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About
Diana
The Frequently
Asked Questions about Diana Gabaldon and The Outlandier Series have
been taken from her answers to the questions from her online fans (America On
Line and CompuServe). In most cases, the answers are direct quotes from Diana's
posts. In others, she has edited the original answer to include more information.
Readers be cautioned
that some of the answers to these questions will contain SPOILERS. If you don't
want to know anything about the future books, be cautious in your reading. I will
try to note which questions contain spoilers.
(After following
a link below, simply select the "Back" key in your browser to return to the index.)
How
is Gabaldon pronounced?
My name is pronounced
GAB-uhl-dohn (long o). In Spanish it's pronounced gav-ahl-DOHN (still with a long
o).
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Are you Scottish
or English?
American. Raised
in Flagstaff, Arizona. However, my ancestry is both English and Mexican-American;
one of my maternal great- grandfathers emigrated from England to Arizona in the
late 1800's, while my father's family seems to have been in New Mexico since the
late 1500's.
Diana currently
lives in Scottsdale, Arizona with her husband, three children, and a large number
of animals.
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Have
you ever been to Scotland?
I did Outlander
entirely from library research (since at the time, I thought the book was purely
for practice, I hardly thought I could tell my husband I had to go to Scotland
to do research). I did take part of the advance money and go to Scotland for two
weeks, though. It was (luckily!) just as I'd been imagining it.
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What
did you do before Outlander was published?
I have an M.S.
in Marine Biology from Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a Ph.D. in quantitative
behavioral ecology (animal behavior with statistics involved; my thesis was on
Nest Site Selection in Pinyon Jays (or as my husband says, "Why Birds Build Nests
Where They Do, and Who Cares Anyway?"). I wrote comic books (free-lance) for Walt
Disney for a year or two in the late 70's-- while holding a post-doc in marine
biology at UCLA. Then I was a professor at Arizona State for twelve years or so,
in the Center for Environmental Studies. What I actually did there was
(weirdly enough) to develop an expertise in the brand-new field of scientific
computation (the use of computers to do scientific research--in botany, ecology,
physiology, meteorology, etc. Completely different from computer science, which
is the study of computers and how they work).
As part of this,
I started and ran a scholarly journal called Science Software for
several years. See, I started using computers for scientific analysis in the early
'80's, just when microcomputers were getting started. It occurred to me that there
should be a venue for other scientists who did what I did (not many, back then)
to share their work. The journal took off, and took over--within a year, I was
doing virtually nothing else; I ran the journal, did training seminars for scientists
wanting to get into computers and lab automation, wrote texts and manuals and
so on.
Essentially, I
invented my own specialty. I then called up magazine editors and offered to write
about it. That is, I started sending copies of Science Software around
to the editors of the mainstream computer press (along with one of my Walt Disney
comic books, just to be sure they looked at my query{g}), asking for
assignments--which I got instantly, because at that time, I was one of maybe a
dozen people in the world who knew anything about scientific and technical software
and could write coherently about it.
In other words,
I became established as an "expert" in scientific computation the same way I started
writing fiction; I just did it.
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Arizona
Diary Essay (Copyright 1999 Diana Gabaldon All Rights Reserved )
Myth and
Mountain Birthdays
My birthday was
always the coldest day of the year. If not literally true, it was family legend,
and everyone knows that myth is much stronger than meteorology, even in the north
country, where the snow lies deep on the mountaintops, and houses are built to
keep the heat in, not out.
This particular
legend had its origin--reasonably enough--on the date of my birth, January 11,
1952. My family lived in Flagstaff, but the family doctor had been having a difference
of opinion with the hospital board, and had moved his practice to the Williams
Hospital. So, when my mother went into labor early in the morning, my twenty-one-year-old
parents were obliged drive thirty miles over a two-lane ice-slick road, through
the teeth of a driving blizzard, in order to get to the doctor.
When I was finally
born, just at dark, my father was so unnerved by the entire experience that he
went out to a nearby restaurant and ordered ham and eggs for dinner--forgetting
that it was Friday. (Way back when, Catholics didn't eat meat on Fridays.) Driving
the thirty miles home through snow and black ice, he ran off the road twice, got
stuck in the drifts, and--as he later recounted--managed to free himself only
because he couldn't stand the thought of freezing to death and leaving my mother
with a one- day old child.
