and engineering. But you will get it, and I hope you enjoy it when you do.

–Diana

And I just reread your post…picking up on something I had missed the first time. I’m terribly sorry about your daughter.