August 28, 2010

Speaker: Diana Gabaldon

Character and Viewpoint

Note: Seating is limited, and all reservations are on a first-come basis. Please make your reservation early.

Diana Gabaldon, author of the award-winning, #1 NYT-bestselling Outlander novels, visits with us to discuss Character and Viewpoint. Diana will provide practical, in-depth instruction on how fiction writers can make the best choices in creating characters and handling viewpoint in order to put original yet realistic people into fiction.

Salon magazine described Diana's Outlander novels as "the smartest historical sci-fi adventure-romance story ever written by a science Ph.D. with a background in scripting "Scrooge McDuck" comics." The adventure began in 1991 with the classic Outlander and has continued through five more New York Times-bestselling novels--Dragonfly in Amber, Voyager, Drums of Autumn, The Fiery Cross, and A Breath of Snow and Ashes—and presently has some seventeen million copies sold worldwide. An Echo in the Bone, released last year, is the seventh—but NOT the last!--novel in the series.

The series, published in 24 countries and 21 languages, includes a companion volume, The Outlandish Companion, which provides details on the settings, background, characters, research, and writing of the novels. Gabaldon (it's pronounced "GAH-bull-dohn"—rhymes with "stone") has also written several books in a sub-series featuring Lord John Grey (a major minor character from the main series): Lord John and the Private Matter, Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade, and Lord John and the Hand of the Devils). Returning to her comic-book roots, she has also written a graphic novel titled The Exile (set within the Outlander universe and featuring the main characters from Outlander), illustrated by Hoang Nguyen, to be published by Ballantine in Fall of 2010.

Diana is presently working on the third Lord John novel (Lord John and the Scottish Prisoner), and thinking vague thoughts about the eighth book in the Outlander series. In addition, she is working on a contemporary mystery series, set in Phoenix, and has written Highly Scholarly Introductions (with masses of footnotes) to recent Modern Library editions of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanoe and Thomas Paine's Common Sense. Diana holds three degrees in science: Zoology, Marine Biology, and Quantitative Behavioral Ecology (plus an honorary degree as Doctor of Humane Letters, which entitles her to be "Diana Gabaldon, Ph.D., DHL." She supposes this is better than "Diana Gabaldon, Fed.X") and spent a dozen years as a university professor with an expertise in scientific computation before beginning to write fiction. She has written scientific articles and textbooks, worked as a contributing editor on the MacMillan Encyclopedia of Computers, founded the scientific-computation journal Science Software Quarterly, and has written numerous comic-book scripts for Walt Disney.

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