WoJ transcription help needed + mention new WoJ's here

[Fannan]

These interviews/Q&A sessions are a pleasure to listen to and read, thank you all again, especially Serack, SO MUCH!!

[thelordbeans]

Edit, for Ghost Story release WoJ sources that are currently available on the internet it looks like the Kansas City signing is the only one that is not already either done, or pledged to be done by someone (someone has already done one segment of that one, but didn't pledge to do any others).  Now that someone gave me advice on how to post them on youtube, I will be posting the bits I have of the Bevercreek and Boston signing as soon as I get the chance, and then those will need transcriptions.

Cool, I'll get started soon

Edit: here's Part 1


Jim: So I'll come to a place and they'll ask me if I'm going to do a reading, and I can never really get behind that because I'd like to think that most of my fans can read. What I'd really rather do is question and answer, if that's okay with you guys... *audience agrees* ...but for that to work, somebody has to ask a question!

In what book will we find out who fixed Little Chicago?

Probably not until 19 or 20.  Since I'm a lazy writer, probably 20. I think that would be good for the last of the case files, so I'll hold off on that one.

Jim: I originally said that Changes was about the midpoint of the series, and he asked if earlier plots had pushed the middle point later, and if so does that mean we're getting more over the series before we got into the finale.

The midpoint of the story is not necessarily the geographical midpoint, it's sort of where things get good. *grin* I was just so confused after Changes came out and there was a little bit of a reaction *audience laughs* and I couldn't understand it because I was happy: "Come on he's dead! Now I can do the good stuff," and I guess we'll see how that works out. I occasionally forget that not everybody knows the whole story.

Any chance for another Dresden series like on TV?

I am willing to forgive Hollywood for killing the show when it did, and for Sorcerer's Aprentice. I'm just saying if you ever held up the posters... if it had been anyone but Nic Cage I might not have thought twice about it. The one actor in Hollywood that I know has read through the series, except for Valerie on the TV show, who played Murphy. She was the only one of the cast who had actually read the books and came up and started kneading me about them when I got to go visit the set. She was cool after that. Some people complained because she wasn't blonde but she's cool, she read the books.

Are you familiar with TV tropes and is Bob turning Orange and Blue a reference to one of them?

(LordBeans) http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlueAndOrangeMorality

Yes, I'm familiar with TV tropes but only because somebody said that I got put on there as one of the guys who is in the definition for doing Crowning Moments of Awesome. *Jim effects an excited voice* Okay I'll go surf there! But as far as the orange and blue thing, that's not a reference I know of. *audience mentions morality* Okay I'll have to go look! It's probably one of those things that got ingrained into me when I was watching who knows what. I always think that I think of something cool and original like Bob the skull himself I think is cool and original and then I sat down with my son one morning and watched the opening credits to old Scooby-Doo and said to myself "Aww man, I'm not nearly as cool as I thought." Then I watched the second reel of the Last Unicorn. (LordBeans - I don't know what this is a reference to) "Aww man, I was so cool a few minutes ago!"

I read the short story from Marcone's point of view, Even Hand, and I noticed that John Marcone is not his real name. Is that going to be significant?

Sure is if somebody tries to cast a spell at him using the name John Marcone! That would be a big deal. We'll have to see how that works out. Actually the character that's really interesting is the Mirror Mirror universe Marcone, and we'll get to him in a few books.

Are any of your places like Mac's pub based on real places?

No, except the ones that are based on real places. For example, the Field Museum, where I have actually been now. I've got pictures of myself coming right in front of Sue. Also the big Shedd Aquarium that they have there by the Field Museum. I got to go stand there by the big windows and look out on the tanks where they have whales and dolphins going by.
Just so you know, if you go by there and ask them: "Hey what would happen if these windows were broken? No, I need it for somebody's shot amount or something. No no, it's for professional reasons!" They do not have a sense of humour about it.

Are you thinking about writing a seventh book in the Alera series?

If I go back to Alera, it'll probably be years from now and I'll have to pay off my gambling debts or something - a good reason - and I would either go a couple of generations in the future where we would see a much steampunkier Alera after guys like Octavian got through messing the place up. Either that or I'd also give consideration to writing the incredible trouble-making angel A-team of cursors that Erin has to put up with, where one of them's a Canin and one of them is a Marat and so on, kind of a Justice League of cursors causing trouble. But it wouldn't be a story that's on the same "Let's animate mountains and smash the world" kind of scale that the first one was. I wouldn't want to disappoint by going back to that.