At the age of
two days, I too made the perilous trip through the dark pines of the frozen landscape,
to become a third- generation native of Flagstaff. There aren't a lot of us, if
only because Flagstaff isn't that old.
Among the early
founders of the town were my great-grandparents. Stanley Sykes was born in Yorkshire,
England, but at the age of fifteen, was diagnosed with consumption. The only chance,
his doctor told him, was to leave England; go to Arizona, where the warm, dry
air was good for the lungs (well, it was 1868, after all; the midwesterners hadn't
got here with their damn mulberries and bermuda grass yet). Stanley heeded this
advice, and with his elder brother Godfrey, set sail for the New World and the
healing balm of the desert air.
Like many another
outlander--my husband, for example--who thought Arizona was a desert, Stanley
was startled to find that the northern third of the state sits atop the Colorado
Plateau, and that the San Francisco Peaks are covered with the largest forest
of Ponderosa Pine in the world. In search of desert, Godfrey went south...but
Stanley stayed, seduced by the rush of wind through the pines and the clear dark
skies of the mountain nights, thick with stars.
Great-grandmother
Beatrice Belle Switzer came from Kentucky, along with her seven brothers and sisters,
when the family farm was flooded out. It must have been a flood of biblical proportions,
because once the Switzers started moving, they didn't stop until they came to
Flagstaff, which--at 7000 feet--they evidently considered high enough ground to
be safe.
The air in Flagstaff
may not have been hot, but apparently it was dry enough, since Stanley lived to
be 92, finally dying on a vacation to San Diego (that fog will get you every time).
I was four when he died, and still have a vivid memory of him in his armchair,
the smoke from his pipe drifting in the lamplight, as he taught me the delicate
art of building houses out of cards--a skill that's stood me in good stead since.
His son, Harold--my
grandfather--became the mayor of Flagstaff--and thereby hangs another family tale.
It was a scandal,
in fact--or so everyone said--when my mother Jacqueline Sykes, the mayor's daughter,
descendant of one of the First Families of Flagstaff, fell in love with Antonio
Gabaldon. Tony was smart, handsome, athletic, hardworking--and a Mexican- American,
born in Belen, New Mexico. In 1949, in a small Arizona town, this was miscegenation--or
so everyone said.
My mother's friends
said so. Mrs. X, her English teacher, said so, telling her firmly that she couldn't
possibly marry a Mexican; her children would be idiots. The parish priest who
refused to marry them said so; such a marriage would never last. The "interested
parties" who took out a public petition against the match said so; it was a scandal.
Her parents said so--and at last she was persuaded, and reluctantly broke the
engagement.
My mother's parents
sent her south, to the University of Arizona in Tucson, to leave the scandal behind;
to forget. But she didn't forget, and six months later, on a dark December night,
she called Tony and said, "I still want you. If you still want me-- come and get
me."
He drove down
from the snow-covered mountain to the desert and brought her back the same night--and
they were married at 6:30 the next morning, by a priest from another parish.
It was a long
and happy marriage--dissolved only by death--and thirteen months after the wedding,
I arrived, the third generation born on the mountain.
We (and the fourth
generation) live in Scottsdale, but I still keep the family house in Flagstaff,
and escape there regularly to write; to me, the ideal weather for writing involves
a gleaming portcullis of icicles to keep out all intruders, soft white drifts
on the pines and the sidewalks, and the muffled grind of cars in the distance,
crushing cinders into the slippery packed snow as they labor uphill. No salt on
these roads; the San Francisco peaks are in fact one mountain, the remains of
an extinct volcano--or least we hope it is extinct; the US Geological Survey is
not so sure.
It's 72 on this
Christmas Day, and the dogs are swimming in the pool. My husband gives me warm
slippers, though, knowing I'll need them soon. My birthday, after all, is always
the coldest day of the year.
(Oh...Mrs. X?
You were wrong.)
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