Naperville (Chicago area) Signing Q&A Part 3Transcription by dagaetch
How strong is Demonreach compared to Mab, Nicodemus, and all the other antagonists Harry faces?That’s depending on where you stand. Like literally your GPS coordinates. If you’re in the right spot, don’t mess with Demonreach, and if you’re not, who cares. He’s one of those situations. If you want to go out to that island and play, you better bring your A game, is the way it works out.
Why did you choose Chicago as the base for the Dresden Files?Because my teacher would not let me set it in Kansas City, my hometown. She said “Jim, I really think this is gonna get published, and you’re already walking close enough to Laurel Hamilton’s toes that you do not need to set your series in Missouri as well. Pick another city.” And I said “What other city?” “Any other city it doesn’t matter, just not there.” I’m like okay, there’s a globe on her desk, it’s got four American cities on it. I don’t want to do New York because superheroes have that all sewn up. I don’t want to do D.C., because then you have to write politics, and you’re going to lose people who don’t like your politics, where you stand. Los Angeles was on the map, but I didn’t want to do L.A. because then, then I’d have to find out about L.A. And you know, Hollywood and everybody are around to find out things about them, they’re fine. So last city there was Chicago, I said “How about Chicago” and she said “Yeah that’ll be fine.” So okay, I guess I better learn about Chicago. Somewhere around book 3 I actually did that. I mean beyond like consulting maps and so on, that was around the time where the internet was actually starting to come into full swing and I was able to make contact with people who actually live there, and be able to say “Hey, I need to know what the east wall of Dresden’s cemetery looks like.” “Oh, yeah, I drive by it on the way to work, I’ll take a picture on my phone and email it to you by lunch!” It’s like, wow! This is a great day in which to be a writer.
How many more books of Harry can we look forward to?I’m going to write about 20ish of the case files, like we’ve seen so far, there are a few things that can change that including parts of the story that I haven’t realized I have to tell yet, or my son going to graduate school. But after we’re done with the case books, then I’ll write a big old apocalyptic trilogy to kind of capstone the whole thing, because you know, who doesn’t love apocalyptic trilogies. That would be the point at which we’re bringing aircraft carriers and space shuttles into the story. Well, I guess not space shuttles really, we’ll have to figure something else out.
*audience: awwww* Well, obsolete enough technology, maybe it would work, it’s certainly going to be more robust than anything brand new.
[paraphrased due to length] Why hasn’t Harry told everyone (Michael, etc) about the thing with the necktie on Nicodemus?Because c’mon man, he’s a wizard! Wizards don’t tell you things, wizards deliberately don’t tell you things, and then feel smug about it. Actually, he probably didn’t tell the White Council because he figures “Hey, maybe I’ll need a necktie one day.” He probably didn’t mention it to Michael because it just didn’t come up, or he assumed Michael knew. Really, he kind of got lucky working it out. Although anybody who really stopped and thought about it could probably work it out. You know, guy running around with a hangman’s noose around his neck, choke him with it! Really, that’s not such a huge almighty secret.
When you write short stories, are they always by request of the author writing the anthology, or do you have them lying around?No, all the short stories I write are by request of whoever’s putting the anthology together. And they usually say, “and this is sort of a vague theme that we’re using,” and I’ll be great! Beer! I can write that, which is fun. The only time I’ve kind of made my own theme was for trio of short stories that I’m doing for anthologies right now, which is the Bigfoot trilogy of short stories. Bigfoot’s the client. That’s about the only time I’ve done that.
Where did you get the idea for Harry?My teacher told me, after several semesters of me writing books for her in her Writing a Genre Fiction Novel course, in which over the course of the semester you wrote a genre fiction novel, that was the class, and if you finished the book you got graded on it, and if not you failed. Yeah, it’s like here you go, get a book done. She said “Hey, you know Jim, when we talk in class you’re always talking about this trilogy of books that you really like called the Anita Blake novels (because there were three of them out at that time), and you’re always talking about Babylon 5, and lately this year you’ve been talking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, why aren’t you writing something like that?” I said (posh British accent) “Because I am a fantasy author.”
