Mistress of the Bulge When The Scottish Prisoner was published, a bookseller friend turned to me in delight and said, ‘I think you’ve invented a new literary form – the bulge!’ In other words, a story that is neither sequel nor prequel, but lives inside an existing body of work. Now, frankly, I wish she had thought of something more poetic to describe my efforts, but I have to admit that ‘bulge’ has a bit more punch – with its vivid imagery of a snake that’s swallowed some large and squirming prey – than colourless terms like ‘interpolation’ or ‘inclusion’. I first wrote a short story fifteen years ago, mostly to see whether I could write something shorter than 300,000 words. It was an interesting technical challenge, but ‘short’ is not what you’d call one of my great natural skills. Still, I found the experience interesting, and since then have written the occasional short (well . . . sort of; it’s all relative, isn’t it?) piece when invited to contribute to an anthology now and then. Even though these stories are relatively brief, they’re almost all connected to (and integral parts of) the large series of novels that includes both the huge Outlander novels and the smaller historical mysteries focused on the character of Lord John Grey. These novellas too are bulges; stories that fill a lacuna in the main story or explore the life and times of secondary