21/03/2025
I am Reliably Informed that today (well, technically; I haven't gone to bed yet) is World Storytelling Day--and that this week is Word Storytelling Week. This seems only reasonable; one day surely isn't enough to tell stories...
As you doubtless know, most of my stories are way too long to be telling in a day, a week, or even a month ...but I have occasionally written shorter pieces, and I thought I might share bits of some of them with you as an observance of occasion.
Some of you will know that there is a book--part of the OUTLANDER world, but not one of the main novels, called SEVEN STONES TO STAND OR FALL. Here's the introduction:
INTRODUCTION
A Chronology of the Outlander Series
If you picked this book up under the misapprehension that it’s the ninth novel in the main Outlander series, it’s not. I apologize. So, if it’s not the ninth novel, what is it? Well, it’s a collection of seven…er…things, of varying length and content, but all having to do with the Outlander universe.
As for the title…basically, it’s the result of my editor not liking my original title choice, Salmagundi.*
Not that I couldn’t see her point…Anyway, there was a polite request via my agent for something more in line with the “resonant, poetic” nature of the main titles. Without going too much into the mental process that led to this (words like “sausage-making” and “rock-polishing” come to mind), I wanted a title that at least suggested that there were a number of elements in this book (hence the Seven), and Seven Stones just came naturally, and that was nice (“stone” is always a weighty word) and suitably alliterative but not a complete poetic thought (or rhythm).
So, a bit more thinkering (no, that’s not a typo), and I came up with “to Stand or Fall”, which sounded suitably portentous. It took a bit of _ex post facto_ thought to figure out what the heck that meant, but things usually do mean something if you think long enough.
In this instance, the “stand or fall” has to do with people’s response to grief and adversity: to wit, if you aren’t killed outright by whatever happened, you have a choice in how the rest of your life is lived—you keep standing, though battered and worn by time and elements, still a buttress and a signpost—or you fall and return quietly to the earth from which you sprang, your elements giving succor to those who come after you.
*salmagundi - a general mixture, or miscellaneous collection.
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OK, that’s the end of the Introduction. The “Seven Stones” are seven stories/novellas (roughly speaking, a short story is less than 18,000 words (this is according to the Science Fiction/Fantasy Writers of America guidelines, as of 22 years ago, which is when I first accidentally wrote a short story and it turned out to be 90,000 words and ended up as a novel (this would be Lord John and the Private Matter, the first book in _his_ series), the stories being connected to (but not part of) the OUTLANDER series.
Customary length for a novel depends on the sort of novel it is: if you’re writing a category romance (these would be the shortish romances published by Harlequin or Mills and Boone), the length guidelines are fairly strict, and the book should hit somewhere between 60-80,000 words (though I have seen this fudged now and then). If you’re writing a novel in some other category or genre, the length specifications vary. If you write a book that has more than one genre, , you kind of roll your own…
Anyway, while I don’t normally write short stories (on purpose…) I do occasionally do it as a favor for a friend who’s putting together an anthology—or for some exigent reason (like having to fill out my own anthology, which is where the story “A FUGITIVE GREEN” came from). In that case, the result is usually a novella (more than 20K words, less than…mmm…well, less than 100k, at least…).
So anyway, I had a handful of these shorter pieces, most of them at least _related_ to the OUTLANDER novels, and both editor and agent thought that would be good thing to offer the reading public while waiting for me to finish the next of the main novels. So that’s where SEVEN STONES came from.
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EXCERPT FROM "A FUGITIVE GREEN"
A FUGITIVE GREEN
SURVIVAL
Paris, April 1744
MINNIE RENNIE HAD SECRETS. Some were for sale and some were strictly her own. She touched the bosom of her dress and glanced toward the latticework door at the rear of the shop. Still closed, the blue curtains behind it drawn firmly shut.
Her father had secrets, too; Andrew Rennie (as he called himself in Paris) was outwardly a dealer in rare books but more privately a collector of letters whose writers had never meant them to be read by any but the addressee. He also kept a stock of more fluid information, this soaked out of his visitors with a combination of tea, wine, small amounts of money, and his own considerable charm.
Minnie had a good head for wine, needed no money, and was impervious to her father’s magnetism. She did, however, have a decently filial respect for his powers of observation.
The murmur of voices from the back room didn’t have the rhythm of leave-taking, no scraping of chairs…She nipped across the book-crammed shop to the shelves of tracts and sermons. Taking down a red-calf volume with marbled endpapers, titled Collected Sermons of the Reverend George V. Sykes, she snatched the letter from the bosom of her dress, tucked it between the pages, and slid the book back into place. Just in time: there was movement in the back room, the putting down of cups, the slight raising of voices.
