Revised and Updated OUTLANDISH COMPANION Vol. 1 is out!

Diana Gabaldon's OUTLANDISH COMPANION Volume One (Revised and Updated Edition) is now available!

For those of you who are not familiar with the original OUTLANDISH COMPANION, first published in 1999, Diana Gabaldon described it this way, in a post on Compuserve on January 14, 2015:

[It's] a non-fiction book, with a lot of information about the first four books of the series:  OUTLANDER through DRUMS OF AUTUMN.   It has detailed synopses of those books, for the use of people who can't remember what happened and want to catch up before reading the next book, but don't have time (they think) to go back and re-read the earlier novels.

It has numerous essays by me, about how I came to write the books, where characters come from, doing historical research and a few other things, an annotated Bibliography of all the references I used while working on those four novels, a Gaelic Glossary, a few fun things like professionally-cast horoscopes for Jamie and Claire, and so on.  My husband describes it as "the perfect bathroom book," since you can pick it up and open it anywhere. <g>

Please note that word "non-fiction"! This is NOT one of the OUTLANDER novels.

What's new in the Revised and Updated edition?

The sections on "Work In Progress" and "Outlandish Websites and Online Venues", which had become badly outdated, have been removed, and obsolete material has been removed from some of the other sections as well.

As for what has been added, Diana Gabaldon posted this on Facebook on February 18, 2015:

I put _in_ four new essays, and a new Section dealing with the TV show. The essays are: Jamie and the Rule of Three (about the hows and whys of Wentworth Prison), Book-Touring for Beginners (for those who think this is a glamorous thing to do ), A Brief Disquisition on the Existence of Butt-Cooties, and "The Shape of Things" (an essay on How I Write, and what the internal geometry of each book looks like to me).

Now, these essays have all appeared in one place or another on the internet, though the first three were originally done as blog-posts, and thus have been formalized and tidied up a bit for their appearance in the OC I. ("The Shape of Things" appears as a back-matter add-in to the 20th Anniversary edition of OUTLANDER.)

The new TV section has several pieces, describing the book-to-screen process (how we got from an option to a TV show), the adaptation process in theory and in practice, the actors and what they do, and an account of "My Brief Career as a TV Actor." Also a section including photos from the show kindly supplied by Sony.

For the full explanation in Diana's own words, look here. 



THE OUTLANDISH COMPANION Volume Two (pictured above), covering THE FIERY CROSS, A BREATH OF SNOW AND ASHES, AN ECHO IN THE BONE, and WRITTEN IN MY OWN HEART'S BLOOD, will be published on October 27, 2015.

For more details about both OUTLANDISH COMPANION books, see my OUTLANDISH COMPANION FAQ page.