WoJ transcription help needed + mention new WoJ's here

[TheCuriousFan]

Dragoncon 2020, not much here so brace for summary answers for often asked questions.

My first question is, did you read sci-fi or fantasy as a child or young adult?

(Oh god yes.)

Now something I'm always curious about, we spend a lot of time talking about your primary characters for obvious reasons, they are the most important, but which of the secondary characters that you've written in any of your series have been the most fun to write and which ones have been the ones that have given you the most trouble for whatever reason?

Most fun is probably... I have a lot of fun writing characters like Bob the skull because he can be totally inappropriate and that's a lot of fun to write. I really enjoy writing Mab, I enjoy writing John Marcone, those are both fun characters to play with. Although I kind of get to do more characters in the non-Dresden Files series because, you know, Dresden is always following Dresden around so you only see the other characters through his eyes and his viewpoint is a little limited. In the fantasy books, in the Alera books and the Cinder Spires books I actually get to go into viewpoints of other characters, you get to do a lot more shades of grey when you do that.

And something that you mentioned reminded me that you had a few of your short stories that were actually told from a secondary character's perspective and I imagine that's been both fun and kind of challenging because it's a different aspect from what you're used to. What are some of your favourite creatures that you have created in each of your series?

I've always liked the red court vampires, they've always been a lot of fun. Usually I mean, my favourite monsters are the ones I've just gotten, that I've just made up or just borrowed from folklore or other stories that I've read. Monsters are some of the best parts of getting to write the Dresden Files just because you get to come up with whatever you want. Yeah I can make up the wildest stuff out of nowhere and it works really well. I really liked the Vord in the Alera books, they were basically the Zerg from Starcraft but that's okay I had fun writing them anyway.

Well that's the blessings of fantasy right, to be able to create what you want.

Right.

Is there one of your books, it doesn't have to be in the Dresden Files, the one that you struggled with a little more in just the writing of it-things didn't flow quite as well you had to kind of knock it into shape sort of?

Peace Talks and Battle Ground was like that, it was supposed to be one story and it was only supposed to be Peace Talks and it was all going to be in one thing and it just got so huge and out of hand because I was just trying to do so much inside the story and evidently I tried for a little bit more of a story than I was actually capable of writing so we wound up having to split it into two stories to make it work, that was one time. Ghost Story was a very difficult book to write for me just because Dresden was in a position where he couldn't go kick down the door and save the girl, that was not gonna happen when your foot just goes through the door, so. That was a really interesting way to- it was an interesting challenge for me because Dresden couldn't be Dresden, he had to be kind of this different person for the course of that story, he had to be someone who worked through other people and had to be indirect about everything and Dresden's just the most direct guy for the most part so. But it was fun to have him change up but it was also very difficult.

That makes sense because as you said he's very direct, doesn't suffer fools gladly even when it's himself sometimes.

Oh especially then.

But yeah I can imagine that that would have been a particular challenge. Would you say that there is some sort of a common thread that runs throughout all of your series even though they're all very different from one another?

I deal a lot in themes of power and how it is used and abused. Kind of all of my books tend to revolve back to that at some point or another. I think it's just because I was bullied a lot when I was a kid so it was something that became an interest that was near and dear to my heart as I grew up and got older so I think if anything if you want to get thematic I talk about that more than anything so the nature of the moral and ethical use of power. So, you know, for the Dresden Files that's fun because Harry Dresden's got all kind of power and is probably really less aware of it than he should be because honestly he's a force of nature and he hangs out like he's just an average ordinary nerd and it's like "no dude, that's not you anymore, you've got more than that on your shoulders" and that's what he's sort of starting to realise as we get to the end of these books it's like "oh I've got a lot of responsibilities there's a lot of people looking up to me I've got a lot to do" that's where Dresden is going to be going next.

Gotta tap into that potential there.

Oh yeah.

I know that right now you're working on the next Cinder Spires book and how does it feel to be back immersed in that world again?

Good. We're going to different parts of the world so now I'm building fresh world again and that's something I haven't done for a while. I mean the Dresden Files universe I pretty much know where everything is at this point, we're like seventeen books in and it's busy, it's established. But for Cinder Spires it's a new setting and we're going off to new places so I've got to be making up fresh new world again and that's a lot of fun.

Hence the question, but I thought "wow it's been while" so it must have been interesting to go from all the fraught nature of Dresden into something else that's completely different. And as it's creator, which aspect of that whole Cinder Spires world most intrigues you personally?

Probably the cats honestly. I mean I'm writing the book with talking cats and it's coming up with a culture that I've got to make work not only for cats in the real world but but for cat owners because I'm not writing a book for cats I'm writing it for cat owners so I've gotta make the cats work in such a way that cat owners will be happy. But that's a lot of fun it's kind of coming up with a society that's based around cat psychology instead of human psychology its a very good time.

Right and I believe you said that when you wrote Aeronaut's Windlass that you had not actually had a personal cat of your own at the time and now you have so it's going to be different. And I would like to point out that I don't know if you can see it but as soon as you said the cats well there's Fenris oh hi Fenris. As soon as you mentioned cats Bru got up behind you and made sure he was in the shot.

Yeah, yeah. Bru's a little jealous of his new little brother so. Plus he likes to walk and make sure there's no squirrels stealing the birdseed, sheriff Brutus over here. That's about his speed, to chase squirrels. Anything else he'd be scared.

Well now just as an aside since we're already discussing him how old is Bru now?

(Bru is two and a half, Fenris is about six but small, continue at 12:00)

There is a quote in Aeronaut's Windlass that- it's a conversation between Grimm and Creedy where Grimm says "a ship is more than would and crystals and ether silk Byron, some fixed gold vat counters have always said it was nonsense but the men on the ships know better. Airships aren't just vehicles and the men who treat them like more than that get more out of them." My question for you is do you feel as though that's a pretty good kind of indicator of what Grimm's whole personality is like is that kind of- as I recall that passage is like 145 pages into the book so- it's a long book so it's maybe a fifth of the way through or whatever but do you feel as though that gives you a good idea of where Grimm is coming from?

To a degree yeah but I think that's more a description of the world than anything else and we'll see more of that as we keep going.

That sounds good I know a lot of people are looking forward to that.

You talk to a lot of sailors even today and they will say similar things about they're ships, that they're more than machine.

And in fact if you're going to spend your whole life basically, maybe not 24 hours a day but in some cases yes on something then you certainly would want it to be more than just- it's like our cars.

Yeah more than just the thing that happens to float on water.

Right. Now moving onto Dresden Files, if Harry could make a guest appearance in another UF (urban fantasy) series which one do you think would be the most fun or the most challenging for him as a character?

Let's see, most challenging is going to be a tossup between Anita Blake's world where Anita Blake would beat him up and Larry Correia's Monster Hunter International where he would be worth so much puff that everybody would want to kill him. Those would probably be the most challenging, I think the one that he'd enjoy the most would be... let's send him to Temeraire's world and go hang out in Napoleonic England with dragons.

Ah yeah, I could see where he'd- yeah, okay, there we go.

Because then he could just have a pet dragon, they're basically just big cute dogs anyway.

That's right, that's all they are.

Yeah.

*laughter* At least- there's a children's book that I actually still have in my house that I read to my kids and have since read to my grandchildren and they get a kick out of it and it's called There's No Such Thing As A Dragon.

Right.

You're saying you're familiar with that one? Yeah, it's- that's a funny book, it keeps getting bigger if you don't acknowledge it. Who would you say so far in the series, who do you think has been Harry's greatest adversary? The one that has been the most difficult for him to beat or get the better of?

Oh gosh, I mean most of those people are on his side. People like Mab, like that. Let me think, it's probably Nicodemus, he's the one who's inflicted a bunch of loss on Dresden. Lemme think, you know, really incompetence has been more of a threat to him than anything else. He has had a lot of enemies who were like very competent, very much a threat to him but incompetent allies are almost more dangerous than competent adversaries, you know, so.

That's true because when you need them they don't necessarily come through the way that you need them to so. Now one thing I thought would be interesting to hear and just have directly from you is how would you describe the distinguishing features between the summer court and the winter court?

Um, they're fairly thematic to the seasons themselves. Summer embraces summer and spring, the winter court embraces fall and winter. They both have kind of different purposes in the Dresden Files universe with the winter court's purpose being to protect the mortal world from threats that might come from outside of it and the summer court's purpose being to protect the mortal world from the winter court because they just have attitude problems. But the winter court is very focused around sort of the darker aspects of life and while the summer court takes the sunnier aspects of life so the summer court you'll find them backing up the arts, you'll find them going out and doing good, you'll find them blessing crops and making sure they grow well for spring and summer, that sort of thing, that's the summer court's thing, that's their oeuvre, they're keepers of life. Whereas the winter court are craftsmen of death and that is sort of their job is to be dealing with sort of the darker aspects of what's going on, because they are protectors and it is their job to be rough and tough when they need to be so for them it's all about sex, it's all about violence, it's all about being ready for the next fight, it's all about being keyed up and ready to go at a moment's notice, the winter court does not plan things for the future because they know they're probably gonna die in a fight before too much longer, it sort of gives them a very different attitude a very different set of values than the summer court fae have.

This has been something I've wondered about for well for a while, probably since reading Changes. From your perspective, which shocked Harry more? Finding out that he had a brother or finding out he had a daughter?

Oh both were pretty rough but the daughter thing was specifically more rough because that hit him in the heart. Harry was in a situation where essentially he was responsible for the life of this little girl who had then been abandoned and he hadn't even known she existed so that he could make the choice not to abandon her the way he had been abandoned. He was abandoned because his parents died but at the same time when you're a kid you don't really understand the niceties of things you understand you're alone and you don't want to be alone, you know. So that brought up really really hard, painful childhood pain, the pain you get when you're a kid, that's the kind of stuff that sticks with you. It was a lot tougher to find out he had a daughter than to find out that he had a brother, finding out that he had a brother was just kind of cool, that would be neat. Finding out you had a daughter you didn't know about? Oh wow that's hell.

Oh yeah, certainly just the psychological impact of finding out about Maggie would certainly- that makes- that's gonna have a huger impact on his future but at the same time it was cool to read that those passages- or just his reaction to finding out that he had a brother when all these years he thought all his family was gone and he felt as though "oh wow I have somebody after all", and finding out about Maggie I guess was just a further step along that path but as you said it's tied in with his own history and that makes it different, kind of makes it more poignant too.

Yeah.

Now what do you feel has been Harry's greatest growth from kind of the beginning of the series up to now? What characteristics do you see in him that you would point to and say "okay that makes sense, he's actually getting older"?

Yeah he's getting older, he's starting to think beyond just his immediate reactions to things that happen around him, as he gets older he does more and more thinking. Which is kind of- Brutus please I'm doing an interview for probably thousands of people. Dog doesn't care, dog does not care.

*laughter* It does not.

