Diana Gabaldon doesn’t defy genre distinctions – she spits in their faces.

Where other writers break a sweat and tear out their hair at the moment when their books get classified by publishers and booksellers, Gabaldon just sits back and lets the market try – just try! – to categorize her.

Fiction. Literary fiction. Historical fiction. Science fiction. Fantasy. Military fiction. Military History. Lesbian Fiction. Horror.

Her books have been placed on practically every fiction shelf in the store.

“All of my books are different,” Gabaldon said in a telephone interview from her home in Scottsdale, Arizona. “I never like to do the same thing twice, but the characters themselves change from book to book."

Gabaldon is a household name for her wildly popular Outlander series, which tells the love story of a time-traveling, 20th century nurse Clare Randall and her 18th century Scotsman husband, Jamie Fraser.

Gabaldon holds a reading of the seventh book in the series, "An Echo in the Bone," at the Salem Public Library’s Loucks Auditorium as part of her most current publicity tour on Monday, October 5 at 12:30 p.m. Although all 200 free tickets the library was distributing for the event are gone, any remaining seats are available beginning ten minutes before the event.

Far-fetched as the series’ premise of may seem, her books achieve a believability that can only come from a woman whose own story has reached the level of literary myth.

Gabaldon, who has degrees in marine biology and zoology and who started writing while in graduate school, set out one day to write a historical novel. So after watching an episode of Dr. Who in which the eponymous doc encounters a young highlander, she borrowed a couple hundred books on Scotland from the library and began her research.

“I knew it had to take place somewhere,” Gabaldon said. “I really knew nothing about Scotland or the 18th century. I just figured I would steal stuff from the historical record.”

Gabaldon soon had some fetching men in kilts together in a room. But she knew she had to have a female character to play off of them, so into the scene she sent Clare Randall, an Englishwoman.

“She started saying all of these smart-ass, 20th century modern remarks and started taking over the story,” Gabaldon said.

She posted a story draft on a CompuServe writer’s forum, eventually attracting the attention of a famous science fiction writer – and his agent.

Writing these characters hasn’t become any easier for Gabaldon, who still approaches fiction the same way she did in the beginning – an undertaking that is just as mysterious as the prospect of time travel.

She starts with a single image, a single seed. Then she imagines a scene and lets the dialogue fill itself in until that seed becomes a scene and she can see it concretely.

Then she sits and stares.

“All the while the back of my head is turning the compost in my mind to fill in the details,” Gabaldon said.

That seed grows backward and forward; sometimes the original kernel disappears entirely. But she moves onto another seed, and another, until she has handfuls, and bits and pieces, which she lets linger while she sets out to establish a book’s historical background.

“In the end I am juggling all of this stuff, and it’s all floating in my head like stars,” Gabaldon said in a breathless rasp. “With luck, I will see the shape of the book.”

That “shape” Gabaldon’s most recent book can be found on the book’s cover image, a four-pointed star signifying the four story lines that run through "An Echo in the Bone."

The novel picks up with Clare and Jamie in the heady days before the American Revolution, but also tells the story of their daughter Brianna and her husband Roger McKenzie, who are following the mystery of her parents’ lives through a series of letters written 200 years ago.

The book culminates in the author’s richly-rendered depiction of the Battle of Saratoga, the deciding conflict of the American Revolution.

“The more I read about the battle, the more the reference material led the book in a different direction,” Gabaldon said. “I walked that battlefield three times.”

Like the other Outlander books, "An Echo in the Bone" is, in its essence, a love story. No one writes love scenes like Gabaldon – the kind of breathless, carnal, take-me-as-I-am, physical lust fests that would seem cheesy if they had come from any other hand than hers.

“My intimate scenes always flow from the characters,” Gabaldon said. “I can’t write a love scene in cold blood – they come naturally or they don’t come at all.”