Fast Forward, Contemporary Science Fiction interviewTom Schaad: And we're here with Jim Butcher, author of Ghost Story. Jim Welcome to the show.
Jim: Thank you very much.
Tom Schaad: It's been a long time waiting to get you on the east coast to where we could snag you away from a book tour and talk to you about this series. How many times have you done this kind of a big tour like you're just completing?
Jim: I started it the same year that Proven Guilty came out, which was in 2008 I think. So this is tour number four.
Tom Schaad: Have you noticed any change, in the rhythm of the tour, in the response of your readers in that time?
Jim: Well the readers are always great, weather you are at a small convention, or at a big book store somewhere, they are always fun guys, but I noticed that my wrist is getting more sore, so I suppose I am signing a few more books.
Tom Schaad: That's not a bad thing for an author to say.
Jim: Oh, that's an awesome problem. I like having that problem.
Tom Schaad: Now lets talk about this book. The thirteenth novel in the chronicles of Harry Dresden. Now there were a lot of people who you disagree with because they call the ending of your last book,
Changes, as a cliffhanger. And I don't know why they would think that having the protagonist shot and falling off a boat and going into the water a cliffhanger of any kind.
Jim: Yah, well technically speaking, a cliffhanger is when there is something in progress and you don't know what is going to happen.
Changes was a book that was all about Harry going out to rescue his daughter, even if it kills him, and it does. The End. That didn't seem to be cliffhangery to me, but I sometimes forget that everybody else doesn't know the whole rest of the story to the end of the series.
Tom Schaad: Actually,
Ghost Story, although it has it's own little arc and everything like that, is really as much about change as anything that happened in the previous novel. I mean a lot of changes are going on. A lot of things are happening. There is this seismic shock wave traveling through the Harry Dresden universe right now and things haven't even close to settled down so that people can look around and figure out what the landscape is like now. And I wanted to talk about one aspect of this that seemed to show itself in terms of the scheduling of the publication of this novel. This one came out a little later than it was originally planned to come out.
Jim: Indeed, about a three month delay.
Tom Schaad: And in the opening statement of the book, you talk about that a little bit. You thank a lot of the people you work with on a regular basis, and the people that you live with on a continual basis for their patience and forbearance while you finally finish this book. What was it about
this particular novel that required you to take more time to get to the point where you were satisfied?
Jim: There were several contributing factors. One of which was that my son had gone off to college, so that's a major kind of re balancing thing in your life when you know there's not this small person that you're supposed to be dad to anymore.
Tom Schaad: But congratulations on that.
Jim: Oh, well thank you very much. As the series gains success there's been more and more obligations that I need to meet as an author, which take more and more of my time. And then for another, this was a really different book. Instead of Dresden kicking down the door and solving problems that way, he had to do everything indirectly. He had to accomplish all his goals by being able to talk to people. And that was a very different set of solutions and I wasn't very used to working with that. I'm much more comfortable with kicking down the door and blowing something up.
Tom Schaad: Well you can have him walk through the doors, you do several times (
Jim: That's true, that's true) because he is a ghost.
Jim: Yah that was a whole lot of fun. At the beginning of the series, I knew that I wanted to kill my protagonist and have him solve his own murder in book thirteen. If I ever got to book thirteen, that was the plan.
Tom Schaad: It's a really fun book to read, and I really did enjoy it. You cost me about twenty four hours of my life, thank you very much. (
Jim: You're welcome) But there were some things I found in this book as a recurring theme. It's been in some of the other stories you have written about Harry Dresden, some of the things I found were basically explicitly discussed and examined. And one of them is the impact and the reality of unintended consequences, and for Harry, because his actions are so huge and gigantic, and have such a big impact... well we can talk about
Changes because it's already been out for over a year, I mean the absolute destruction of the Red Court of vampires leaving this huge power vacuum that has to be filled by something, is just a part of what he has to deal with and try to address in this novel. Is that one of the things you have been working up to in terms of specifically examining it? Is it something that you feel you talked about a number of times in these books?
Jim: Yah I have talked about it a number of times, how the consequences of ones' choices will come back to haunt you, good or bad. No matter what you do, you can't escape the consequences of what you've chosen to do. And for Harry, it's a little more dramatic, because he's basically a super hero, but in some of this he has to face up to the consequences of what he's done. And in the last book at some point, he was facing this horrible situation and he had his daughter he was going to rescue and people would say, if you do this, it's going to cause all this harm, it's going to set the world on fire, and he said, "Let the world burn, me and the kid will roast marshmallows." You know, that was his attitude going in. But he gets to find out later that he is getting faced with the reality of that choice, and real people are getting hurt because of it. And that is something that is going to effect him very deeply for the rest of the series.
