Diana Gabaldon said one month after the ninth book was published that she had already begun writing book 10.
Just one month after "Go Tell The Bees That I Am Gone" was published in November 2021, Gabaldon told Town & Country that she had already gotten stuck into "the beginnings" of the new novel, which she has not yet named.
"I have started writing that, but I'm just poking away at it little by little, because there's so much interference from the book launch stuff going on that I can't work with my usual focus," she said at the time.
Gabaldon added: "It's just beginning to bubble, like the tar pits at La Brea, these rising bubbles and there's a lot of bones underneath."
Some six months later in May 2022, she shared on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that she had "barely begun Book 10."
On her website, Gabaldon has made it quite clear that she does not know when the 10th book will be released, writing: "Sorry, I don't know when I will finish Book Ten, much less when it will be published."
"It takes a long time to write an 800-page novel and also do all the historical and other background research that is required," she added.
Gabaldon said that as a "very rough guess" she predicts it could land on shelves "about three to five years" after "Bees," which gives us a wide window of any time between 2024 and 2026.
That will certainly be good news to fans who experienced a seven-year wait between the publication of the eighth novel, "Written in My Own Heart's Blood," which came out in 2014, and "Bees."
Gabaldon has put the lengthy gap wait between those two novels down to the fact that writing the latest novel coincided with her role as a consultant on the television adaptation.
In an interview with TV Insider this year, she joked that finishing the 10th novel as soon as possible is in her best interest too. "The bottom line is, I'm 71. I don't know how long I'll last. I want to be sure of finishing," she said.
Gabaldon has shared that the story will end on the cusp of the 19th century meaning that, if Jamie and Claire survive until the end, they will be 79 and 83, respectively.
"I think the Outlander books will end in 1800. If this tells you anything, more power to you," she wrote in the FAQ section of her website.
She added that "the last book will have a happy ending, though I confidently expect it to leave the readers in floods of tears, anyway."
It's the question that every fan has been asking since the very first book, and first episode of the Starz adaptation: how and why was Jamie's ghost watching Claire in 1945 before she took her life-changing tumble through the standing stones?
"The ghost is Jamie — but as for how it fits into the story, All Will Be Explained — in the last book," Gabaldon wrote in the FAQ section of her website.
Speaking on the "Outlander Podcast" in 2014, Gabaldon revealed the age of Jamie's ghost in the scene. "He's about 25," she said, which only sparks more questions about what is going on in the scene, given that Jamie definitively does not die at 25 years old.
Interestingly, that is the age when he fights in — and survives — the Battle of Culloden, so his near-death experience in the aftermath of the fighting could explain it.
Readers won't know for certain until the final book is published, but Gabaldon has shared another intriguing detail about the ghost, telling a fan on X (formerly known as Twitter) who asked about it: "Ghosts don't exist in a place where time has meaning."
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