*laughter* She’s like, “You know, maybe you should think about doing it,” it was very diffidently put because she’d worked out at this point that if you tell me something I have to do the other thing, just by reflex. And so finally, that semester I decided that I was going to prove to her how wrong she was about all her writing theory. Her whole process and her whole everything, I was going to do it by being her good little writing monkey, and doing absolutely everything she told me, all the worksheets and outlines and everything, and then she would see what awful terrible cookie cutter crap comes out of that process, and I wrote Storm Front.
*laughter and applause* I sure showed her! You know, I put Harry together out of Gandalf and Merlin and Sherlock Holmes, and Spenser, and Travis McGee. I said, let me go find the best qualities from these long running, successful, hard boiled private eyes, the original private eye Sherlock, and let me go find out all the qualities from them that they share in common and then all the qualities from these classical wizards that people love as characters, and I found out that if you’re a wizard, you have to be grumpy, there’s no other recourse, because wizards are grumpy. You’ve got to be nosy, and you’ve got to be a meddler, if you want to be a wizard. There’s no good wizard who’s not a meddler. I mean even Radigast was doing stuff and he got mentioned like twice. And then when I went to private eyes, what I found out about the most popular private eyes was, one of their main traits was they were tenacious, you absolutely cannot stop them from doing what they’re doing, they’re going to keep going no matter who gets in the way, that’s one. Two, they can all take a beating, and they get delivered horrible beatings left and right. So I had to have that. And then three, all the ones that I liked the most are willing to flip off to absolutely everyone, at absolutely the worst time, every time. So that was my ingredients list for Dresden, that I put together. So I made him tall like Sherlock, and skinny like Sherlock, and gawky, like the private eyes that I liked, and I beat him up a lot. I didn’t realize until I made my son watch, he was fifteen and I realized he’d never seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, so “Stop! Sit down.” And he’s like “What?”, I gotta go to a store and get a copy of Raiders of the Lost Ark, because we don’t have one, but “sit right there!” and so I made him watch it and I realized oh my gosh, that’s what Dresden is, he’s Indiana Jones, we just keep getting him more and more busted up, and I’m making it up as I go along, but anyway.
Now that Harry’s working for the Winter Court, is he going to have to deal with things like paying the rent and things like that?Spoilers! That’s something that I’m going to let see, because it will be more fun for you to see it than not see it. I’ll tell you that Harry’s going to look at his job, his first day on the new job, he’s going to look at it much as anyone would their first day in prison, but we should have a good time with that.
Why did you cut your hair?Mostly, to shock my wife. Plus, it was the tour for Changes and I thought it would be thematic. Yeah I walked out of the house with the hair down to the small of my back and a big old full beard, because I hadn’t done anything to it in a while, because I’d been writing, walked out with it like that, came back crew cut, clean shaven, and waited for the explosion of Oh My Gosh, and instead, we had one of those conversations where she doesn’t look up from what she’s doing for 10 minutes,
*laughter* and I got tired of waiting, and finally, like 20 minutes after that, she looks up and goes “Oh my god! If I hadn’t been having a conversation with you I would have shot you!” But I’m glad you dig it. There’s a lot to be said for “I need to comb my hair! Where’s a damp washcloth *rubs his head* Done!”
Are we ever going to get to find out more about why Bob’s so squirrelly about the Winter Court, and why he’s nervous about Mab and so on?Yeah. The next book is pretty much going to be our Winter Court book, so assume that’s true.
What did you do for fencing?I did epi and foil in college, I graduated from that to LARP fencing, which is fencing with nerd swords, which is actually, there’s a very strong correlation if you’re in a system where you can hit people on the fingers. After that, I shifted to a different LARP game, where finger hits don’t count and so it’s a much more dramatic style of fighting, which I still do. In fact, I went mad with power when the Dresden series got popular and I bought a farm for us to go LARPing on. So I actually own a 160 acre farm, about 140 of which is 200 year old forest, it looks like Last of the Mohicans in there, but it’s awesome, we’ll go LARP in there and chase each other through the woods at night, with no lights and Nerf swords. Which is fun!
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