I think he's starting to see- one of the things about reacting to various situations in ways that are kind of square white bread conventional morality, most of the choices that you make that conform to that sort of standard are simply the choices that are the best for you in the long run. Doing the right thing is almost always the smart thing in the long run and so in the long run one of the things that Harry has always done, it's always been part of his character is that he's always been somebody who was prepared to back up and boost and advance people who had less than he has. So the folks who were coming along behind him, you know he was always- Dresden was always there being the guy who was saying "okay let me teach you how to survive this situation better, let me show you how to handle your magic so you don't hurt people, let me help you with this" and as a result sort of all these people around him who started off as these little folks who couldn't really do a lot have grown up into these fairly formidable allies that are all around him now and that's something that he has seen, he's started to see the consequences of his actions in the long long term and as someone who's going to live for three hundred or four hundred years maybe, being able to think long term is kind of a big deal. And not only that, that's something that humanity is gonna have to learn too I mean my generation of humanity is probably- I can count on probably living to be a hundred years old. My son, he's gonna live to be a hundred and fifty or maybe even longer than that because by that point they might have developed actual biological immortality so /humans/ are going to have to start thinking in terms of hundreds of years before very long as well. That's gonna be an interesting thing but it's one of those things I've been thinking about for Dresden, if I was gonna be somebody who was planning to be around four hundred years from now how would that change the way I think about my problems and I think about solutions? How would it change the way I approach the world? And so Dresden's starting to face these problems and starting to think longer term because he's got a daughter now and he's gotta think "well what kind of world am I leaving to her?" You know, so, it's been a really fascinating thing for me to see this character start to start realising different stuff because he's getting older. I just wish I could live for four hundred years so I could continue writing him.

Oh yeah, so you could follow along in real time?

And so that I could learn myself, you know, have a wizard's knowledge myself I suppose.

Well I think one aspect of his character that you were talking about, he has kind of taken on that mentor role even though he might not necessarily see it that way in a formal respect, other than with Molly of course eventually, based upon what happened to him he's actually making a sincere effort to do completely the opposite so, good for Harry.

*laughter*

Now I have- when I was going through some passages that I had marked in the books over time when I read them- which I do in pencil I'm a former librarian I wrote in books in pen. I have some quotes from the last three books in the series that I think if you take all three of them and put them together you- I think they're kind of a good assessment of Harry's character and I want to get your response to that.

Okay.

Now in Skin Game when he is having this discussion with Hannah now he wasn't actually saying these words but this is what he was thinking "I loved magic for its own sake. She didn’t." and then it goes on to basically say in Hannah's case she was more interested in what it could do for her, not just for it's own sake. Now in Peace Talks, Maggie tells him, when she and Dresden are having a conversation and he was asking her "where did you hear this phrase "make things right?"" and she says from Mr Carpenter he says making things right is the first and last thing you should do every day and that is what you always try to do and then in Battle Ground we have Mab who says "you know what it is to sell pieces of your soul so that someone who will never know your name will have another chance at life". When I was looking through these things I thought for one thing these people seem to know him pretty well- well one of them is his own thought but what is your reaction to that? I mean do you agree with me that those seem to be pretty Harry characteristics?

I suppose. I don't know that's not something I spend a lot of time thinking about, you know, I've got a lot of monsters to write. But yeah, I'm always trying to pull out pieces of Dresden that I think are the most essential points of his character for whatever story we've got going at the moment and in this one yeah and in this one the part of his character that I think is essential is his willingness to sacrifice for the sake of others. That's kind of a characteristic of defenders of cultures or societies in general, their willingness to sacrifice, and that's one of the things that makes Dresden who he is. It's always important that you notice that Dresden is- he's generally the first one to put himself on the altar when it comes to sacrifices, he doesn't ask that of other people he asks it of himself. That's really the difference whether somebody's on the up and up, does the sacrifice come from them or do they take the sacrifice from somebody else to make something happen. And so that's one of the things I've always tried to be careful about with Dresden is trying to make sure he's always the guy who gives of himself and not the one who says "you, you're the one who needs to sacrifice to fix this problem".

And that's why people line up behind him or next to him, whichever the case may be. I think that that is something that is true when it comes to any good leader really and that's certainly what he is even if he doesn't necessarily see himself that way, he is that way. Now there's a place in Peace Talks where Harry talks about home and he says "Home, like love, hate, war and peace is one of those words that is so important that it doesn't need more than one syllable. Home is part of the fabric of who humans are it doesn't matter if you're a vampire or a wizard or a secretary or a school teacher you have to have a home, even if only in principle. There has to be a zero point from which you can make comparisons to everything else, home tends to be it." Do you think that this concept of home, do you think that this is something that Harry has always had and it's affected all of his decisions- well not all of his decisions but has affected a lot of decisions he's made throughout the series or do you think that this attitude is something that has kind of grown as the series has gone on?

No that's.... ask any orphan their thoughts on home and they will have some important thoughts about what home is and what it means. Because there is a need in humans for a place of safety, for some place that we can go to sleep and something's not gonna eat us while we're sleeping. You know, originally, and then... But even now we need places where we're safe, where we feel like we can relax, we can let our hair down, we can be ourselves, especially more and more in our society folks have to be so tense about what they say in public and it's like "okay, you know what you need a spot where you can go and relax" and home is it, it's something that is vital for humans. And the more your insecure that your life has been the more important home is going to be for you. In Dresden's case, I mean, he's had an insecure life, home is a big concept for him and that's the way he's gonna look at it he's gonna look at it as something that is vital and profound to everyone. Whether or not he's right, I mean, I imagine there's some people out there for whom- and folks who like to live life on the road and so on they don't have the same kind of value for it, they've got a different value on life and what's important and what makes them feel secure. But for Dresden, yeah, he longs for that place where he is stable and safe and people like him.

Right and now he essentially is without one and has been.

Yeah he has been for a good while since they burned his stuff down in Changes, he's been kind of floating from place to place and now it's time for him to put down some roots. Now he's got a castle and that should be fun.

Yeah, that should be fun, it's true, we'll see how that all works out. Now we'll move onto that elephant in the room. Regarding that event that occurs at the halfway point of Battle Ground, how long have you been planning that and how much hatemail have you received since? I'm joking about the last part.

Oh um, I've been planning that one for about fifteen years so I'd been looking forward to that. I only decided on it for sure about ten years ago but I've been toying with it for about fifteen so.

Okay, right, yeah I know I was not alone that when I read that passage it was just... it was such a shock that it happened I guess the way that it did, it had an impact that some of the other deaths maybe would not have had that same kind so well done I've gonna say if you're gonna write a death that was a nice job, I've gotta say.

You don't have to be a sadist to be a writer but it seems to help.

As I know, I've heard many of your fellow authors say that torturing readers is one of the joys of your job.

Joy is such a strong word.

Perks? Maybe it's just a side effect.

You know, it happens sometimes.

But now, that death, Murphy's death at the hand of a human seems to me to be very significant in terms of the series and had you always intended that that was going to be the case since you started thinking about it more seriously?

What I really thought about it was "what's the /worst/ way for Murphy to die?" Not like the most painful or the most dramatic but the one that would be the worst for the people who loved and supported her. What is going to make the reader suffer the most to read and so it's like she can't die in battle she has to die and it's got to be to this weasel, she can't be taken straight-up because it's not who her character is but to be killed by this weasel sort of by accident almost, you know death by incompetence seems to be even worse *unintelligible*. I had a lot of fun planning that out and I know there's a lot of people who are really angry at me and to them I can say "well keep reading we'll see what happens".

Right because it is the Dresdenverse after all right so...

Yeah there's a lot of stuff going on there so who knows?

Right. You know the part about the fact that the aspect of it that it was a human being, you know Harry's always tried to protect her even though she doesn't like him to say that he's always been cognisant of trying to protect her from the supernatural threats, which you know, that beating she took from Nicodemus was awful and all of that but you know I'm sure many of us were worried for her safety at that point in time but the fact this happened so suddenly and it was completely... it was just completely opposite of what you would expect to happen in what they face on a daily basis, I think it had more of an impact for that reason as well. Maybe even on him since it was something he didn't see coming, not for long anyway maybe a couple of minutes.

Right, that's gonna be one of those things that is gonna tend to... the reaction that most people would have in that situation- in the face of a situation like that would be to make themselves a lot more ready, a lot more serious. You know saying "there I was goofing around not taking this seriously and thinking properly" you know, if he'd been thinking properly- Dresden's going to be thinking to himself "well if I'd been thinking properly I would have made sure Rudolph didn't have a weapon to begin with, I would have made sure that didn't happen I would have made sure his hands were bound if we were really worried about him being dangerous to people".

Right but even so you would think that one of the last people he would be dangerous to it would be Murphy given that it was Rudolph.

Yeah that was an awful thing to do to Murphy and especially to Murphy fans and I would apologise but you guys keep buying the books, you're just encouraging me.

*laughter* Well, you know, the thing it's um... especially in- you knew, it wasn't as though you made a snap decision you just said that it first occurred to you fifteen years ago so you know I guess this was eventually going to be the case but people can look at this and say "well we had sixteen and a half books with her in them and be happy about that", because she was a great character, no argument there and we shall all miss her and maybe who knows next time we have an in-person Dragoncon maybe we should have a memorial service for Murphy or something.

That would be awesome, I'll propose that to the fan group and see if they want to do it.

Alright there you go.

Everybody who cosplays Murphy can be dead on the ground, we'll have a wake.

We might need a lot of space for that but that might be fun.

Yeah.

In Battle Ground there is a quote about that says "magic and emotion are intertwined so strongly that it can be hard to tell where one begins and the other ends" and you've alluded to this throughout the series that this is the case, that those things are tied together and certainly we can see it and we can see it really well in this book, do you think Harry is learning how to kind of get a handle on that and how- that kind of a situation do you think? Even though they're his thoughts do you feel he's coming to terms with it and *unintelligible* personally? St this point.

I think the next book that I'm gonna write we're gonna be seeing- I'm gonna spend some time- it's gonna be a different book than other books we've done before because it's gonna happen over the course of a year in Chicago. So we're gonna see what life looks like on a daily basis for Harry and not just on the terrible worst weekend of the year. Hopefully I can keep it just as interesting as the terrible worst weekend of the year but it'll be a little bit slower paced thing you know kinda gonna see a little bit more of what life is like for the wizard and what life is like in Chicago now that things are getting darker so we've got a lot of cool stuff to look at, that'll be a lot of fun.

So almost a dystopian-

Plus he's gotta survive all these dates with the vampire queen and stuff like that and- he's got a lot of stuff going on.

Yes, that's going to be very interesting.

(40:45 to 44:04 is a repeat of why Chicago so skipping)

That's great that you're talking about that we'll see a different side of the city or see the city as being even more- almost maybe it's own character in what's coming up.

Well I think the supernatural group... the community that Dresden moves in... the big power players are like those big sharks, you only see them sometimes, they come up when things are serious and you /know/ they're serious because there they are. Just during the weekdays of the Dresden Files universe though it's those people like the Alphas and the Ordo Lebes and so on who are going to be so much more important on a daily basis because they're the folks who have to work with you all the time because they don't have power, they do depend on the community for- to protect themselves. That's gonna be something- I think we'll see a lot of the smaller characters popping up in this next book, we'll see what happens.

Oh great, okay.

Plus I've just killed a bunch of people so that means I get to introduce new characters now, it'll be a lot of fun.

That's right, you have been picking them off here and there so yes, it does give you that chance.

I probably shouldn't smile when I say that but yeah.

That's okay we know that you love them all but they sometimes have worn out their welcome and they need to make way for the new people.

That's true.

