Judi Dent for one of the Mothers? Funny that those are the only elderly female characters coming to mind right now outside of Martha Liberty, though I'm sure there's more I'm forgetting.

Still in love with Tricia Helfer as Lasciel/Lash.

Also, I feel like Noomi Rapace would be good for somebody...

I'll finally get around to finishing Kansas City soon, only part left is part 4, and then you can cross it out in your OP

Edit: I will, I will! I swear!

Read the OP, haven't read anything else yet, I thought the theory was really cool, and I especially liked the possible Third Eye / Kumori connection.

Anyway, I wanted to mention an idea that I've had a while, in case somebody sees it connecting to the theory in a good way.

The parallel universes that Jim has described and that we will explore (or at least get a taste of) in Mirror Mirror - THAT is the Outside.

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.

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.

Got someone on it yesterday.  Thanks, though!  Serack, this is my official "Someone's working on it" post.

Oh. Well throw me something some time when you guys need the help

Worthington =/= Harry

Since I just watched Sherlock...
Jude Law == Thomas?

I would get one of the shirts 'cause I love the "Conjure it by your own risk" quote, but I don't like the guy's face.

Other shirts I'd want:

Harry Dresden:
You always a wiseass?
No, sometimes I'm asleep.
+quips Dresden throws when facing danger
or
"Ow ow ow! It hurts to be this good!"

Thomas:
Cain quote on one side, any cocky quote by Thomas on the other

Murphy:
Tiny, but fierce

Fairies:
Toot-toot quotes on one side, Mab quotes on the other

I'm quite surprised that Harry hasn't made mentioned about the 'other' Harry. I wonder what his thoughts on the book/character would be. He'd probabaly call him a poser. *Raises fist* "Represent."

haha nice

or how about this shirt:
wizardry job description
flirt with sexy women
create exciting fireworks
be infuriatingly arrogance when you've figured out something no one else has
and have your ass handed to you by every demon that comes through town