Tom Schaad: And it is interesting, Harry's character does tend to have tunnel vision. Occasionally it is because of combat and a lack of oxygen to the brain, but often (Jim chuckles) it's just his own personal way of viewing the world, he's very linear, which a lot of people comment on this novel. That you're so linear, weather it's the fae or the others, this linear thing you've got going is really limiting you.
Jim: Yah, Harry is all about straight lines.
Tom Schaad: Usually with flames traveling along them in many instances.
Jim: Indeed, well I think that's in some measure it reflects part of the mindset of somebody who has to deal with life or death situations. If you're a salesman and you're negotiating a sale, or if you're a politician and you're negotiating a bill, compromise is something you expect and something that you aim for. So it's alright to get there sort of eventually by a circuitous rout. For Dresden, the things he deals with, if he doesn't take care of them, somebody's going to die. And there's just no compromise when it's life and death, you only have one or the other. And that's sort of where he's been.
Tom Schaad: And in many cases, you've put him in situations, well or the universe that you've created has put him in situations, where there's not time to seek compromise. You know, it's gonna happen now, make up you're mind, lets get down to it, let's do it. (
Jim: Right) You really do kind of hit the accelerator, usually about five paragraphs in, if we aren't already blowing something up in the first paragraph in a lot of your stories. You obviously enjoy writing this style, and you obviously have a talent for it because you appeal to so many readers in terms of this mixture of the supernatural and the detective noir. I mean Harry is, one of the things that everybody loves about Harry is he is such an unreconstituted smart ass. (
Jim: chuckles Yah, not that I'm like that or anything, but yah) And I'm sure this is the kind of thing that would get you kicked out of high school in a New York minute, is just reflexively responding with a shot back. I mean it's almost like watching somebody play verbal tennis sometimes. You know, he's either bleeding on the floor and he's still cracking wise, I mean people dream about being able to do that.
Jim: That was one of the private I. traits that I sort of borrowed when I put Dresden together. He's sort of a Frankenstein of classical and more recent wizards and the very successful, hard boiled PI's, and one of the things that I always admired about the PI's was their ability to say the worst
thing possible, at the worst
time possible, to the worst person possible,
every time. And that's one of the really fun things I get to do with that character.
Tom Schaad: Now we're thirteen novels, a collection of short stories, a number of other novels that you've written in the codex, and three novels that you started out as you were learning how to write and developing your skill as a writer that still have not been published-
Jim: And won't be. I wouldn't have made Osama bin Laden read those novels. They were awful at first.
Tom Schaad: But let's talk about you as a writer. From the time that the first Harry Dresden novel was accepted and published, to now, has anything changed, have you seen any changes in yourself and the creative process that you use and the tools that you've developed that has changed as you continue to write and continue to create and expand this rather complicated world that you've built.
Jim: Well it is a big complicated world, but as long as you can try to build it on the same principles of logic, you can add new stuff to it, or you remember how the old stuff works much easier than you could if it was a "real" world. Where a lot of times, things just don't make sense. As far as my writing process goes, that's stayed pretty much the same. I do most of my writing at night and I'll start around 10 or 11 oclock and writ until 5 or 6 in the morning. Well that's the only time that's quiet. There's never going to be anybody that's going to call me or interrupt me with anything. Plus it works out well because my wife writes as well, but the process is, I'll write a chapter, I'll send it off to a group of beta readers, with my goal being to make them scream for ending the chapter at
that point, and why isn't the next chapter written. Which I think has been an unintended consequence of my process that has helped the books be very successful is that I try and make sure that it's hard to stop reading at the end of a chapter and (Tom Schaad: Oh you succeed at that far too well) then you stay up all night, and enjoy the book. I really like that.
Tom Schaad: I want to talk about one of the other themes. They are my obsessions, not anybody else's. There is a rather long discussion as to what constitutes free will as an element in the back end of this book. Is what is presented and discussed as a concept, your own philosophy? How did that come about, the idea that free will is making your choices based upon truth.
Jim: Right, and in the Dresden Files universe it's a vital component. It's what devides mortals, human beings, from everybody else. Is that we're the ones that have elements of both good and evil inside us, we're the ones who get to chose what to do. And because that's who we are, we make the world around us through those choices. The forces of the universe, these cosmic forces are always ballanced against one another, and we're the ones who can tilt that see-saw one way or another with our actions. I think that is largely true in real life, but it is certainly a very fun, dramatic use of the concept of free will for writing with. It's very important in general, and that's why Harry, as he's gotten more mature, he's striven so much harder to make sure that other people have a choice, you know, he's not trying to make choices for people any more, he's trying to make sure that they know what's going on, and can make an informed choice.