Now is there a particular imagery that you've used, whether it's been in the city or somewhere in the- if it's anything to do with Demonreach or you know the winter court or anything like that that stands out to you particularly, that you're particularly proud of? That you'd say "I accomplished exactly what I set out to do with this particular depiction" whether it's of a place or a power or something like that?

Oh don't know I had no idea what I was doing when I set out to do this (young Jim screenshot appears) oops my Ipad spazzed on me. When I started out I had no idea what I was doing, mostly what I wanted to do was I wanted to build a fantasy world that was inclusive of all the various beliefs and lores and supernatural stories of the world so that when I was putting the world together I wouldn't sit here thinking to myself "well which one of these things is going to fit into my world and which one am I gonna have to throw away?", I wanted to build a world where everything was gonna fit and I just had to figure out how to make that happen. And it turned out that the way to make that happen was to invent the Nevernever and that's what I'm proud of. The Nevernever is sort of the supernatural world that exists outside of the mortal world and within the Nevernever are contained all the possibilities of human thought so Heaven and Hell they're both in the Nevernever somewhere, that supernatural world out there somewhere, Asgard is out there somewhere and so is Olympus and places like that. By doing that I was able to create a home for absolutely anything you could think of and then from there could connect it to the mortal world and figure out how it interacts with the mortal world and what things are actually native to the mortal world and which things are native to the spirit realm and sort of show up and visit once in a while and that was what- inventing the Nevernever was what let me include absolutely everything in the Dresden Files so if there's anything I'm proud of, I'm proud of sort of that concept. And it's not even my own concept... having that alternate dimension is not- is nothing new but as far as a storytelling device goes it worked so well for me so that one and the wizard soulgaze was something that was also that was kind of more unique to me than other stuff. And that is nicely dramatic I've had lots of fun writing that over the years so I'm kind of proud of that too.

Yes well you should be proud of both of them I think that all of your fans would agree. Now while I was reading Skin Game because this was a while back and knowing that there will be an eventual end to the series it occurred to me that I am going to miss Harry's voice. I am really going to miss that because there's nothing else like it, I'm just being honest from my own perspective as a reader that I know I'm really going to miss that voice. Once the series is done what do you think you're going to miss the most about Harry?

Oh I don't know that I'm going to miss him all that much. I mean y'all get to hang out with him once in a while, I write a book, you open it up and for a few days or a week you get to hang out with Harry Dresden, he's my roommate, I've gotta hang out with him whether I want to or not at this point. By the time I get to an end of a book I'm kind of looking at him like "I want to kill you buddy" and I've done it once too so don't think I won't do it again.

*laughter*

But yeah, I will miss writing Dresden and I will miss writing things kind of from his perspective because to me the Dresden Files looks like a very different place because Harry Dresden has a very specific perspective on it and it's not always the most aware perspective. Dresden does his best he really does but there are times and people in the Dresden Files universe that he has a completely skewed viewpoint on that other people think completely differently about and I'm actually kind of looking forward to the Dresden Files being over so that I can write the Dresden Files universe from a different protagonist's perspective and bring these different people in and they're gonna look very different to this guy than they did to Harry Dresden because he's gonna be in a different position he's gonna be in a different relationship with all of them. Being able to see all the things from twenty degrees to the left is going to be a lot of fun.

Oh yeah that's something that I'm hoping to see.

Plus I'm gonna get to do Dresden as a character that somebody else is looking at, potentially, if he survives his series, I'm still not sure he will.

*laughter*

There's several endings and one of them is a noble death I'm sorry that's just kind of who Dresden is.

Right and that's- I mean I think that probably especially after what you just pulled off I would imagine that that is weighing heavily on many people's minds at this point in time as to what will happen but you know what I think you're saying makes complete sense, that having to live with them all the time would not necessarily be the same thing as spending a few days with them at a time so. Just personally I'm still going to miss that voice but at least there'll be enough books that you can start over again right.

Oh yeah.

Now what would a- if there were to be such a thing, if you were going to write it yourself or someone did it for you or whatever using your characters, if there were a mashup story that was comprised of the main protagonists of all three of your series, what would it look like?

Oh um, we would have some kind of multidimensional threat, I would be grabbing characters from various stories if I was gonna go do that. That'd be a lot of fun, Dresden would be the wizard trying to organise things, he'd be like the mysterious figure and I would write him as kind of this outsider figure that we were never in his viewpoint but the people who knew him from reading the Dresden Files books, I would write him to where there would be a lot of funny inside stuff that you would be able to get if you knew the series but that the characters that were there wouldn't understand but the readers would.

*laughter* Right, right, because they would have the backstory so- I can just imagine him shaking his head at some people and what they would think of him yeah, that would be interesting. It's fun to think of these things but I'm sure it would be very very difficult to pull off.

Yeah it would be.

Now I do have kind of a process related question, I'm always curious about this, when you're writing do you listen to music? I've asked- or reading when you're reading or writing because I've actually asked this question of people on the trackpage just because I was curious. Everybody has a different approach but do you like to have something going on in the background, do you like to have music going on, do you want absolute quiet, how do you approach it?

When I'm writing I need some music. If not music then it needs to be a movie that I've seen so many times that I don't need to look up to know what it looks like and usually it's a movie that has kind of it's own music to it, Ocean's Eleven is a very lyrical sort of movie there's like a rhythm that it keeps all the way through, Big Trouble In Little China very lyrical movie because John Carpenter did all of his own music so he wanted to have his own music on the screen as much as possible, that sort of thing. But yeah I like that and I usually need somebody to- I need to be sure that I'm not gonna be- that I'm not gonna have to get up for something, like I'm not gonna have to get up to handle the dog or the cat or to answer the door or the phone so either I need to write when I'm sure I'm not gonna be interrupted or I need somebody to kind of cover my back while I'm getting stuff done. That's kind of like what PAs are for, my PA, my Personal Adult.

That's right there you go.

To show up and do all the adult things so that I can play on my keyboard with my imaginary friends.

That's a good way to put it too. Maybe eventually you could get Fenris trained to be able to open the door for Bru or something who knows.

No Fenris would never do that because that would be convenient for Bru. Fenris would let himself out and would make Bru stay inside. But no Fenris already has a job when I'm writing he keeps my ankles warm.

Oh okay. He certainly does a good job of doing that at this time of year I'm sure.

Oh yeah. Quite excellent, quite excellent, very dedicated cat.

I'm sure aside from the emotional aspect of it he probably gets some kind of reward from it as well because I saw some pictures from Colorado just recently where there was a fair amount of snow already so it must be pretty cold up there so keep using Fenris, Fenris keep doing the good work of keeping the author going, you've gotta have that.

(the rest after 56:30 is a really barebones teaser for the Olympian Affair that contains nothing new besides a comment about how more sales = more problems fitting into a print schedule)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xs4i8k6kL8

[TheCuriousFan]

Some very partial transcripts for a change.

Are you going to do anymore short stories with Molly Carpenter and are any of her siblings going to show up with some magical ability as well?

Am I going to do any short stories with Molly? I really hate writing short stories, I don't enjoy it at all. But apparently I don't hate it as much as I hate saying no to people who want me to write short stories for them.

*laughter*

So maybe. Though Molly's sort of... her story path is not... it's not towards being familiar and human so it might be a little bit more difficult. As far as the other siblings in the Carpenter family, by the time the other kids were coming along her mom had buried that stuff so deep it wasn't coming back so.

---

I know you pull from at least a few different cultures that I know of mythology *unintelligible* Are there any cultures or specific mythologies that you haven't utilised yet that you're interested in bringing in?

Haven't done a lot of Hindu, don't know much about it. Haven't done a lot of Middle Eastern stuff don't know much about it. The stuff that I do use is stuff that I've been able to find good solid research on for the most part, that's where I can do some reading and I can more or less justify myself, you know, within a fudge factor. If you just go writing about stuff you've got no idea what's going on then that's probably not a good thing for you as a writer. I've been approached very /very/ carefully by some Navajo since writing about skinwalkers.

*laughter*

They sent like the person who- they sent the person from the tribe who was half-white to come talk to me "maybe you speak his language I don't know but you need to be careful and evaluate him before you actually have a conversation with him or, you know, have a meal with him" so that's interesting, that sort of thing. That's serious stuff down there, you go to the south-west they take that seriously.

---

Okay so I know you said you had five cats and you've written cats so well-

I had zero cats before I wrote the book, I didn't actually get any cats until after the book.

-So in saying that, are there any cats like your physical cats that inspired the cats in your books?

No it's the other way around. We bought three Maine Coons and named them- we named one Mirl and one Rowl because they matched. But the big one is the big white one, his name is Bowie but he's like a thirty pound long haired Maine Coon, pure white with a green eye and a blue eye. He'll be in the next book as the commodore, he'll be the ship's cat for Bayard's ship, yeah commodore Beauregard is what they call him, they call him Beau which is what we call Bowie as well we call him Beau. And he'll always be the cat that's just a little bit better than Rowl at everything without really trying and he's Mirl's older brother so Rowl hates him but has to put up with him you know, so.

But then we got two more cats, we got Zatanna, Zatanna was a feral cat who got born under our porch and Kitty went and rescued the feral kittens because they were dying, she managed to save two of them and one of them we got to in time to socialise and so he's with a family who spoils him outrageously now, he's a big Persian looking cat it's ridiculous. And then the other one was Zatanna she's a little tiny tuxedo four pound kitten sized cat and so we named her Zatanna because she has a tuxedo but she doesn't like people very much but she bonded to our cats though so we got our cat a cat.

*laughter*

And then we had three more kittens that were found abandoned and we found homes for two of them and we kept one of them and it turns out that they weren't actually kittens they were five years old and they're just tiny from being malnourished and they conned us into thinking they were kittens.

*laughter*

Now they all have a decent home so one of them his name is Fenris he's the one who stays with us, he's a foster cat we're gonna give him away someday (still there as of November 2020). I know he sleeps on everybody's lap and everything like that and rides around on my shoulder but we'll give him away. Damn cat he's a liar and a swindler.

Were you the one that named him Fenris?

No that was Kitty she named him that off of Dragon Age just because she likes Fenris (good taste). But yeah Fenris is the alpha cat in the house now, he's the smallest animal and he runs it. So when Bru comes up to mess with him Bru will come up and try to be a little bit friendly, Bru's my Pitbull, he's a ninety pound Pitbull and the Pitbull version of friendly is a little enthusiastic. So he'll come up to sniff Fenris and like knock him off the furniture by doing it and Fenris will just look at him and just the look on his face is "hey man, I'm not angry at you, but I'm disappointed".

*laughter*

And he does this to all the cats and he's the first one to eat, he gets to check out Bru's bowl before Bru gets to eat and all that but he's the one who's in charge of the house he might be in charge of us I'm not sure, which probably means that he is, geez. But he's very cool though we'll take him out on walks, put him on a harness and take him for walks because he can handle the outdoors he's very fine with it, just super chill. So pretty good cat as far as cats go. He'll make a nice cat for somebody someday.

---

Are we going to get more stuff from Mouse's POV?