[thelordbeans]

Part 2

What about an anime or an animated movie for either series?

I would be delighted with those because then they could blow up as much stuff as they wanted, and it wouldn't really cost them any more than not blowing up stuff, which makes it a major difference from television. In my head it's kind of an animated series anyway, as I'm writing it. There's some moments where you can actually stop and say "Oh my gosh, what he's writing looks like an anime writer's panels," and yes, it does. It's what it is in my head; I just have to write it down that way.

Jim: Over here in the red shirt... you are expendable, sir!

Is there any real or historical person or place that you want to Dresden to interact with that you have not already?

Yeah, several, but I'm going to use them so I don't want to give away too much yet. I've also thought about going back and writing the French and Indian war in the Dresdenverse which would be really interesting because that's back when Ebenezar was a young hothead and most of the Senior Council guys were running around causing trouble, dumb enough to get into the kind of things Dresden does every book. We'd have sasquatches and the French and everything, it'd be a lot of fun.

Are there any clues or certain points in the books that you thought people might have picked up on by now but have not?

*After Jim repeats the question for the audience, the same audience member that asked the question also asks "And what are they?" to laughter*

Jim: I refuse to repeat that part of the question.

Actually, no. Everybody's picked up on I think all the major plot stuff that I've done, and pretty much somebody's picked up on all of them. Nobody's put them all together. In each individual part, where things get revealed as the plot goes on, in the future you're going to have people go "I called that!" and they get it. They would be wrong on like ninety percent of the rest but for that part, yeah, they nailed it. It's actually possible to put together the big story too because the guys who are researching the role playing game did it and were writing it in the book and I had to tell them, "NO! Stop that. You may not put that in the role playing handbook because you're giving things away that would be way more fun to give in the actual books. So don't do that or I'll scream and throw a fit at someone."

Is there anybody that you based Dresden on? How did you go about creating Dresden?

First of all, you have to understand that I created Dresden as an excercise in my writing-a-genre-fiction-novel writing class in order to prove to my writing teacher how wrong she was about all her ideas of writing. This was in the grad program of L.U.'s college of journalism and the professional writing program there, and she had been trying to give me very good advice for a long time, which I'd been ignoring because *Jim effects a slightly pretentious voice* I had a bachelor's degree in English literature, whereas she had merely published forty novels. So I'd been arguing and arguing with her for a couple of years and finally I said, "Okay, I'm just going to be her good little writing monkey this semester. I'm going to do all of her little worksheets and fill out all the little things and follow this very artificial, very terrible process that she's trying to get us to get involved in, and I'm going to show her what terrible, cookie-cutter papal crap comes out of it, and that's when I wrote Storm Front." (LordBeans: papal?) Which showed her!
Dresden himself I put together from two sources: one, classical long-term popular wizards, and two, long-term popular private I's. I started with Merlin and Sherlock, and those were the first two that I used. I started listing, in this very artificial process, all the common traits of these popular literary wizards and all the common traits between the successful Private I's. I noticed a couple of interesting cross-overs: one, all the wizards and Private I's get all of their real power from knowledge. They go find things out. That's what really makes them dangerous. What made Gandalf dangerous was not the fact that Gandalf had a medium-sized special effects budget that could throw fire and stuff like that. What made him dangerous was him running around, finding things out, and going down into the dark musty vaults of Minas Tirith and looking up all these old records and realizing, "Wait a minute, this is how we kill the guy!" Private I's kind of had to function the same way: You could have a Private I that was scrappy and good in a fight, somebody like Spencer who could box you to the ground if you want to play that kind of game, or they could just plug you if you want to play rough, but that's not really what makes him dangerous. What makes him dangerous is his ability to go places and find things out. Whether they're going to a literal underworld like the mines of Moria or going to a metaphoric underworld like the underside of the Boston crime scene, that's what they do. So I said, "Okay, well these are the things I want to put together. What else do I need from wizards? All wizards are grumpy. I'm going to put that in because it's just true. All Private I's are mouthy. As much as I could tell, all the popular ones. And they both tend to be arrogant. You look at Sherlock Holmes and he's a terribly arrogant character, kickingly so arrogant he almost seemed innocent of the fact that he was so smart. So what are the other things about the hard-boiled American private I's that make them popular characters? Well, they all mouth off to exactly the wrong people at exactly the wrong time, and they'll do it every time. And they can take an enormous beating, yet still drag themselves up and continue pursuing their goal. Those were the basic character traits I put together for Dresden."