Tom Schaad: I think that we forget, because we've had so many of these books that we have been able to read and we have been able follow along in all these adventures, how compressed the time line is really in terms of what's happened in the first thirteen novels. I mean, half the time Harry hasn't been able to complete the healing process before he's tossed in the cauldron again. And as a wizard, you talk a lot in the books about how old the fae are, and how old the vampires are, and how old many of the members of the White Council are because wizards are extremely long lived. And yet Harry's still a
young pup compared to most of these people, he's just been played around like a ping pong ball for the last five, eight, ten years?
Jim: Yah, a ping pong ball filled with nitroglycerin.
Tom Schaad: Yah, nitroglycerin is a good attitude, and quite honestly it does as much damage to the ping pong ball as it does to everybody else. (
Jim: Indeed, exactly) Harry is one banged up dude! But because he is in this situation, you get a chance to revisit some acquaintances he's made in some of the previous books. I'm thinking of several characters. A necromancer, Morty, another character that has slowly grown, Butters, who works in the morgue, and actually is the one that does most of the autopsies on supernatural beings because he's the only one who admits that that's what they are. And he see's them because he can't interact with them because he can't be the driving force in the physical action that takes place He see's them in an entirely new light. Was that fun to kind of grow these guy's out and show them differently?
Jim: It was very fun, and very difficult, which is another reason that the book stretched out so long. I had to face all these problems, and that's what the people who left Chicago when he died had to do as well. They had to suddenly address these problems as well, they had to suddenly address these problems that are happening. You know, Harry had no idea how long a shadow he cast when he was alive, and how many things avoided the city because everybody knew that you know that crazy guy Harry Dresden lived there. And now that he's gone, everyone else had to kind of try and step into his shoes and he has really big shoes.
Tom Schaad: But as we see as we go through the book, some of them are going a really good job, I mean considering what their own natural gifts are, and everything else like that, they are really... weather it's following his example or weather it's just basically not having him to take the load and them taking the load and realizing how strong they were. A lot of them are doing an incredible job in an incredibly difficult situation. Physically and emotionally.
Jim: And they are able to do it because they kind of have an idea what's out there and of how to approach going up against it. They know their own limitations, and they know the things out there aren't invulnerable either, and that's stuff that they learned from Dresden. I mean, this entire book, all the folks that are still running around Chicago, their running around still trying to defend the City, because Harry was an example of how to do it. I think in the series, one of the things that I hadn't actually planned out which has come forward is that the main facet of Dresden's character is not that he's personally tough, or personally a good wise ass, but that he is able to empower the people around him to become something more than they were. And as he does that suddenly he finds himself standing with these allies who are very, very capable. In part because he's shown them how to be so.
Tom Schaad: This was the thirteenth novel, and this was a tough slog for you. Of course everybody is already asking you about the next book. It's what we do, it's part of the dynamic. (
Jim: Oh they read so much faster than I write!) Now these too books,
Changes, and
Ghost Story go together very tightly. They are very tightly connected as part of a process. Is that process, are you finished with this, are you now moving on to another series of set pieces, or is this only, where are we going now. Where do you want to go with the story of Harry?
Jim: Well the next story is called
Cold Days. And I don't want to leave any spoilers, but for those who've already read the book, they will have an idea of why it's called Cold Days. And I really think of
Changes,
Ghost Story, and
Cold Days as kind of a three piece set. Where Harry is pulled out of all of his usual haunts, all of his usual routine (
Tom Schaad: Well you've blown most of them up) Well yes I did, a bunch of them blew up. It's what I do. The great part about being a writer, as opposed to a film maker is I can blow up Chicago or not blow up Chicago, it costs me just as much. In any case, I think the third book will be something that is very interesting. It will be a lot of fun. I'm anticipating it gleefully now which is very good because a few months ago I couldn't stand this guy, I was sick of him. But we will get to
Cold Days, and we will have a good time.
Tom Schaad: And with that we will have to end this interview because we have run out of time but what a great place to stop.
Jim: Thank you very much.
Tom Schaad: Jim thanks for stopping by, thank you very much for Ghost Story, and we will look forward to many more years to come of you not getting sick of Harry Dresden.
Jim: As long as I can take some time away, and work on something else. Which I have been doing the past couple of months, it's much more fun to go back to Dresden's world. It's kind of hard to do it back to back.
Tom Schaad: Thank you again
Jim: Well you're welcome.
Tom Schaad: Well that's it for this addition of Fast Forward. We hope you found something of interest, we hope you come see us again, and until then this is Tom Schaad saying, Take Care.