More stuff from Mouse's point of view? Probably- yeah I got roped into this anthology- like I said I hate saying no to people. So some people came up with this anthology and said "we want to write an anthology that's all animal stories and we're gonna dedicate all the money to animal shelters" and to which I said "yeah okay and let me get you the email addresses of all these other big authors that I know. Here's Rothfuss, here's Sanderson", you know, like that. Going down the list of people to ask because that's the kind of thing- you get to my point in life and career and you like writing your stuff and everything and so on but you also look around and think "what am I actually doing? What am I-besides just writing stories and getting royalty cheques what am I doing with my life?" And for me it's like, I want to help animals so that's what I'm doing. It's- for a project like that as a charity project I think you're actually better off going to the bigtime writers because the folks who haven't got there yet are more like "you know I would love to but I want to eat", you know like that, so, kind of where we are now.

---

In the Dresden Files RPG there's little sticky notes and stuff in there, have they ever gotten too close to stuff that hasn't been published yet?

Yeah, I had to delete all kinds of stuff. I was really pleased that they had come up with all these potential story leads and so on but I was like "no you can't play with those I'm already playing with those go away".

*laughter*

But it pleased me very much that I had given them the background of the story universe and then they had logically put together the same things I had logically put together. So it was like "oooh this must work, it must be kind of sound if other people can take it and go to the same place," I was really pleased with how Evil Hat researched the stuff. I mean it was run by my gaming buddy from college, Fred, he ran the company but he wasn't necessarily actually working on the material the whole time that was other people but Fred was like "trust me they're nerdy enough" and coming from Fred that's a recommendation, so. But yeah it was a lot of fun I would have- we would get together about every three weeks and I would just talk for two or three hours about the world, try and answer questions as best I can that they had and a lot of times that's fun because I don't know the answer to the question until somebody asks me. Somebody askes me a question, "well what is the answer to that question oh obviously it's this now I know something cool about my world and it sounds like it was there the whole time", you know, so.

*laughter*

Just your intellectus coming in.

Yeah it's my intellectus, not my BS *rolls eyes*.

---

Just a quick follow up to that (microfiction and PT release date question) with the Morgan microfiction was that something that was just in the back of your head or was that actually part of your masterplan the entire time?

It's the plan. Morgan was always the guy who was really not all that bad a guy if you weren't Harry Dresden. I mean it's just that- circumstance and fate had arranged things for him to just be a nightmare for Dresden, that was his purpose in the world. And I had to stop and think "well how do you take- how do you get somebody who is more or less somebody with a code of honour and ethics and make him behave the way I need him to behave without just making him a jerk?" You see Morgan through Dresden's point of view so he's always a jerk except kind of at the very end- he's kind of a jerk at the very end. But yeah, the Dresden Files story from other people's points of view is a very different story. We get Harry's point of view because he's right in the middle of the furball so he has a very different take on things than everybody else but- I mean if I was writing the story from, you know, the Merlin's point of view Harry would essentially be Loki. I mean he's this agent of chaos who keeps causing problems. And from other people's points of view it's very different, I mean the further away you get from Dresden the weirder the world looks because it's a different world from what he sees.

---

I know that your foray into the heist subgenre went really well, are there any other subgenres that you're interested in bringing into Dresden in a future work that you haven't got to play with yet?

Dystopia, apocalypse, kaiju, professional wrestling and we gotta do a dragon book still.

*cheer*

Right? We'll have to break some laws of magic for that one, definitely.

---

Will we get to know more about the daughters as the books come out?

Yeah that's the idea they kind of have to be there a bit, you know, so. But at the same time they're gonna grow up at child speed so don't expect it to happen anytime soon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA6hcE5-YCA

*prior talk was 22 books planned before BAT now*

-that's nice and round yes, though will this completely throw off like the Denarians appearing in every book that's a multiple of five?

Nah it should be alright.

Excellent, cool, cool.

---

Who wins, Dresden or McGonagall? Like McGonagall from Harry Potter?

Oh god like Harry would hit an old lady, for crying out loud, McGonagall wins.

McGonagall survived cancer, she's kicks butt.

---

Does the winter mantle make Harry more venerable to Lara Raith? I'm sorry it was written venerable.

Well it probably gives him a little more gravitas but it won't make him any older. I think you meant does it make him more vulnerable to Lara Raith and I would say anything that makes you more aggressive and horny probably does make you more vulnerable to Lara Raith.

---

Here's a good paranoid question, in Cold Days during the mind battle between Harry and Sharkface near Demonreach Sharkface says the following "I AM GATEBREAKER, HARBINGER! I AM FEARGIVER, HOPESLAYER! I AM HE-WHO-WALKS-BEFORE!". The commas between gatebreaker and harbinger and between feargiver and hopeslayer made me wonder, knowing how evil you are, is Sharkface naming /himself/ in all five of those instances or is he naming Dresden in the first and the second too, i.e. is he calling Dresden harbinger and hopeslayer?

I don't know I just write these books man, that's all I do, I just kind of write down what goes through my head. That's paranoid.

The insertion of a comma in the middle of a phrase that changes the meaning, did you intend it?

Did it change the meaning? It all depends on how it's being delivered doesn't it. I don't know we should listen to the audio and see what James thinks. Because he really does- he changes the story occasionally based on the inflections and emphasis that he puts on words and the way he delivers the lines, he occasionally changes things, couple of times he's just broken my heart doing that, it's like "James you're evil", that's me saying that.

---

Can we expect a Covid-19 inspired event in future Dresden adventures?

Probably not in future Dresden adventures although there's going to be a plague story because there's always a plague story whenever you're doing a long running story *unintelligible*. But I think I may well be writing up essentially a... AU fanfic of the Dresden files by myself and give it to you guys and we'll set that in a parallel Dresden universe that starts at the same place right after Skin Game and we'll see what we can do with that. See if we get get started on that over the next several weeks so people have something to think about other than ugly stuff. That's a good thing, now is a time when entertainers- this is a time where entertainers it's time for us to go to war, I think you're going to see a lot of us doing everything we can to provide stuff to our readers and our fans and viewers because there's a lot of folks just like me on this. You want to help, I can't make you any better but maybe I can make you not afraid for a little while while you're reading my stuff, that's worth doing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5V9am4XyYz4

[TheCuriousFan]

I would like to know if there were fallen in the Denarian coins when Judas received them as payment.

Were there fallen in the Denarian coins when Judas received them as payment? No, no there weren't. It was the act of betrayal that got them in there, until that the coins were not unholy enough to house a demon.

I just figured that it seemed like a pretty big payment to have demons in a coin, it seems bigger than the equivalent of about two hundred bucks.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, next question.

Is there ever a situation where the laws of physics and the laws of magic come into direct opposition with each other and in that case which one wins out, physics or magic?

Is there ever a situation where the laws of physics and the laws of magic come into direct opposition with each other and if so who wins? Yeah I mean stuff like making fire appear out of nowhere, physics doesn't agree with that so much.

*laughter*

That's kind of the whole point of writing magic, although when I designed the magic system the basic of the philosophy that I used for the magic system was simply Newtonian physics. But yeah if you're gonna have a wizard running around reality's gonna sit in the back.

---
When the White Council was first formed, from the word go did they have a Blackstaff and a Gatekeeper or were those things down the road where they realised "hey we really kind of need these?"

When the White Council was first formed did they have the Blackstaff and Gatekeeper as positions or were they created as they went along? The origins of the council are pretty nebulous, I mean they were like kind of an advisory board to the Roman senate for a long time, it was only after the fall of Rome that Merlin was like "okay we've got to get all these people together or we're just going to have all these wizard-kings fighting each other the entire time" so that was why he formed the council. The additional roles that are there, those are the only two that Harry knows because they're wizards and they like to keep things secret. But yeah they had to create those roles to fill a need as they went along, it's like everything.... no I can't say that, okay next question.

---

Do you know the titles as you're going into the books or does it happen as you write?

No I planned them all out ahead of time, that was part of the outline, but I had to start adjusting things on the fly because they wouldn't let me use- I was using puns at first. Let me see it was Semiautomagic, I think Fool Moon was always Fool Moon, Grave Peril was... what was the name of that I forget now (it was Knightmare), was that the one where he- no that wasn't the one where he met Thomas that was five, Family Secrets was the original title of Death Masks (and here I thought it was Holy Sheet). But anyway there were all these different puns and titles and stuff that I had and they were all like "no, no, can't have pun titles, that's Terry Pratchett" and I was like "oh I would hate to be associated with him".

*laughter*

In Cold Days you named several serial killers who had formerly been winter knights, you've alluded in other Q&As to George Washington having formerly been a wielder of esperacchius-

Well actually I think you've got it backwards, there were several winter knights who were also serial killers.

Either way just framing the question I was gonna ask, if you were going to point me at one person who used to be a summer knight and one person who used to wield fidelacchius that I could go read a biography for, who do I need to look up?

I don't know, I'd have to go research that. You know, it's not like I've thought out every summer knight that's ever happened.

I thought that you might have had a few that come to mind.

I mean so far not really. Here and there there's some people in history, summer knights are generally artists, musicians and writers because summer is really into the arts. The winter knight is usually somebody who would be murdering you anyway because Mab doesn't like to train new people.

---

Two questions now thanks, first question is are you considering returning so we can find out what happened with the Alerans and the Canim, did they drive the Vord from the Canim lands? Second question, you mention the other things that have not happened, that you didn't do in the Dresden Files, can you give us something that didn't happen and will never happen so you're not spoiling anything?

Okay. As far as other choices that I could have made in the Dresden Files, the biggest crossroads was in Changes because at the end of it Harry could have done three different things, he could have made a deal with Mab, he could have remembered- I mean he still has it memorised he looked at it with his true sight Kemmler's book and pulled off a darkhallow and been a necromancer or he could have summoned Lasciel's coin to get the power he needed to go get Maggie. So if he had taken one of the other two paths it would have been much different, if he'd gone necromancer, basically his friends would keep getting killed and it wouldn't matter so much.

*laughter*

That would be a very different story if Dresden was the most powerful necromancer on the planet.

Did you seriously consider doing one of those two?

Of course, I considered all of them, and then the other one was summoning Lasciel and then I would have had to write a lot more sex scenes.

*laughter*

But those were all things that I- and then Harry had to stop and I had to sit down in his point of view and figure out if he was going to sign a contract with someone who's it going to be so he looked around and decided that the one that he could really trust was Mab because she might be an awful monster but she's honest and she keeps her word. And so he figured that was his best shot of being able to wriggle out of it somehow. And Mab was like "yeah kid that's cute".

*laughter*

As a big fan of audiobooks in general I love the way James Marsters reads the books I'm just wondering how you ended up with him? Did you go through a bunch of people?