Heart thumping, she took one more glance at the Reverend Sykes and saw to her horror that she’d disturbed the dust on the shelf—there was a clear track pointing to the oxblood-leather spine. She darted back to the main counter, seized the feather duster kept under it, and had the entire section flicked over in a matter of moments.
She took several deep breaths; she mustn’t look flushed or flustered. Her father was an observant man—a trait that had (he often said, when instructing her in the art) kept him alive on more than one occasion.
But it was all right; the voices had changed again—some new point had come up. She strolled composedly along the shelves and paused to look through the stacks of unsorted volumes that sat on a large table against the west wall. A strong scent of to***co rose from the books, along with the usual smell of leather, buckram, glue, paper, and ink. This batch had plainly belonged to a man who liked a pipe when he read. She was paying little attention to the new stock, though; her mind was still on the letter.
The carter who had delivered this latest assemblage of books—the library of a deceased professor of history from Exeter—had given her a nod and a wink, and she’d slipped out with a market basket, meeting him round the corner by a fruiterer’s shop. A_livre tournois_ to the carter, and five sous for a wooden basket of strawberries, and she’d been free to read the letter in the shelter of the alley before sauntering back to the shop, fruit in hand to explain her absence.
No salutation, no signature, as she’d requested—only the information:
_Have found her_, it read simply. _Mrs. Simpson, Chapel House, Parson’s Green, Peterborough Road, London_.
_Mrs. Simpson_. A name, at last. A name and a place, mysterious though both were.
Mrs. Simpson. It had taken months, months of careful planning, choosing the men among the couriers her father used who might be amenable to making a bit extra on the side and a bit more for keeping her inquiries quiet.
She didn’t know what her father might do should he find out that she’d been looking for her mother. But he’d refused for the last seventeen years to say a word about the woman; it was reasonable to assume he wouldn’t be pleased.
Mrs. Simpson. She said it silently, feeling the syllables in her mouth. Mrs. Simpson…Was her mother married again, then? Did she have other children? Minnie swallowed. The thought that she might have half brothers or sisters was at once horrifying, intriguing…and startlingly painful. That someone else might have had her mother—hers!—for all those years…
“This will _not do_,” she said aloud, though under her breath. She had no idea of Mrs. Simpson’s personal circumstances, and it was pointless to waste emotion on something that might not exist. She blinked hard to refocus her mind and suddenly saw it.
The thing sitting atop a pigskin-bound edition of _Volume III of History of the Papacy _(Antwerp)_ was as long as her thumb and, for a cockroach, remarkably immobile. Minnie had been staring at it unwittingly for nearly a minute, and it hadn’t so much as twitched an antenna. Perhaps it was dead? She picked a ratty quill out of the collection in the Chinese jar and gingerly poked the thing with the quill’s pointy end.
The thing hissed like a teakettle and she let out a small yelp, dropping the quill and leaping backward. The roach, disturbed, turned round in a slow, huffy circle, then settled back on the gilt-embossed capital “P” and tucked its thorny legs back under itself, obviously preparing to resume its nap.
“Oh, I don’t _think_ so,” she said to it, and turned to the shelves in search of something heavy enough to smash it but with a cover that wouldn’t show the stain. She’d set her hand on a Vulgate Bible with a dark-brown pebble-grain cover when the secret door beside the shelves opened, revealing her father.
“Oh, you’ve met Frederick?” he said, stepping forward and taking the Bible out of her hand. “You needn’t worry, my dear; he’s quite tame.”
“Tame? Who would trouble to domesticate a cockroach?”
“The inhabitants of Madagascar, or so I’m told. Though the trait is heritable; Frederick here is the descendant of a long and noble line of hissing cockroaches but has never set foot on the soil of his native land. He was born—or hatched, I suppose—in Bristol.”
Frederick had suspended his nap long enough to nuzzle inquiringly at her father’s thumb, extended as one might hold out one’s knuckles to a strange dog. Evidently finding the scent acceptable, the roach strolled up the thumb and onto the back of her father’s hand. Minnie twitched, unable to keep the gooseflesh from rippling up her arms.
