Well, here’s an entry for the new website feature, ‘Entertaining Things Fans Do.’ {g}
(Yes, I really_ am_ working on the new website; have had out-of-town company for the last couple of days, though, and much as I enjoy them, they do take up time in which I could otherwise be going blind typing up descriptions of the seven big OUTLANDER novels….)
I may have mentioned that I get interview requests All The Time? Well, this one came in from the Canadian publicist a few weeks back, with a note saying, “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”
I read it, laughed, and emailed back, “Are you kidding? This is the most interesting interview I’ve had in months, if not years!” At last, an interview that didn’t start out with some variation of, “Soooo….how did you get the idea to write these books?”, didn’t ask me “whether you’ve thought of making a movie of these books?”, and didn’t want to know who I’d cast to play Jamie Fraser!
(You know that feature on my website called “FAQ”? It’ll be on the new site, too. It stands for “Frequently Asked Questions,” and the point of it to supply answers to the Questions That EVERYBODY Asks Me. You’d think someone preparing to do an interview with somebody would go look at the somebody’s website first, wouldn’t you? But noooooo……) But I digress.
This interview was from a nice person named Theresa Carle-Sanders, for her food website, www.IslandVittles.com, and she wanted my permission to run a short excerpt from VOYAGER, describing a particular 18th century dish, to accompany a brief interview about the food in my books.
The interview is here
and I hope you’ll enjoy both that, and the website, which is drool-worthy.
Hey Diana!
I just spent the last half an hour browsing your site…love it! And I totally love your books, as does my daughter and my sister and just last week, I got my neighbor hooked. She is now on book 2 of the Outlander series. I am happy to hear that the next book will be out in 2012…every time you publish a new one, I start over from the first one before I will read the new one. I probably know most of the first 3 books almost by memory, but learn new things from the rest of them every time I read them. I probably better start in fall of this year to get ready.
My only regret is that I never got to meet you during the 3 years I lived in AZ. Tho I must admit, I would rather read than look at you.
Sincerely
Dianne Biscoe
I am disapointed in you. You have written a series of books that take many of us on a historical journey and then you wrote a “cliff hanger” like a Saturday Afternoon flick which resolves nothing. I expected better . Enjoy your comics, musicals, etc., you’ve lost me as a fan.
Dear NJ–
Well, not all books (or graphic novels) are for all readers. (I can’t take any credit for the musical; I had nothing to do with its creation.) I don’t expect the explanation to please you, but fwiw, ECHO ends as it does (and was Extremely Carefully Engineered to do _just_ what it does) because of the huge response I got after A BREATH OF SNOW AND ASHES was published. People wrote to me in _droves_, all moaning about how sad they were that the series was ended, what would they do without Jamie and Claire, wouldn’t I please re-consider… I wrote back to every one of those people and said, “What do you mean? Why on earth do you think it’s the last book? Did I _say_ it’s the last book? Does it say, The Thrilling Conclusion’ on the paperback?” And every one of them wrote back to _me_, saying….”But you tied everything up so neatly! We thought it must be The End!”
To which I said, “Well, see if I ever do _that_ again!” {g}
Point being that ECHO ends as it does specifically to indicate to everybody that NO, IT ISN’T THE LAST BOOK. And I will say most people did figure that out. {g} Every single prior book has generated wads of “Oh, I heard this was the last book…” mail. This one, not so much.
As to not resolving anything–there are four major storylines in ECHO; three of them are cliffhung with the greatest skill and execution, but I did resolve Young Ian’s storyline, which ends the book.
–Diana