Okay this is what happened. One day I was at home and it was the day after I had shut my right index finger in the hinge of the garage door as it came down. Yeah, you can't get away from that until you open the garage door, I panicked and tried. When you're in the emergency room and the doctor says "well the only thing we can do is drill a hole through your fingernail and let some of that liquid out" and you go "yeah yeah do it now". Wait I lost track of the question... Driving home the next day and I get this phone call and it's from a small publishing company called Buzzy Multimedia and they say "hey we would like to make audios of the Dresden Files" and what I heard was "we would like to pay for your family's health insurance for six months" and I was like Yes! And then they called me back a week later and said "we got Spike from Buffy to do the reading for you" and I was like *starts dancing* and that was all there was to it. I've got to meet James a couple of times, the fact that he's doing these now, he is one of the most highly paid actors in Hollywood. In fact, I think in 2014 he was /the/ highest paid actor in Hollywood, yeah he makes a lot of money, he's invested his money very intelligently apparently, so, he's got like cologne and stuff like that. But the point is, we absolutely cannot afford James Marsters, he's doing it because he likes the books. I mean, he still gets paid and all but not what he's worth. But yeah he's a really nice guy, I've met him a couple of times to talk to him, he actually is kind of a very friendly spaz, he's a good guy. But anyway, when I was recording Marcone for the Brief Cases audio and I was talking to the audio director over the headphones while I was doing it and the audio director was like "oh I talked to James this morning and he wanted me to get a message to you" and I'm like "oh yeah, what?" and he says "he wants to know when Peace Talks is gonna be done" and I'm like *hits head on microphone*

*laughter*

And then I thought "oh, James is a fan, okay". But that's the other reason that I think an animated series would be better because we could get Marsters to be Dresden, that is theoretically possible.

---

You've established in the books that wizards and those with magical power are able to heal from physical injuries, what about from mental injuries such as Alzheimer's or depression or something from that standpoint?

They're still people but they're better off in terms of if you get to the actual physical nuts and bolts it usually gets put back together a little bit better than it would for a regular person. Psychologically they're not quite as strong but- I mean they're no stronger than normal human beings but they're also human beings who have spent their lives of sometimes centuries seeking mental clarity and mental discipline so they're usually pretty solid. But Alzheimer's is still a real threat for wizards as they age, maybe a super-threat depending on the wizard. But yeah there's a reason the white council even though they all show up together everybody kind of shows up like *looks around* uh-huh, does he seem twitchy to you?

*laughter*

Like that. But they're- it's something that they have to deal with but it's background stuff it's not really important. Okay last question then let's sign some books.

Do you like to listen to music when you're writing and if so what songs or bands or albums that you relate to your stories or characters?

Yeah everybody's got a theme song for the most part. Harry's got a couple such as Gone Away by Offspring and The Thing I Hate by Stabbing Westward (these were also his original picks for Elaine and Morgan's themes back in the 2000's), those are his themes. Every time I start writing a new book I put a new playlist together of things that I think will be appropriate, I'm using a lot of epic Mozart on this one, they take like classical music and they give it the film trailer treatment with lots of bwaaah but there's gonna be some epic conflict in this one and that needs some epic music in the background. When I'm writing steampunk it's Lindsay Stirling or if I'm not listening to music I'll have a movie on the television and it'll be a movie that I've seen so many times I don't need to to know what's going on or a movie that's terrible enough that I'll only look up for the good parts, like "there goes Harley Quinn that was fun". But yeah music is there, I still want to write my epic fantasy epic where music and magic are the same thing but it's gonna take me a while to get there, I'm not a good enough writer yet, when I grow up I want to write big old fantasies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODOhEdiFwW0


So my teenage grandson, he read it and we're sitting there talking and he goes "wait a second this feels like a brand new beginning" so I'm gonna ask you, is this the start of a new series?

Oh no not really, we're still doing the same stuff we're just running into the natural consequences of what happens when you get that many people angry at you that consistently. Harry is, he's the kind of guy who gets involved in things and ticks people off and there are consequences for your actions and I think as we move to head through the series I think I've made it pretty clear that I'm a big believer in facing and dealing with those consequences. So Dresden he's getting to find out more and more of the choices he's made are shaping his life and while I think the series has changed quite a bit since we got started it's essentially following this one character's journey and hopefully it all feels like "yep, that was gonna happen because of what he did, he pretty much had to choose the way he did but it's definitely gonna happen as a result".

https://www.spreaker.com/user/arroe/jim-butcher-releases-peace-talks-and-bat

So for folks who haven't been able to reread the series or are new to the series entirely what would you think is the most important thing for them to know or remember when jumping into these two books?

Well if you're new to the series this'll be a very busy book for you. Otherwise if you're new to the series you might want to start a little bit earlier with Dead Beat or with Changes. Those would both be good places to jump in.

Changes would be a very difficult place to jump in.

Yeah but a lot of people have and it's been successful.

Oh nice.

But anyway, where were we?

What is important for people to know going in?

Well I don't know, have fun. The important thing to remember is that these books are not supposed to mean anything, just remember that. These are popcorn novels, I like to think they're the best popcorn around but they're popcorn don't take them too serious.

---

What is the first totally frivolous thing Harry buys with his gym sock full of diamonds?

Probably the first totally frivolous thing he buys will be a basketball goal for inside the great hall. And you haven't read the second book yet so you don't know, that's the answer you'll understand in time (people figured this one out instantly).

So there are a couple of things that- questions that that appear in a lot of interview that I'm going to challenge you to answer slightly differently from answers we've heard in the past. One question that I've enjoyed hearing is how some side characters have grown past your expectations for them and you always give Butters as a really spectacular example of that and I'm wondering if there are others that you want to elaborate about?

Yeah Toot he was just a little informer guy the first time he appeared and he was a fun character and he was popular so I kept bringing him back just when I needed some little dinky thing to do things with. And then the jokes started coming and after that was happening it was like "well he's got to get more involved now I have to start thinking about where pixies come from and what they do I can't have them just be this little thing". And so over time he grew and grew, there were other characters who were meant to be much more involved, when I first wrote Carmichael he was going to be long term Murphy and Carmichael partner, instead I killed him, these things happen.

At what point did you realise he needed to die?

It was right after the werewolf had ripped him apart.

*laughter* You thought he was going to get better?

Well it was like "oh I just killed that guy... yeah that happens, moving on".

Are there any characters whose reaction from the fanbase really surprised you like latching onto a minor character or disliking a character that you really liked?

Oh my gosh the attachment to Lasciel (Lash) was amazing.

Yeah, yeah.

The imaginary girlfriend who can look like whatever she wants to look like, that was something that went over a lot stronger than I ever thought it would for sure. Marcone's got a lot more fans than I thought he would have.

You know the internet you knew people were going to latch onto Marcone, come on.

No when I started writing we didn't have much of an internet.

That's true, yes.

I mean I started this in 1996 and Marcone's in chapter two or three... three, yeah, so. People surprise you.

---

We know from Zoo Day that Mouse's magic works by making everything just a little bit better, easier and luckier for his friends, are there any specific times where things would have gone very very differently- much more off the rails if not for that influence?

Yeah all those Mexican standoffs in Turn Coat, that would have been very different without Mouse.

I guess I'll have to go to Marcone next since everyone loves Marcone. So construction would have needed to start immediately after Harry's death as you mentioned in your writeup for the Better Future Society meaning he had plans in place, so where was he planning on building the castle before the real estate opportunity showed up? How did that all happen?

That's something that you don't need to know, that's part of the story.

Did he inherit the Brownie cleaning staff?

No no there was a whole new thing setup it didn't even have much of a threshold for a while that was screwing everything up until he moved some families in there in order to get a threshold out of the deal so. That's Marcone's style it's like "oh helping families is the most effective way? Alright we'll do that."

Good for business. Does Marcone have the bullet that killed Harry?

Oh he's got more than one bullet to kill Dresden with.

No um in Even Hand we see the power that bullets used to kill heroes possess so we're wondering if he managed to find the bullet that killed him in Changes.

Oh, huh I wonder... It's possible it's not highly likely because Kincaid just wasn't that far away he was maybe a couple hundred yards away, it wasn't much of a shot for him. But when you're using really high powered rounds and you hit something solid with it it tends to shatter, something that's harder and more rigid than a squishy human.  It'll make a hole but it also tends to shatter, I think it'd be considerably harder to recover modern bullets than the old ones because the old ones were like this big rock, they were considerably more massive. You get shot with a .75 caliber pistol bullet that's considerably different than a modern bullet coming out of a .22 even though the modern bullet is actually more dangerous to you in some ways.

Will we get to know more about how Marcone discovered the supernatural and about his patriotic youth?

Maybe, I don't know. Part of the thing that makes Marcone Marcone is that you don't know about him so I don't know we'll have to see.

Has lady Molly made any frenemies among the fae?

No actually not very many at all because she's actually doing her job and she's actually got a lot of respect among the fae and she's just frozen and shattered half a dozen of them who got out of line, you know. I mean she's hanging out in the winter court now, you play for keeps over there and they always challenge you so there are times when you've got to off somebody just for everybody else to go "okay yeah, let's follow her."

With Lea in Changes and her creepy murder garden was that something she specifically created in the Nevernever equivalent of Harry's backyard or did she already have a creepy murder garden that she somehow managed to link to Harry's apartment?

Oh she already had a creepy murder garden let's not confuse anything about that. But yeah all she had to do was link up her demesne to Harry's-to a location near Harry and do a lot of manipulating of the Nevernever, it's like a big project- it's like a building your own house project but it got done.

So with the cosmology of the series how do the various pantheons of gods coexist with each other, like... in terms of the actual creation of the universe?

That's a big question and in the Dresden Files world the creation of the universe is something that happened outside of linear time which makes it essentially completely incomprehensible to something as simple as we are. We're all just floating down the stream of time that's how we time travel we just go down the stream that way but before there was a stream the universe was a weird place because there couldn't be a cause and effect if there wasn't a before and after so that's something you just can't comprehend because our entire life is based on cause and effect, everything we do in life is based on "well I did this and this happened as a result" you know, so. It's something that I think is a big enough event that mortals couldn't really understand it and a lot of things changed afterwards especially with Lucifer getting up to his nonsense during the angel war. The way it works in the Dresden Files universe is that all the gods have really confused recollections of that time, like they get bits and pieces of it but it's that party you were really really drunk at and you only sort of remember when somebody something about it and you go "oh yeah I vaguely remember something about that happening" and that's sort of their experience of the before time. The basic idea is that these are beings of incredible power and that humans don't really understand them very well and so we try to put them into shapes that we can understand and comprehend and deal with but it just doesn't work very well because there's just such a huge incompatibility between us squishy meatbags and people who are made of pure energy.

That may be my favourite explanation for the differences in religious ideology and such. Oh that makes me happy. Several fans have asked how various supernatural influences like merge and combine like two different creatures try to breed, could a half-bigfoot half-white court vampire exist? Or if Thomas picked up a coin would the fallen angel clash with the hunger?

I'd have to take all of those on a case by case basis. Yeah there would be an issue with the demon and the hunger if a white court vampire picked up a fallen coin, there would be a power struggle and the hunger would be on the short end of that stick, it's just not as powerful an entity. But as far as reproduction and scions and stuff go all the supernatural stuff is- I kind of think of it as an old D&D template, it's something that you add on to something that's already there. Mouse is a dog but he's got the supernatural temple dog template that gives him his superpowers. But it would have to be a case by case basis though, generally speaking there's a big line between mortals and everything that isn't a mortal and that line is free will, that's what exists in the Dresden Files universe so. It becomes questionable as to how much free will various entities have and the more powerful you get, many times the less free will you get to operate with, Mab /has/ to fill her role to be Mab, all of her vast supernatural power is useless outside of the arena it was meant for, she doesn't have free will to just go throwing it around anywhere she wants and most supernatural entities are like that.

Do aliens on other planets have their own Nevernevers?