Will the history of Collin Murphy - how he killed himself, et cetera - turn out to be important in any way?

Well, no. Because that would require that he actually killed himself. So I'll just leave it at that.

What do you feel is your biggest cliche?

An easier question would be what is my biggest avoidance of cliche, because there are far fewer of those.
The wizard with fireballs was probably it. I tried not to, but I played too much DnD when I was young. It was going to happen. I tried to avoid it but it didn't work out. Though I did have fun playing with fireballs in the same way we used to do in all the old DnD games: *effects nerdy voice* "3000 cubic feet of fire! And we're in a ten by ten hallway that's this long and still spread out by... and why are you slowing down the game with that? I'm saying it'simple math!" *audience laughs* Yeah, I'm in a room with kindred spirits here.

[Serack]

(LordBeans) http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlueAndOrangeMorality

It is often stated that any link to tvtropes must be accompanied with a warning

[thelordbeans]

It is often stated that any link to tvtropes must be accompanied with a warning

lol, I hope I can be excused considering my hyperlink showed the address of the site itself, which is named tvtropes.org

[thelordbeans]

Will we ever see Dresden forced into a situation where he may have to jump through time to do something?

That would require him breaking one of the laws of magic, and it's not as though I have seven books outlined, one for each law, or anything. We may, probably, possibly some see such as thing at some point.

Have you ever had the idea to have a short story of Dresden crossing over into another universe, like Star Wars?

No, because I don't want to get sued. However, just so you're aware the Dresden Files universe exists in a big, wide, spectral multi-verse. It's not like there's parallel Earths. There's an entire broadcast spectrum of parallel Earths, and if you go far enough you'll find the parallel that's where . You'll find the parallel Earth where Star Wars stuff works, and so on. Dresden could get there if he wanted to, but stop and think about that for a minute: Would you really want to go the Star Wars universe? Because you're not going to be a jedi over there. Really jedi are a lot scarier on the ground level than they are from passenger seat view next to one. You know, "There's a bunch of heavily armed fanatics with mind control powers here; they say they want to talk to you." That's kind of spooky.

The RPG mentions that you can have different Dresdens based on choices you made in past books, and is that for the RPG only?

No, they came up with that because they know I'm using that as a storyline in the future. Because I've said several times it's only going to be a matter of time before I can resist doing a Mirror Mirror episode of the Dresden Files. In fact, I think I'm just going to call it Mirror Mirror. It's a great title: the same number of letters and everything! My work is done.

Will the Jade Court vampires ever come up?

They might briefly come up in the big finale. They are in China, and they are isolationists, and they stay isolated. But yeah, there's are a gang of Chinese vampires that are no one to be trifled with. (I saw Princess Bride recently. If a bunch of references slip in I am sorry.)

As an author, when did you know that Maggie existed?

By book three. By book three I realized, "Oh, wait a minute, I have to do this," because I remember there being some huge uproar on The List and I was still kind of keeping track of things at the time. There's nothing that will get me riled up faster than a discussion on the Internet. There was somebody upset about the Laurell Hamilton books and going on steady with the argument that these books have devolved into BDSM* sex that have nothing to do with plot. So one of the counter arguments was, "How could you possibly have a BDSM sex scene that was actually plot relevant in any way?" *Jim makes the facial equivalent of "Well..." and the audience laughs* It could be done, plot relevant, there you go. So her existence was planned - though the specifics didn't get settled until a little later - but in book 3 was about where I figured it out.

Great, powerful wizards are staple, but generally speaking by the time that these big, powerful wizards get to the end, in terms of the big finale of the series, what they actually accomplish is fairly small. Are you planning something like that for Dresden?

Yes and no. The problem is that most of the wizards who do that are simply not the central character of the series. Gandalf: not the central character of the series - that's Sam. (Not Frodo. Frodo was not the central character. Frodo was a junkie who happened to be along for the ride. Sam was the man.) Similar with classic wizards like Merlin. Arthur was the center of that story, for the most part. Am I going to go all the way to the end of this to have Dresden be the one who pushes the button that says, "Destroy the universe? Yes : No."** It's not going to be anywhere near that simple. Hopefully, if I do it right - which I don't know, because I've never written a twenty book epic fantasy before - we'll set it up to where if it had been anybody else it would have ended in disaster. But because it's Dresden, we all get to keep getting along. If you're doing your job as a writer, by the time you get to the end of your story, any other individual other than that character whose making things happen... if somebody else had been there, it all would have ended horribly wrong. Hopefully I'll be able to do the same thing.

