time travel – Anna J. McIntyre Author

Tell me the year you first read Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander

When I was a teenager you wouldn’t find celebrity posters on my wall. Had I been a little older and made it to a Beatle’s concert during their prime, you wouldn’t find me jumping up and down excitedly, tears running down my face. Fact is, I’m not much of a fangirl. Just not my style.

There is one exception—the author Diana Gabaldon. A couple of my author friends have attended conferences with Gabaldon and when they mention seeing her, I tend to go all fangirl on them.

I often joke that I was the original fan who made Gabaldon famous. After all, there had to be a first, right?

It was back in the early nineties and I had joined one of those book clubs. Remember them? Back before eBooks became the thing. You’d join the club and select five or six books that they would send you for free and then every month they would send you a new book.

Always a sucker for time travel, I chose Outlander as one of my freebees. Until the book club, I had never heard of Outlander or of Gabaldon.

When I finished reading Outlander I immediately started looking for other books in the series. I also started telling everyone I knew about it. At the restaurant I managed for my parents, I convinced one of our servers to read the book. She became an avid Gabaldon fan and told all her friends they had to read the series.

I got my sister, Lynn, to read Outlander. She fell in love with Jamie and went on to tell all her friends about the books. For several of my birthdays Lynn bought me hardback editions of the series—the first two were signed by Gabaldon.

The entire thing snowballed—we would tell someone they had to read the first book in the series, and after they did, they would in turn tell their friends.

Two decades after reading Outlander, I was discussing books with my daughter-in-law, who is an avid reader. I told her she had to read Diana Gabaldon’s series. It turned out she already had—and it was one of her favorites.

As a writer, I’ve naturally been inspired—and humbled—by Diana Gabaldon the author. It wasn’t long after I read Outlander that I sat down and wrote Lessons, now entitled Coulson’s Lessons, which is the third book in my Coulson’s Series. While Lessons is nothing like Oulander, I will confess the location of Alexandra and Garret’s honeymoon was inspired by Outlander.

I learned they were making Outander into a movie from my sister, Lynn. In July we signed up for Starz. I ended up watching the first episode twice. Lynn watched it three times.

While I would love to think I am THE fan who got the snowball going on the Outlander Series, I accept the fact it is simply my delusion. But just in case it is not a delusion, answer two questions for me.

1. What year did you first read Outlander?
2. How did you first learn of the book?

Altering Perceptions of History & Time

Richard Collier, Christopher Reeve’s character in Somewhere in Time, surrounds himself with artifacts from the period in time to which he wants to travel. Touching those items doesn’t just bridge the gap in time – they fill it. Of course, when he finds himself clutching a coin from his own era, he’s hurled forward, back to his own place and time in the present.

My point being, when we have some tangible connection to a moment in history, that moment in time somehow feels closer. Time it seems is all about perception.

When I was a small child, my less favorite day of the year was December 26. On that day, the next Christmas was an entire year away. For a child, a year seems like a very long time. I remember telling my grandmother, “I wish we could magically make the year go by so it could be Christmas again.” She just looked at me, a serious expression on her face, and said, “No you don’t. Someday time will move much too fast, and you won’t want to wish days away.”

That didn’t make sense to me. After all, a year is always a year, how can it possibly speed up? Of course, I eventually understood what she meant. I even wrote a poem about it, which begins, “Grandma told me time would fly. It’s not that I had thought she’d lie. But she didn’t make it truly clear, that our future was this near…”

It is our perception that changes as we age. While Richard Collier needed inanimate objects, like coins and clothing to fill the gap of time, for me, now that I am older, it is about people. If I’ve known a person who lived during a certain era, that moment in time seems less distant. In 1900 my Grandma Hilda was eight years old. When I was a small child, the year 1900 seemed as far away as 1500. Today, 1900 seems much closer for me.

The story told in my new, soon to be released book, Coulson’s Wife, begins in 1900 and ends almost a half a century later, in the mid-1900s, several years before I was born. One thing that struck me was how much the world had changed for women during that time period.

The story told in Coulson’s Wife is not only about the characters’ evolution, but about the world around them. While I once swore I would never write a historical novel, it appears I have. Although from my perspective, it’s recent history. The fact it is recent history, makes the story told (in my opinion) far more dramatic considering the social changes that occurred during the first half of the 20th century, But, I will have to wait to see what the readers think.

Articles

Tell me the year you first read Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander

Altering Perceptions of History & Time