Well if there are aliens on other other planets, we don't know having never been to one we really are such toddlers, we crawled out of the crib once for a few minutes in the late 60's and since then we just sort of hang out. I don't know, I think it would vary on a world by world basis I don't think the whole universe would look the same that seems like a waste of space.

Can you get to Alera through the Nevernever?

In theory yeah, if we run reality on a spectrum Amber style from complete chaos to complete order and every possibility in between exists somewhere the the way, but yeah that's partly- that's the Nevernever that's the vast possibility.

---

Was it disorienting in Skin Game, Harry suddenly being disconnected from Demonreach's intellectus after a year and a half of living on the island and knowing exactly what impact every footstep is going to have?

Yeah he was probably like stubbing his toe an extra large amount for the first morning or two, tripping over things, bumping into people because they were getting too close and he's just used to knowing everything.

Like being without your iPhone and not being able to look up everything at a moment's notice.

Maybe. I spent most of my life without that so it seems normal to me.

Where is the thin gray line between necromancy and ectomancy? What is the most an ectomancer can legally do?

The thing about ectomancers is he is not actually doing anything that's anywhere close to necromancy, an ectomancer is working with, communicating with an energy field that happens to be shaped like a human being and to have a human's memories. Necromancy is actually using life force and doing things with it, it's not the same thing at all. It's one of those things that could edge over real quick and you could cover necromancy with ectomancy really good so it's something the wardens are still suspicious about but it's not something that they just go- I mean talking to ghosts is one of the most common things you can do in the supernatural world, that's why seances are a thing.

How have predatory supernatural powers been using the internet? Like sexy singles in your area?

Yeah white court just grabs Tinder, you know. Well for that matter they could order up UberEats or DoorDash and just say "hey, driver" and other vampire stuff like that too. A lot of them won't mess with it at all because it's weird human magic, it's ferromancy.

Tinder is their UberEats.

Yeah. And also the supernatural world, I mean it tends to be a very old fashioned sort of place, there's a lot of immortals, there's a lot of people who have lived several centuries involved in it so all this new stuff is confusing and frightening and it's not something that they would be into a lot. But the ones who are closer to humans would, they would use it for whatever it is they need for a given thing. The Leanansidhe if she was trying to make her bones now, instead of inspiring artists she could inspire e-athletes, it's that kind of thing. It's like yes it'll kill you slowly but you'll be the *greatest gamer alive*. I know so many people who would take that, they would make that deal with the devil right away.

Everyone on TikTok would make that deal.

Is there a power or powerset you wanted to give Harry but you decided against it for whatever reason?

No. I mean, when I first started writing him he was a lot more precise and a lot better at it then I decided it's a lot more fun if he kind of sucks at magic.

*laughter*

I mean because we'll have some things that he can do that he's real good at but- like classroom things but other stuff not so much so that was a lot more fun, it also gave me a much easier time creating an arc for the character's development. Because I had like this perfect basis "in this book Harry's going to learn how to do this" "in this book Harry finally can do a fireball" you know like that.

You were just talking about Harry's progression and such, with regards to adaptation are there any aspects of Harry's character that you would consider inviolate that you would definitely want to make sure is carried into another adaptation and on the flipside are they any aspects that fans would be surprised to hear that you're really chill about that you don't mind changing?

I mean I don't mind changing anything about his appearance at all, I just kind of wrote a generic appearance for him anyways. Especially if it goes to other mediums I don't really care what Harry looks like I care what he behaves like. What was the first part of the question again? Oh which bits are inviolate. Harry's never gonna hurt a kid or an animal.... I don't know I probably wouldn't know it until I saw it happen and went "oh my god that's the worst" which I assume would happen quite easily. But I don't know.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAh_HjHKSqc

[TheCuriousFan]

Back to doing most of a regular interview instead of posting snippets from three different q&as that seem relevant.

What do you prefer Star Wars or Star Trek? For me it's funny because you answered this in one of your books.

For me it's Star Wars especially since The Mandalorian came out. Trek, I don't mind Trek but it's not like my spiritual home, I need swords and space wizards.

I'm right there with you and Mandalorian really almost feel like... people who grew up with the original trilogy it almost feels like coming home home a little bit don't it.

Oh I know, I know, I'm loving the heck out of it.

If you had to pick three favourite Dresden books which would they be?

Probably Changes, Peace Talks and Battle Ground, I mean I kind of see Peace Talks and Battle Ground as the same book because originally they were but it was just too big and clunky.

What is your favourite food and drink combo? And if it's not pizza and coke I'm gonna feel cheated.

Well you're gonna feel cheated then because it's burgers and fries.

Okay, I'm just saying when I read Dresden Files books every five minutes when Harry's getting a coke I'm like "good lord I can feel my teeth cracking".

Yeah.

Which character point of view would change our view on Dresden's world the most if we got a chapter or a novella from that point of view?

Ooooooh, the Merlin probably.

Oh nice.

Yeah the Merlin... he just has bottles of Pepto that Dresden causes him to drink, but he's the one who knows the whole story and exactly how dangerous Dresden is right now, so.

If you could collaborate with one author in any genre, living or dead, who would it be?

Robert B Parker.

What does Robert B Parker write?

He is the author of the Spenser private eye series, so all of the Spenser movies, all the tv shows, they all come from his books. He's kind of my hero as a writer, he didn't even start until he was in his 40s and then he just started writing and turning out these books on a regular basis, he actually died at the keyboard like a man, that I how I want to go out you know, doing something cool like that. But yeah he was my favourite writer and he passed five or six years ago.

So besides Robert B Parker if you had a chance to write any other author's universe, play in that sandbox, which one would it be and why?

*his answer is still Honor Harrington cat scout and Monster Hunter International's denarians vs monster hunters*

Now I've heard this story a lot in the comments of the videos I've made for your books, the story about the professor that basically inspired you to write the Dresden Files, did you stay in touch with this gentleman?

With her, Debbie Chester, we trade emails occasionally still. Most recently she published her book which is called "The Fantasy Fiction Formula" and it's- she's the one who taught me everything I needed to know to write so for you wannabe writers out there check out "The Fantasy Fiction Formula" by Debora Chester. But yeah she was the one who inspired me to do the Dresden Files. I'd been writing swords and horses fantasy in her class for years and she was like "when you're talking to me about story structure you're always talking Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you're always talking about Babylon 5, maybe you should try writing something that's kind of in that same kind of genre, maybe you would enjoy that". And I was like "I am a /fantasy/ author" excuse me so I resisted what she was trying to tell me to do for a very long time. *Storm Front origin story from here*

Do you ever think about writing a hard space science fiction series?

Oh I already have, or at least I started writing one. It's called US Marshals which I decided- I set it 200 years in the future and the Earth has colonies on the moon and Io and Mars and stations at the Lagrange Points and asteroid mining going on and the entire system got tired of dealing with all the people on Earth who have no idea what their problems are like when their problems are like "we need air". That's the kind of problem Earthers are not going to understand so eventually they took a power collection satellite, they wrote "don't tread on me" across the Gobi Desert in letters thirty feet high and they declared independence from the Earth and declared themselves the United System and I did that just so I could have US Marshals as the protagonists.

So they're the United System Marshals and they're the only ones who know about the aliens. Earth is sort of on the receiving end of the Prime Directive but instead of being in a nature preserve it's more like a hunting preserve because when contact is outlawed only the outlaws make contact so the only aliens who show up are guys doing illegal stuff, religious fanatics, political refugees, weird scientists doing weird experiments that are unauthorised by the Federation you know, that sort of thing. Those are the only aliens we see and the marshals are the ones that have to deal with them.

This is a book that I can get and read?

No no, the first one is like three quarters written, I stopped writing it to start the Alera series (the only polite thing I can say is thank fuck this never got off the ground). I left my protagonist floating in a decaying orbit over the moon with his ship about to go critical behind him and a solar flare coming on and he's been there for like ten years.

Wow, well I'd be interested in hearing if he gets out of that situation. What beer in our reality is most similar to Mac's ale?

I'm not a beer guy I don't know, I go to friends for research for beer.

Your favourite Metallica album?

S&M the one they did with the symphony.

Who is your favourite villain to write in the Dresden Files and why is it Nicodemus?

Nicodemus is a load of fun because he's the guy that will do anything, that's kind of his schtick so it's always fun to have him there because I'll sit down and brainstorm just the worst things he could possibly do that day and try and figure out how to work that into the book then after I do that, he's a lot of fun. Mab is a whole ton of fun I regard her as a villain. Marcone is probably the most fun to write because he's the guy who is- he has the limited resources and the naked will against all these creatures of incredible power everywhere.

You know Death Masks was the one where I really was like all in the series because I felt like Nicodemus could have been the big bad on a season of Buffy, I stick by that. Now Marcone is just like the coolest cat in the world, we all kind of want to be him.

I have so much fun with that character man, writing the end of Battle Ground was such a blast.

Yes that was a trip, at first I was like "god damn it no" and then it was like "oh yes...?" so what music do you listen to while writing and would you consider putting out a playlist on Spotify like Brandon Sanderson does?

I guess if I could figure out how. Depends what I'm writing, Dresden gets lots of heavy metal and the heavy metal that I like is often covers of other songs that are very not heavy metal songs but somebody did a heavy metal cover and that's something I enjoy, when I'm writing the steampunk I write almost exclusively to Lindsay Stirling, the violinist. I don't know if you've heard her albums but they're fun.

Who is your favourite not-Harry character you've created and how did you envision this character while you were creating them? Please be Marcone.

Marcone was an accident. He started off as kind of a throwaway gangster guy and then I decided well his opening was too cool to leave him like because we opened with a soulgaze on Marcone, it's like "okay no if I'm gonna make this guy a human predator then he's going to be a tiger and you will always have to be afraid of him, period. And that meant that he was going to have to grow in proportion to Dresden otherwise he would not be someone who is scary so Marcone as he's been going he's been gathering resources and various abilities to influence the world around him even though he can't do it Dresden's way, he has the advantage of he has no limits, or at least very few limits so off he goes to get things done. That's always terribly fun, writing Marcone because I can stop and think "okay if I was going up against this wizard how would I manage it?, alright now let me stop and think." I'll go and contact some of my sneaky friends and say "alright sneaky guys how do I do this?" and they tell me to have him operate this way.

As a comic book guy I always- the comparison I always make to those two is some of the best issues of Superman him and Lex Luthor had to work together so you've got Harry and Marcone having to work together, and they work really good together it just puts a smile on my face I love it.

Yeah that's a lot of fun to write, frenemies is the best.

Favourite season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

*It's season 2*

Angel or Spike? And I know that you've got James Marsters doing your audiobooks and you feel like you've got to answer this one way.

*It's Spike even without James Marsters*

Any advice for new writers based on your experiences is there anything you would advise new writers not to do, or avoid?

Avoid anything that keeps you from getting new writing done. I mean, no matter what you're doing you should be getting new material published so if you start getting into a place where you are continually revising and editing old stuff you're not learning anything new and you need to stop doing that and start writing new stuff as well. So always be generating new material that's how you learn and grow as a writer. Don't let anything get in the way of you making new stuff.

This is kind of a long one, let me make sure I'm reading this right, what have you found to be both and advantage and a disadvantage of telling a story the size of the Dresden Files from the first person point of view of Harry?

