No, I was working a post-doctoral appointment at UCLA when I began writing comic book scripts.
My mother taught me to read at the age of three, in part by reading me Walt Disney comics. I never stopped, and at the age of 28 or so, I was reading one and said to myself, “This is pretty bad; I bet I could do better than that, myself!”
So—mostly on a whim—I found out the name and address of the editor, and wrote him a rude letter saying, “Dear Sir-- I’ve been reading your comic books for twenty-five years and they’ve been getting worse and worse. I don’t know that I could do better myself, but I’d like to try. Yours truly….”
Well, by good fortune, I’d hit Del Connell, a gent with a sense of humor. Del wrote back to me and said, “OK. Try.” He also included a couple of layout sheets, so I could see what a comic script looked like, and the company guidelines for the characters. And I wrote him a story.
He didn’t buy it, but he did something much more valuable; he told me what was wrong with it. He did buy my second story, and I continued to write Disney comics (including one for their educational media division, titled “Nutrition Adventures with Orange Bird”) for the next three years—until the higher-ups said, “Wait a minute; we have forty years of classic Carl Barks scripts in the files—why are we buying new stories?!?” So they stopped buying new stories, and that was the end of my comic-writing career—at least until I did THE EXILE (an Outlander graphic novel) last year. <g>
8. How supportive was your family when you decided to change careers from a solid science-based field to writing fiction? Were you scared when you decided to change careers or did you wait to see how the writing thing would turn out before you gave up your day job as a university professor?
I wasn’t crazy enough to tell them. My husband would have tried to stop me—not out of any objection to my writing novels, but out of fear that I’d drop dead of exhaustion. He would have said, “Wait ‘til my business is doing better and you can quit one of your jobs, wait ‘til the kids are all in school…” And I just knew that if I didn’t do it now, I might never do it. So I didn’t tell him.
By the time he found out, I’d been at it for eight months or so; it was too late to stop me. I didn’t tell my father until after I’d sold OUTLANDER (and two more novels, as a three-book deal). I called him then, and told him all about it. It was a lovely, mushy conversation: he said how proud he was of me, how much my mother (who died when I was 19) would have loved it, and so on. We said we loved each other and hung up.
Thirty seconds later, the phone rings; it’s Dad. “Don’t quit your job!” he said. <G>
I didn’t actually quit my university job until my contract came up for renewal, just about when I’d finished the manuscript for DRAGONFLY IN AMBER. As I told my husband, “I don’t think we’ll starve if I quit—and it would be nice to see what it’s like to sleep for more than four hours at a stretch.” I kept on writing software reviews and the like for a few years, but cut way back on those—I’d pass work on to friends (i.e., decline the assignment, but give the editor the contact info for a friend who could do it instead), and eventually quit altogether.
9. Before you started writing fiction, you were the founding editor of Science Software Quarterly. Was there anything you learned from being an editor that helped you when you crossed over into writing fiction?
Yes. Never tell a contributor when your real deadline is.
10. You’ve said that writing Outlander (Cross Stitch, UK title) was just an exercise to see if you could do it. How far into it did you have to get before you realized you were good at it? What was it that kept you writing and gave you the impetus to complete it?
Number One Fan! Interview with Diana Gabaldon
Start from the beginning