*You have no idea how long it took me to figure out that he was saying "BDSM"! Stupid initialisms.
**I never thought I'd use the ? : format outside of coding.

[thelordbeans]

Part of it was actually figuring out, 'Oh, wait a minute.  The actual plot that I thought was happening is not exactly the plot that I thought was happening.'  And that only came together in the last month or so. 

Sorry, that was bothering me.

[Crawker]

Yo Serack, you didn't update this translation on the front page, thought I'd let you know.

Notes:
-Video link
-I can't hear the place the woman asking the first question says before New York, can anyone make it out? (around 2:40 in video)
-I also can't hear what Paul Blackthorne had done in the second question (around 4:20)
-The video ends before the second question gets anywhere, so you might want to just cut the last bit


Host: Hi, welcome everybody!
{audience cheers}
Host: Welcome, to the second ever New York Comic Con which clearly is getting bigger and better, fantastic turnout, thank you so much for coming. My name's Jay Pow, I'm the general manager of the Sci Fi channel, based here in New York.
{audience claps}
Host: It's great fun to be in our home town as opposed to San Diego, which is on the other side of the country
{audience cheers}

Audience member: New York!

Host: We've got a great treat in store for you tonight, we're gonna give you a sneak preview of Sundays episodes of Dresden Files and Battlestar Galactica
{more cheers}
Host: You'll see them before anybody else, including me, I've not seen these two episodes so I'm looking forward to them as well. But before we kick off with that we've got fifteen minutes in which to introduce you to two new talent, new stars at Sci Fi; Paul Blackthorne
{loud cheers from audience, Paul nods}
Host: A talented actor I think we've seen on Sci Fi for a very long time
{applause}

Audience Member: We love you Paul!

Host: Dresden Files is the best new edition to our schedule of shows I think in the last five years. We're thrilled. And while Paul Blackthorne's character himself, he doesn't do potions, he doesn't do parties, but he does do Comic Con conventions.
{cheers from audience}
Host: And let me remind you, we would not be here without Jim Butcher!
{very loud cheers from audience}
Host: Jim started us off in 2000 with an amazing series of books; he's bringing out number 9 of this series in April, called White Night. He's just told me that he's mapped out 20 books, so that bodes incredibly well for Jim and the book series, and actually for our TV show as well, so welcome to you both and I'm going to take some questions from you guys for about 10 or 15 minutes, so go ahead:
{host gestures at audience}
Host: I'll pick someone close to the mic I hope. Oh yes actually if you could go out to the middle there's a mic just in the middle there, if you can just repeat the question.

Audience member: My name is Connie Coleman and I am now the biggest Dresden Files fan in {see notes} and maybe New York.
{a few laughs from audience}
Audience member: I've just read two of the books,it took me two days. And I just wanted to know, how you feel about how they adapted it for TV, and Mr Blackthorne, Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden, that's a great name, have you read the books and were you familiar with the material beforehand?

{Paul gestures to Jim}
Paul: Your question?

Jim: How I feel about it? You guys are getting to see the show tonight, I'm not even getting to see this episode yet! I can't even watch it on Sunday because my hotel doesn't have Sci Fi, I'm gonna have to wait and watch it on cable on Monday when I go back home! Which I'm disappointed about because I'm really enjoying the show. I like it a lot.

Paul: What was the question again, I'm sorry. Have I read the books, yes, yes I had all these wonderful ideas of reading all the books when I got the part, but of course I had no time to read them before doing the first pilot movie shot way back when. But I was able to read Storm Front after that, which of course I very much enjoyed, so. And then I didn't get a chance to read any other books because these scripts started coming in! So I figured I ought to concentrate on those. So yeah, Storm Front is the only one I've read. The first story. Next?

Audience member: Well Paul, I have read online that you had done {see notes} and {see notes} and I'm also quite priveleged I totally think that's awesome. And I -


End of video

I'll do some more this week.

