How did Outlander get published?
Well, first I was going to write a book for practice and never show it to anybody. {grin} Nevertheless, I posted a piece of the book in the CompuServe Literary Forum in order to win an argument I was having with a man about how it feels to be pregnant. A lot of people who’d been following the argument read the piece (it’s the bit from Outlander, where Jenny explains to Jamie what it feels like), and they all said, “Hey, this is good! What is it and where’s some more?” And so I put up more, and people read it, and….eventually, John Stith (who writes wonderful science fiction/mysteries, by the way) offered to introduce me to his agent, whom I’d heard many good things about from a number of published writers I’d met online. The agent took me on, on the basis of an unfinished manuscript, and once I did finish it, sent it to five editors whom he thought might like it. Four days later, three of them had called back wanting to buy it, and we were kind of off to the races. I told him that by