Well the great advantage is is that Dresden's point of view is so limited and kind of ignorant that I can sort of adjust things on the fly because things are happening behind the scenes that I know are happening but Dresden doesn't know are happening and if necessary I can look back on it and go "oh wait let me just pick this bad guy up and put him over here and that one over here because the audience can't see it yet anyway and this will be a nicer setup for later on in the story" so that's kind of the good part is that Dresden is so... he's kind of so blinkered that there's all kinds of things happening that he doesn't know about that I know about as a writer. So it's convenient for me so I can rearrange things along the way.

The problem of course is that Dresden is a character who is so limited and blinkered that I can only show the things that are right in front of him and I'm very limited in what I can present to the audience in terms of the various overstory that's going on because basically the only way for the audience to find out is for Dresden to wander into the middle of it and step on a landmine, that's how the audience finds out about it.

I know in Side Jobs you wrote some stories from some different characters' points of views, have you ever thought about writing one from like third person omniscient or anything like that? Just to see what it felt like?

For the Dresden Files? No I couldn't. I mean Dresden Files is very much, I mean it's funny because I have a different experience of it than everybody else because in my head I can see all these other characters and their stories and their viewpoints and their view of Dresden and the White Council and everything and it's all so different than Dresden's attitudes about things. And people are /afraid/ of Dresden it's not like they casually go up and challenge what he thinks about the world on a regular basis. I mean he's the guy who can melt you if he gets really upset, do you really want to go talk politics with him? No probably not, you can probably skip that and be just as happy.

Well yeah there's only one guy who can soulgaze with a kraken and the kraken's scared of him, right.

Well essentially yeah. That was more a starborn thing but anyway. There you go free one for the audience.

If you could finish ASOIAF for GRRM what would be the last sentence?

I don't know I haven't read it. The last sentence will be a lot better than D&D anyway, right?

I've got some- the real D&D which is Dungeons and Dragons I've got some of those questions here in a minute.

Nice.

What advice would you give to a new and struggling Dungeons and Dragons player who only knows how to be a Barbarian because he just wants to punch everyone in the face, what would be your advice to someone to get better at Dungeons and Dragons?

Play lots of characters, I'm the sort of person who gets bored and switches characters every month or so in a weekly D&D game *chuckles*. GMs just roll their eyes at me all the time but yeah play more characters and enjoy it, think your way through the character that you're playing you know, figure out if he's gonna be a dummy. Don't try and be the cool guy in the party, try and be the loser in the party it's so much fun. If you're the guy who's so dumb you're causing problems for everyone then that is a much more interesting game than if you're playing Captain White Bread.

I was told not to ask you about the fourth edition of Dungeons and Dragons, I think they said you believed it was like the new coke?

*usual summary of grievances with 4E and some talk about D&D movie*

I watched a panel a while back right when I'd first gotten into Dresden Files, I also like the Red Rising series by Pierce Brown a lot and you two were doing a panel together I think somewhere in like Arizona this was like back in 2016 I think and I noticed in that panel that you kept- when people would ask you about Dresden you'd be like "yeahyeahyeah" and you'd answer it and then they'd ask you a question about Dungeons and Dragons and you were real enthusiastic about it and it's like "I think this guy really wants to play some Dungeons and Dragons" so it got me thinking, what is your favourite D&D class and what class to you gravitate towards the most? I know you say you like to change it up a lot but which one do you find yourself falling back into easily?

I almost always play spellcasters. I like playing characters that can cause chaos and rearrange the battlefield a lot, lot of crowd control type characters are what I enjoy playing because the tactical effect is much larger with that character. So I enjoy playing anybody who's a spellcaster I enjoy playing clerics because I like playing characters with a southern accent and preaching to the monsters and stuff like that, that's always fun.

See I was new to it and I felt like right when I was starting to get the hang of it I went out and bought me some nice metal dice and a nice metal character and all that stuff and then covid happened and now we can't get together and play anymore so.

Yeah makes it much more difficult, lots of Zoom D&D.

Would you ever consider visiting the Codex Alera universe again?

*the usual answer about potentially going back when the Protoss equivalents arrive a few centuries later or going back to a cursor academy right after the series ended and showing how the world changed*

Will you be writing a redemption arc for officer Rudolph?

Writing a redemption arc for officer Rudol-*starts laughing* I don't know yet, we'll see what happens to Rudy. I could see Rudy winding up on a Stone Table at some point.

I don't think anybody would be mad about that really.

Yeah, yeah.

Why is the Furies of Calderon hardcover so goshdarned expensive?

I do not know. It's hardest to find because they printed fewer copies of that than any other hardback that I've ever had come out so that's probably why. Technically that was my very first hardback book was Furies of Calderon I think they only printed six or eight thousand of that first one so it's sort of hard to find.

Leaning onto that one, will there ever be a hardcover re-release or first release for some of the earlier books in the Dresden Files series?

Oh I'm sure there will be you know how corporations are, I mean Penguin's a corporation like everybody else I'm sure they'll want to do some kind of special release when we get to the end. Maybe I can talk them into doing some kind of release where they'll release two or three novels in a hardback omnibus edition, that might be kind of nice.

After I buckled and bought all the trade paperbacks I'm sure now they'll probably just go ahead and do that.

Yeah exactly "here all new hardbacks, matching covers, if you line them up they all- the art makes new art", like that.

As a book collector I can't say no to things like that.

Exactly, exactly. Preying on all the poor OCD kids.

Alright, do you find it hard to kill of your characters or do you really get joy out of making your readers cry? For example in Battle Ground, why Jim why?

Look, I torture my characters because I'm not legally allowed to torture any readers. So the only way I can get to them is through the characters, as long as I have the characters and do mean things to them I can get to you guys too and that's really what this is all about for me.

Well hearing how you described your favourite season of Buffy I think I got the answer to that, yeah I think he likes ripping your soul out just a little bit.

I do, that's what you're all paying me for.

Indifference I think, as a writer- the worst thing would be indifference if you killed a big character and everybody was kind of like *shrugs*

Oh yeah, I don't mind when people get upset about character deaths, that's the best thing ever. That's heroin for writers.

Battle Ground was kind of rough for me, got the advance reader copy and I was like- this sounds like complaining about having too much money to some people but I was like- you know how much it sucked having to be quiet about that for a month and not being able to react to this you guys.

Oh my god I had to wait a year after I wrote it before I finally started getting audience response from it.

And hatemail?

Well you know, some of that but it's to be expected.

What are some of the best books that you've read in the last five years?

*Temeraire, Alex Verus, Larry Correia, Robert Parker, Zelazny, Prydain Chronicles, Lois McMaster Bujold.*

What is your favourite candy?

*Andy's Fruit snacks whatever those are*

Will we be seeing more of Elaine in the future I think that's a very easy question.

Oh yeah obviously.

Is Pizza Express based on any specific pizza place?

Oh my gosh it is and I forgot the name of it but I had three or four friends of mine who were LARPers along with me back in the day- back in college and they all worked at the pizza place and the way travel would work out is we'd be traveling to a LARP, we'd be traveling from Oklahoma City to Dallas for three or four hours down there but we wouldn't be able to leave until like three thirty in the morning where everybody got off their shift and I would be like the one guy who was awake and we'd pile into a car and head somewhere. But man I can't remember the name of it, it was pizza something.

So it wasn't anywhere in Chicago?

No, no it wasn't, it was in Norman Oklahoma but they had a Street Fighter game there that if you won enough rounds of it you would get a free small pizza and so it was on my regular rotation of- you know when I was a young father, going around and getting our pizza dinner for less than a dollar because I could win the Street Fighter game and get a small pizza, then I could go to the next place and play a Simon game and get a free movie then go to the next place and play another Simon game and get a two liter and some breadsticks. Then I had the pizza, the two liter, the breadsticks and the movie, take it home and it only cost me a dollar and- it was a quarter to win each game.

And now I'm hungry. You talked about rereading some stuff, something I've been doing is- I read a lot of Steven King when I was a teenager and I've started rereading a lot of his stuff a couple years ago and I was amazed at how much it has different things that'll hit you from when you were a teenager and obviously kids and stuff like that. So my viewers know me and they would love to hear you answer this, do you have a favourite Steven King book?

For Steven King I'll probably take The Stand as far as that one goes, I mean it's a little long but and it sort of ends a little bit goofy but the character work is really enjoyable and once you read it you're a hypochondriac for like six weeks afterward, that's all there is to it.

Yeah I did my review for The Stand back in April right when lockdown happened and I was like "I did not plan this guys I swear to god".

Oh yeah, I watched it, I watched it.

Another Steven King one, was the name He Who Walks Behind influenced by Steven King's He Who Walks Behind The Rows from Children of the Corn?

No I actually stole that from Fritz Lieber in a book from the 50s or 60s, I forget the name of it but it was about a guy whose wife was an actual witch and that was her familiar demon, He Who Walks Behind. It was just such a cool thing that it was like "okay, I'm gonna borrow that."

Recommend a science fiction or fantasy series that not a lot of people talk about.

*First two seasons of Andromeda and Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga*

Harry's mechanic is named Mike, did you get this name from the rock group Mike and the Mechanics?

Maybe? I wouldn't put it past me. I mean at the time I just needed a mechanic and I've got to name him something, Mike, okay.

Mike's a good strong name, I'm a fan of that one. Let's talk about adaptation because I know this one's got to come up quite a bit for you, now we obviously had that one version that came out so, I know that the rights- I think Fox has said they were gonna do something and then I don't know if that was just because they didn't want to lose the rights, so basically is there ever gonna be a new version that's gonna happen and if it did would you prefer it to be animated?

We'll see. There may be a new version, we'll see what happens, it's one of those things that's in development and you know what that means in Hollywood.

It means they're holding on to it?

It means they're holding on to it. Hollywood is a place where nothing happens, nothing happens, nothing happens and then everything happens all at the same time. And that's why the folks who work in the business kind of have a reputation for being a little crazy because they /live/ in everything happening at the same time all the time. It's a tough way to live I don't know if I could do that business but it's in development now, we'll see if anything comes of it. I'm actually kind of on the development team at this point so I'm able to provide direct input to the scripts and being able to say "okay we need a joke here, we need something to lighten up the scene here" and that's been a lot of fun. I don't know if it's going to develop into anything because covid, otherwise something might have happened already I don't know but things have been shut down in California so hard that nothing new is getting done.

I'm thinking about that same panel I saw where you were with Pierce Brown and you said you had like zero contribution to the sci-fy series at all, right?

Yeah that's correct, they didn't even cop me a copy of the DVDs.

*laughs*

Wow I wonder why it failed. As far as animation I don't know if you ever watch any of the Netflix animation like Dragon Prince or something like that... Maybe I've been influenced so much by the very famous fanart for Dresden but that's just kind of what I picture in my head is just animation, and then maybe you can have James Marsters-

Oh it would be so good I would /love/ an animated Dresden Files show because in an animated show you can burn down the city or not burn down the city and it costs you just as much either way. So I would be able to write just the most ridiculous nonsense though in an animated series that you couldn't do on a live action and that would be a lot of fun.

So what is your current favourite tv show that is still airing and streaming counts?

Mandalorian. I really love the Orville? and I think they're clearly having a great time on that show and that usually sells a show for me.