[Crawker]

Sorry Serack, this one too:

Suduvu interview video
Transcription by Crawker


Notes:
-Video link


Jim: Hi I'm Jim Butcher, I'm the author of The Dresden Files.

Interviewer: Now The Dresden Files, for those that aren't familiar is?

Jim: The Dresden Files is a series of books about Harry Dresden, He's a private investigator in Chicago who also happens to be the only professional wizard in the phonebook. Dresden gets involved in all the cases the police run into where there's something wierd going on that they're not set up to handle on their own. So when there's a vampire attack, when a fairy swoops down and abducts a child it's Dresden who's the one that gets called to look into it.

Interviewer: I know with a series of books like yours it's got a complicated chronology and back characters and a whole universe. What are the challenges of working with that from book to book?

Jim: I think that the main challenge is the fact that the readers know it so much better than I do. By the time I've finished a book, I've written maybe seven or eight slightly different versions of the same book and not only that but there's also all the versions I could've written in my head and didn't, and they're all sort of bumping off one another in my brain, but the reader only gets the final one. So they know. Fortunately readers these days make wikipedias so I can go to the Dresden Files wiki and look things up now, so I can make sure to get the details right.

Interviewer: Now I understand you've got a new book coming out, a collection. Is that right?

Jim: Yes, October 26th, the new book is called Side Jobs, it's a collection of the short stories that I've written for The Dresden Files over the years. It ranges from my very first Dresden Files piece that I ever wrote, which was a short story which is fairly awful, to all the different short stories that I wrote for various different anthologies. A lot of readers couldn't afford to go out and buy eight or nine different anthologies so I said "Hey I'll try and get all my short stories together in one book." and not only that, at the very end it contains the novella Aftermath, it's set about 45 minutes after the end of Changes, it's from Murphy's point of view and you kinda get to see some of the fallout of what's happened after the last novel.

Interviewer: Now I found a couple of people on twitter asking, because I mentioned I was interviewing you, they wanted to know whether you'd ever considered writing about any of the other secondary characters, maybe giving them their own stories, their own novels, set in the same Dresdenverse but not...

Jim: The only time I've done other characters has been in the short stories, I think that the main novels that we're on are definately gonna be from Dresden's point of view. I think it's possible that in the future, I don't know maybe I'll have to pay off gambling debts or something, and want to go back to The Dresden Files after I'm done and be able to write the stories from the other people that were living at the same time Dresden was doing his thing. I know there's all these stories in my head about what these other characters are actually going through, as opposed to what Dresden thinks they're going through, so it's possible we could do something like that.

Interviewer: Now I also know that The Dresden Files has been sort of merging into other forms of media, there's a roleplaying game that Fred Hicks worked on is this right?

Jim: Yes, yes.

Interviewer: Have you had much involvement with that or...?

Jim: My involvement with The Dresden Files roleplaying game was largely sitting down and talking to folks about the Dresden files universe, it was reading through all the stuff that they'd read, and they were so into it, some of them were going, they were drawing conclusions and I had to tell 'em "You can't put that in the book, it won't come out in the novels until book fourteen! Don't blow it for me!" But they worked very, very hard on it I don't think I've ever seen something that as many people put so much love into creating. And the book's just gorgeous too, it's far prettier than the Dungeons and Dragons rulebook so I've got the prettiest book.
{interviewer laughs}

Interviewer: Well what is it like to be a writer and to know other people are going to go traipsing around the world that you created?

Jim: More power to 'em, have a good time guys. Actually I've dropped in on a couple of groups in the Kans City area who were playing the game, there was one game set in Prague and another set in Kans City, and they seemed to be having a good time, and that's the point. The whole point of writing the novels to begin with is for folks to enjoy and have a good time with, so they're gonna go playing around the story world? OK have fun! That's awesome!

Interviewer: So did you ever see yourself at the beginning of your career getting to a point where you would have to issue a book collecting all of your short stories? Did you ever see yourself doing that?

Jim: No... no, no I never really... I've been fairly mystified by my success. But I like to think that I've been very fortunately stupid in a couple of places and in a lot of other places just worked hard enough to make things work. But I've been very fortunate and I've been very fortunate to have such a great crowd of readers. They're like cultists or maybe drug pushers, that's what I always get. "He's the high priest of Dresden in our neighbourhood", or "Oh yeah, I gave her the first 3 books for free" So OK we've got cult drug dealers. Thank you guys.

