Book eight in the story of Claire and Jamie is titled WRITTEN IN MY OWN HEART’s BLOOD, to be released in the Fall of 2013. Excerpts and current information are sometimes posted in my blogs or on twitter.
I do occasionally post excerpts from things I’m working on, and you can find a listing of links to such excerpts here, supplied by the kindly efforts of Jari Backman, a man with a much more orderly mind than mine.
And once in a while, I will post brief excerpts on the blog here. I’d appreciate it if you would not copy the excerpts all over the internet, but please do pass on the links to anyone you think might be interested. Thanks!
Now, I do normally work on multiple projects at once. I started doing this back in the day when I had two full-time jobs, three children under the age of six, and recklessly decided that was the right time to try writing a novel for practice. See, no matter what I’m writing—fiction, non-fiction, blog entry, interview, annual report, scholarly journal article, software review — it usually sticks, about 2/3 of the way down the first page. By “stick,” I mean you get to the point where nothing’s happening, and you sit there staring at the screen and flipping through your mind like a card-deck, in search of a helpful idea.
What writers usually do under these circumstances is to get up, go get coffee, take the dog for a walk, do the laundry, go downtown and get drunk….often enough, they don’t come back, and that’s why they often don’t finish their books. Well, I couldn’t do this; I didn’t have time to walk away; I had to keep producing stuff— for my university job, for my freelance commitments, for my research, etc.—or I wouldn’t get paid, and I had a family to support.
So I started running multiple projects. I’d have a grant proposal up on one screen, a software review for Byte up on another—and perhaps a scene from the novel on a third. When the first one stuck, I’d move to the second. When that one stuck, I’d go back to the first and check. If my subconscious hadn’t managed to unstick it yet, I’d go on to the novel—and by cycling through two, three, or even four projects at once, I found that I stayed sitting at the keyboard and kept typing, thus being a lot more productive.
So I still do that. At the moment, my mental work-pile consists of WIMOHB (aka “MOBY”), THE OUTLANDISH COMPANION, Volume II (this is the one with the maps, the timelines, the floorplans, the costumes, the recipes, the photographs of Scotland and North Carolina, and a Whole Lot of Other Stuff), a novella about Marsali’s younger sister Joan, Young Ian’s elder brother Michael, the Comte St. Germain (no, of course he isn’t dead), and a lot of other interesting stuff, a short story (well, for _now_ it is…) dealing with Jamie and his friend Ian when they were young mercenaries in France— and an essay about “Dr. Who” for an anthology.