Aggressive Comix interviewed Diana Gabaldon before her San Francisco stop on her book tour for Written in My Own Heart’s Blood. Here are some excerpts (including some Bear McCreary talk), but please head over to Aggressive Comix’s post to read the entire transcript of the interview.
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.
Diana: Were 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: 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: 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.
Source: Aggressive Comix