Interviewer: Well do you have anything else you want to say to your readers?

Jim: I know a lot of people that say "Hey Jim, what's with the cliffhanger at the end of Changes?" And I can only say to you; a cliffhanger is what you don't know what happened. Changes was: Dresden sets out to do anything to save his daughter even if it means getting killed and he did. The end. But not the end of the story, so we'll keep going with Harry's story in book thirteen, Ghost Story.

Interviewer: Thanks very much!

Jim: Thank you.


End of interview

[Serack]

np, you don't have to quote the whole thing, just link to the post.

Actually, more than np, thanks for going through the additional effort of checking behind me and pointing out the ones that I missed when I last updated the list.

*goes and checks to make sure there weren't any other crawker transcripts he missed*

[jeno]

Hey Serack, did you ever get this interview? http://www.wizardsharry.com/dresden5.html 

[Crawker]

np, you don't have to quote the whole thing, just link to the post.

Actually, more than np, thanks for going through the additional effort of checking behind me and pointing out the ones that I missed when I last updated the list.

*goes and checks to make sure there weren't any other crawker transcripts he missed*

I think that was it, but I'll do some more this weekend.
And you can link to certain posts? How? Or did you just mean the page its on?

[Serack]

Hey Serack, did you ever get this interview? http://www.wizardsharry.com/dresden5.html

That's Jim's sister's website, it's the first link in my interview list grouped by year (the current iteration of which is here)

I can't take credit for finding it though, Tiracakes had it in her older version of the interview link list.  I actually got to meet her at the DC signing

[AcornArmy]

It's been a while with no updates on the DC Q&A, so I did most of it today. I haven't transcribed the answer to every question, but the ones I haven't transcribed were about things other than the plot of Jim's books. In those places, I've written down the questions and the approximate time at which they occur, on which video segment. Eventually, I'll go back and transcribe those, too, unless someone else has a burning desire to do so. *looks around hopefully* These questions have a "...." above and below them, to separate them from the others.

I've done my best to transcribe every answer word for word, paraphrasing only when I really needed to in order to make the answer intelligible, because sometimes he gets interrupted by the audience. When I'm paraphrasing, I enclose the statements with brackets: [ ].

Q&A with Jim Butcher at a Barnes & Noble in Washington, D.C. August 1, 2011 - Part 1

Link to the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wKr8UERpto

Q: Does Ivy know everything Bob knows?

A: Man, talk about an obscure question. Probably the vast majority of it, yeah, although Ivy's more oriented toward things that are happening on Earth, and Bob has sources all over. [messing with the microphone] So, I would say it's more an issue of, they have different fields of information available to them. They don't, like, have a comparable database.

Q: So Ivy doesn't get what Bob gets as soon as Bob gets it?

A: No.

Q: What is the publishing goal for Cold Days?

A: I don't know. It's due next June, I would anticipate it would be around this time. I've got the first sentence done, though, and that's the hard part. Now I've just got like 150,000 more words to go.

Q: Have we seen the last of Lasciel?

A: No, her story's not over. Actually, she's mentioned in Ghost Story, although not by name.

Q: What's with the hat on all the covers of the books?

A: The art department at Penguin thought that was the perfect visual shorthand for wizard detective. 'Cause he's got the wizard stick and the detective hat. So that's why they've done it.

....
What's a typical day of writing for me? ~3:01, Part 1
....
How come Marsters isn't doing the voice acting on the audio of GS? ~3:50, Part 1
....
How much magical theory do you read? ~4:50, Part 1
....

Q: What happened to Toot-toot? Is he getting pizza?

A: I only get to do this to the faces of the readers every so often: [sing-song]I'm not gonna tell you![/sing-song] 'Cause it's way more fun to read in the book.

Q: --he gets pizza, though, right?

A: --maybe, maybe not. You don't know yet. But the next book is going to be much concerned with faeries, so definitely Toot-toot is going to be participating.

....
Do I play the Dresden Files RPG?
....

Q: Who's first on Mab's hit list?

A: That'll be another "I'm not gonna tell you," because we'll find out in Chapter One of the next book. As soon as I write it.

Q: How close is your personality to Harry's personality?

A: Harry is the guy I would like to think I would be if someone handed me his kind of power-- but I think I would really end up one of those giggling villains. Actually, we're not terribly similar. We share a taste in T-shirts and Burger King, that's about it.