Mr. Rennie edged carefully toward the big shelves on the east wall, hand cradled next to his chest. These shelves contained the salable but less-valuable books: a jumble of everything from _Culpeper’s Herbal_ to tattered copies of Shakespeare’s plays and—by far the most popular—a large collection of the more lurid gallows confessions of an assortment of highwaymen, murderers, forgers, and husband-slayers. Amid the volumes and pamphlets was scattered a miscellany of small curiosities, ranging from a toy bronze cannon and a handful of sharp-edged stones said to be used at the dawn of time for scraping hides to a Chinese fan that showed erotic scenes when spread. Her father picked a wicker cricket cage from the detritus and decanted Frederick neatly into it.
“Not before time, either, old cock,” he said to the roach, now standing on its hind legs and peering out through the wickerwork. “Here’s your new master, just coming.” Minerva peered round her father and her heart jumped a little; she recognized that tall, broad-shouldered silhouette automatically ducking beneath the lintel in order to avoid being brained.
“Lord Broch Tuarach!” Her father stepped forward, beaming, and inclined his head to the customer.
“Mr. Fraser will do,” he said, as always, extending a hand. “Your servant, sir.” He’d brought a scent of the streets inside with him: the sticky sap of the plane trees, dust, manure and offal, and Paris’s pervasive smell of p**s, lightly perfumed by the orange-sellers outside the theater down the street. He carried his own deep tang of sweat, wine, and oak casks, as well; he often came from his warehouse. She inhaled appreciatively, then let her breath out as he turned, smiling, from her father toward her.
“Mademoiselle Rennie,” he said, in a deep Scotch accent that rolled the “R” delightfully. He seemed a bit surprised when she held out her hand, but he obligingly bent over it, breathing courteously on her knuckles. If I were married, he’d kiss it, she thought, her grip tightening unconsciously on his. He blinked, feeling it, but straightened up and bowed to her, as elegantly as any courtier.
Her father made a slight sound in his throat and tried to catch her eye, but she ignored him, picking up the feather duster and heading industriously for the shelves behind the counter—the ones containing a select assortment of erotica from a dozen different countries. She knew perfectly well what his glance would have said.
“Frederick?” she heard Mr. Fraser say, in a bemused tone of voice. “Does he answer to his name?”
“I—er—I must admit that I’ve never called him to heel,” her father replied, a little startled. “But he’s very tame; will come to your hand.” Evidently her father had unlatched the cricket cage in order to demonstrate Frederick’s talents, for she heard a slight shuffle of feet.
“Nay, dinna bother,” Mr. Fraser—his Christian name was James; she’d seen it on a bill of sale for a calf-bound octavo of Persian Letters with gilt impressions—said, laughing. “The beastie’s not my pet. A gentleman of my acquaintance wants something exotic to present to his mistress—she’s a taste for animals, he says.”
Her sensitive ear easily picked up the delicate hesitation before “gentleman of my acquaintance.” So had her father, for he invited James Fraser to take coffee with him, and in the next instant the two of them had vanished behind the latticework door that concealed her father’s private lair and she was blinking at Frederick’s stubby antennae, waving inquisitively from the cricket cage her father had dropped onto the shelf in front of her.
“Put up a bit of food for Mr. Fraser to take along,” her father called back to her from behind the screen. “For Frederick, I mean.”
“What does he eat?” she called.
“Fruit!” came a faint reply, and then a door closed behind the screen.
She caught one more glimpse of Mr. Fraser when he left half an hour later, giving her a smile as he took the parcel containing Frederick and the insect’s breakfast of strawberries. Then he ducked once more beneath the lintel, the afternoon sun glinting off his bright hair, and was gone. She stood staring at the empty door.
Her father had emerged from the back room, as well, and was regarding her, not without sympathy. “Mr. Fraser? He’ll never marry you, my dear—he has a wife, and quite a striking woman she is, too. Besides, while he’s the best of the Jacobite agents, he doesn’t have the scope you’d want. He’s only concerned with the Stuarts, and the Scottish Jacobites will never amount to anything. Come, I’ve something to discuss with you.” Without waiting, he turned and headed for the Chinese screen.
A wife. _Striking_, eh? While the word “wife” was undeniably a blow to the liver, Minnie’s next thought was that she didn’t necessarily need to _marry_ Jamie Fraser. And if it came to striking, she could deal a man a good, sharp buffet in the cods herself. She twirled a lock of ripe-wheat hair around one finger and tucked it behind her ear.
From SEVEN STONES TO STAND OR FALL, Copyright 2017 Diana Gabaldon
Let me know if you enjoyed this snippet; if so, I might post a few other bits from SEVEN STONES this week.
P.S. The stories from SEVEN STONES are also available separately, under their separate titles, from Amazon, should you not want to read the whole anthology.