....
Q: Am I planning on writing any more material in the near future for the Dresden Files RPG? ~8:01, Part 1

A: Maybe, I have no objection to writing more material-- [but time constraints make it seem unlikely for the near future.]
....

Q: You've established in the books that Morgan's sword is the one used for executions in the books. Does it predate Luccio?

A: No. Morgan's sword was used because Morgan was the guy who would do it and not have nightmares afterwards. Or, you know actually, point of fact, he probably did have nightmares afterwards, but he would tell everybody that he didn't. He was one of those guys who was very big on the, "don't ever give somebody an order that you wouldn't follow yourself," sort of line of thought. So, lopping off heads? Sure, absolutely, somebody has to do it. That's the kind of guy he was. I mean, kind of a jerk, but he had some redeeming features, too.

[AcornArmy]

Link to the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mzs9aU7KEwo

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Is Harry Dresden going to make it to the screen again? ~0:01, Part 2
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If you had a choice, who would you have play Harry on-screen? ~1:00, Part 2
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Q: Do you think Murphy will take up the Sword for good?

A: Um, [sing-song]I'm not gonna tell you![/sing-song]

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Do you still find time to LARP? ~2:00, Part 2
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Q: What are the chances of me writing another Alera series, or another series in general?

A: 100%, because I have to get a break from that Dresden guy, or I'll hate him. By the time I get to the end of a book it's like, "Man, I am so sick of hanging out with you." It's not that he's a bad guy or anything, it's just like, you know, when you have family come to visit, and the first three or four days is great, and after that it's just a ticking clock until somebody picks up a knife. But, yeah, I'm working on a trilogy now that is probably going to be the prequel trilogy to my epic Epic Fantasy Epic that I'm gonna write one day. "It's so epic it needs a prequel trilogy!" It's largely inspired by the Black Company.

Q: Who is your favorite author?

A: Robert Parker.

[Audience: You should have said Shannon!]

A: I probably should have said Shannon, but she wouldn't have believed me because, you know, I haven't read her stuff. [Further answer ~4:30, Part 2]

Q: You mentioned Robert Parker, is there any connection between that and the Susan character and her fate.

A: No, not really. I had to name her something, so it was Susan. Actually, I think it was the Tick that influenced that more than anything. "Susan?" "Oh, now you're not even trying!"

Q: Jim: He wants to know the first sentence of the next book. [stuff about spoiling people, then--]

A: "Mab has unique ideas on physical therapy." And we'll kind of go from there.

Q: She writes and she knows there are always 8 billion super-cool things that she comes up with and that she couldn't fit into the book with a crowbar, and wonders if Jim is the same and could he tell us some of them.

A: Really, my process doesn't work like that. I'm a fundamentally lazy writer, I try and build the book as lean as I possibly can, just because it makes the editor's job easier and then they like me and take me out to dinner. There are a few things that have gotten taken out. When I was working with Jan Heddel(sp?) she came back with the manuscript to Grave Peril and said, "This is awesome, and I want you to expand on these four story lines, and cut the book by fifty pages." And I said, so you want me to make the book larger and smaller? And she said, "Yes! And hurry." There was a scene with a ghoul that had I planned on using for ghoul-related foo in Chicago that I had to delete. There was a vampire attack where the vampire tried to tear out the Blue Beetle's engine, and didn't realize that it was in the back, not the front. But those are the only really large things that I dropped.

Q: Is Carlos still a virgin?

A: I'm not gonna tell you.

Q: Are we ever going to see Sue the T-Rex again?

A: Are you kidding? I couldn't just let that sit. It might be awhile, but we're gonna get her out again, because that was just too cool to not do again.

Q: Have we met the people who created the Hexenwolf belts yet?

A: That's another "I'm not gonna tell you" question. I will say, "kind of," "not really," and "yes." But we'll get into more of that during Cold Days as well.

Q: Are we ever going to see the Jade Court get involved in things?

A: They're really isolationist, which means they really don't care what's happening outside of their own sphere of influence, which is largely China. We're not going to see them, definitely, in any of the case books. They might show up in the big old trilogy I'm going to do at the end. That's the plan, in case you didn't know, there are going to be about twenty-ish of the Dresden Files, depending on whether or not my kid goes to grad school. And then I'm gonna write a big old apocalyptic trilogy for the very end.