Best Star Trek show on tv right now.

It really is it's the second best Star Trek show of all time but I'm not sure which one is number one but the Orville? is number two.

How do you find your beta readers and how do I become one? That wasn't me that was a viewer that asked that.

Well I've got a waiting list now that is like really long and usually there's only one or two new people a year although probably in the next few years people on the list are gonna start dying so that should make it go through faster.

Have you ever had a character that you planned to kill off but you changed your mind as you were writing?

No I don't think I've chickened out on killing anybody I needed to kill. I have killed some extra people I didn't need to kill only because I get tired of having so many characters, Battle Ground was basically an excuse to go "you know what let me just move a couple of these people aside and I won't have to deal with them anymore, this cast is too big".

Because I won't lie when I was reading Turn Coat I think it was with Michael I thought you'd done it and I was like "god damn it killed my favourite" so I thought you'd done it there and I was wondering if he'd actually intended to do it and just couldn't pull the trigger completely.

No no, that was always his retirement, that was his ticket out.

Do you intentionally write Buffy references in your books to troll James Marsters?

Not to troll Marsters, I write Buffy references 'cause I love Buffy. I don't mind trolling Marsters, that said. And now that I know he has issues saying the word "little" I'm gonna have to work it into like the worst possible times (this is the price he pays for the supposed Toot and Mister story not having the word little in it).

I heard him do the interview where you put like little on a page like twenty five times or something.

Yeah yeah, well I can be like that occasionally.

Not to be when does the next book come out guy, but do you have any plans on when Cinder Spires will continue?

*the usual Olympian Affair summary, other spires are choosing teams*

I only have one question about the cover art for your books here, obviously we know the joke by now about Harry always wearing a hat. Is it true that this character here *points to Aeronaut's Windlass cover* wears a hat and the artist intentionally didn't put a hat in?

Yeah he's a British naval captain for all practical purposes he won't be caught dead without his hat and so we get him drawn- I at least got him to add the hat in on the side eventually. That was a joke between- Chris was playing around with me a little and I appreciate that.

I don't know if this is a typo, like I said I haven't read Codex or Cinder Spires yet but it says "who would win in a fight of indifference? Cat Sith or Rowl?"

Oh Cat Sith or Rowl, I don't know Cat Sith has that magical advantage on his side where he's immortal and he doesn't have to eat or sleep or blink or anything like that so he could probably cheat by being immortal and Rowl would protest his cheating, probably walk away.

When Harry asked Cat Sith where his red lightsaber was I just thought I'd let you know that I laughed so loud that I woke my wife up and she didn't appreciate it but I had a good laugh out of it.

Well please apologise to her from me.

Well that's the thing I think that I've really endeared myself to this series because obviously we grew up in similar situations and similar pop culture references and I love that you put those pop culture reference in almost as like a Farscape kind of thing where John Crichton was always making these pop culture references and everybody's like "what are you talking about?" but I think it's- Lord of the Rings and Star Wars are the ones you do the most and that's two of my favourite things so please keep doing more of that because I enjoy them.

I have to, apparently I can't not do it so.

Yeah if you don't have at least one Star Wars reference per book, right?

Oh yeah definitely.

Did you have an outline for the series with a beginning, middle and end or did you wing it?

*the usual story about coming up with a whole series outline instead of a Storm Front outline*

Well here's the thing, one of the other questions was "it seems like we always get like a mixed answer, is it a twenty book series, is it a twenty three book series- it's a twenty book series with an apocalyptic trilogy at the end so is it twenty three counting the trilogy as three individual books?"

The original plan was for twenty case books and a three book trilogy at the end, a big doorstop trilogy like the big books.

And you're sticking to that?

Well no, because now there's going to be at least twenty two books and then the trilogy.

Twenty five is a great number.

Twenty five is a good solid number and it gets us more Denarians.

I'm always on board for that one.

Exactly, they show up for every five books they're pretty regular.

How do you feel about people seeing Harry and Molly's relationship as a potential romance?

It is a potential romance, they probably should see it that way. It's also potentially a disaster and also potentially a number of other things but at the moment it's one of those things that is not clearly defined.

I kind of think you answered this one already but one of Brandon Sanderson's lectures in his sci-fi and fantasy writing course he mentioned a challenge you received to come up with a story mixing Pokemon and Roman legions, I assume that that story was Codex Alera.

*same story about ideas vs execution argument leading to bet*

-Well I'd argue that his assignment was a little flawed because he said a second bad idea was Pokemon and judging by how I still see people outside on their cellphones looking for fucking Pokemon that it was probably a pretty good idea.

I know, that was the dumbest thing I'd ever seen because I'd been watching it with my kid in the morning and my kid was just /fascinated/.

Mine too.

And it was like "okay I need to jump on this Pokemon train".

Can white court vampires get sexually transmitted diseases? I'm asking for a friend.

They don't ever suffer from them, they can carry them.

When will we see Cowl again?

When it's time.

Well you kind of already answered this one I'll kind of add to it a little bit. Three of my five favourite books in the series are Death Masks, Turn Coat and Skin Game if you can't see what I'm doing here obviously I love the Denarians I love Nicodemus it's my favourite part of the whole series so I'm guessing that book twenty is going to be Nicodemus and the Denarians again, that's a pretty safe bet at this point right?

Well *unintelligible* Nicodemus anyway.

Okay. That's not an accident obviously, you didn't not plan to do this every five books right.

Oh exactly yeah, it's there for a reason.

Do you have any new series plans for your post-Dresden Files writing career?

Yeah, there's a Dresden Files spinoff series that I want to do, I'm calling it Monster LLC. It's centered around Goodman Grey because there are times when you need a hero to help you but some problems require a monster to solve and that's kind of what Grey's- what his schtick is. He's going to be kind of a darker character a little more vengeancey-based character but at the same time he's older and a little bit more sophisticated than Dresden and he interacts with the supernatural world in ways that Dresden just can't. So I think it'll be a lot of fun seeing the supernatural world from a different perspective.

*segues to talking about GI Joe and about the power of nostalgia*

-You'll like the next one, the next one's gonna be a little- we're not gonna do the frantic action thing on the next book.

I figure you've got to kind of take a breath after the last one.

Oh my gosh after Battle Ground I reread that and kind of went through all the emotional fallout of it that I was going to need to be writing in the next book and I was like "oh my god I'm gonna need a /book/ to do this" so you know. We're gonna see Dresden- I think the next one is gonna be called Twelve Months and we're gonna see Dresden have to survive a bunch of dates with Lara and kind of put his- he's putting his castle together and sort of building his life back up after Battle Ground knocked it all down.

So he's not wiggling out of this whole deal that Mab's made for him, this arranged marriage?

We're gonna have to look at it and see but I mean Dresden, it's basically- the next one is going to have to be a book about how do you put your life back together when it just gets blown up around you? And so I think that's what we'll be doing and instead of just being in the Dresden Files universe for two or three days like we usually are in a story, we're gonna be there over the course of a year. And so you'll be able to see what Dresden's life is like in the not frantically-worst-weekend-of-his-year period of story.

It's a good idea, so Mirror Mirror, is that off the table? It's no longer called Mirror Mirror or-

We're just delaying it because I've got to do some other stuff first. I mean if we went to Battle Ground and then the first thing we did was jump away to another universe I think that would be really disorienting and bad for the story. Jumping away to a parallel universe I don't think we want to do that right away but we're definitely gonna do it but I think I can set things up to be a lot more menacing if I have one more book to work with and I'm gonna do that.

I mean what more can Harry go through? I can't wait.

Exactly.

*the rest is a story about Changes' editor reaction and the Ghost Story audio book drama, one of the three people who was available was Ray Romano*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-nYvuRDxpE

[TheCuriousFan]

Back to just the interesting bits from some separate interviews that don't have enough to be a full post on their own. This one is Black Gate Magazine Interview, the Poisoned Pen Podcast, DragonCon 2015 and Salt Lake ComicCon.

*segue from talk about relationship with Murphy*

Do you see there being a cost for Murphy to stand by him? I probably already know the answer.

What really? Do you? We'll see what happens I'm pretty sure I know what happens but we'll see. Sometimes things happen while I'm writing and there's several points in the series that I built big decisions for the character in that I then went "okay I don't know what he's gonna choose I won't know until he gets there because there's gonna be a lot of different factors that go in" there's a lot of factors that go into any choice that anybody makes. And so I wasn't sure which choice he would make when he got to that point so there's a slightly different version of the Dresden Files- and one of the big ones was in Dead Beat when he's deciding how he's going to take on the big bad guys at the end and he winds up grabbing the Word of Kemmler and reanimating the dinosaur and going to town on them but he also- yeah there were three things he could have done there- no I'm thinking too far back it was in Changes that he made the really huge one (I wanted to hear more about the Dead Beat choices too). Changes was like this giant gamble for me because there were all these things that I didn't know what was gonna happen when I was writing it and I didn't know how it was gonna fall out afterwards.

So in Changes he's against the wall, his back's broke, his daughter's gonna die and that's gonna kill him too and other people around him so he's gotta do something he hasn't done before, he's got to change his boundaries. So he's got three choices he can pick up the Word of Kemmler and go full on necromancer and go against the vampires like that, he can summon Lasciel's coin to him still he can still find that at which point he goes in as a Denarian and takes them on, and his third choice was Mab- was to take Mab's offer and go and because Mab keeps her word he says "okay I'm gonna set this up to where I'll be able to go in- at least I'll be able to save her but I won't be able to save me, I'm already done." That was his thinking, that was why he went with Mab at the time because he was in a place of such despair, and then his biggest concern was "but what if she makes me into a monster and has me kill people?" so he figures out a contingency for that as well and then he goes in and hopefully he can't lose. Either way he won't wind up a monster and hopefully he will be able to get his daughter out and to her mother and safe and away, that was his plan.

But there were these huge big choices and there were different versions of the Dresden Files for Harry the necromancer, Harry the Denarian, once Nicodemus becomes your regular frenemy that would have been an interesting series but it would have gotten a lot darker. And the necromancy one, I don't even know about that, that could have- Because Harry would have- that would have meant that he was all "oh no" he would have tried to pretend "I'm just a regular wizard" all the time but the necromancy would have kept popping up and getting more serious and that would have been... But also he could have been the white necromancer and be raising the spirits of the unavenged (I think) which he actually did in book three but anyway, so.

But when you write these things you're not really sure what's gonna happen, I knew I was taking major chances in Changes and oh my god my editor called me and after she got to the last page of the manuscript like, apparently it was still on her desk it had not been flipped over onto the stack, the last page and she calls me up like "you killed him! you killed him!" and my response was "yeah, now we can do the really fun stuff" and she just kind of stopped for a good five seconds and goes "okay" and that was the conversation.

---

So in the Dresden Files we see that a lot of different wizards have their own styles of magic, how much is the way magic works individual to the wizard vs how much is a function of the magic itself?

One of the models I used for understanding how the magic works was martial arts, because they're both expressions of power that not all people have and so I figured that's a reasonably good parallel to work with so I started drawing influence from that. So when you talk about martial artists... I remember having this conversation with some people, my very first real serious exposure to martial arts was The Karate Kid of course. And then I went to Ryukyu-Kenpo school and learned from a guy who was... he was my teacher and he was getting his English doctorate at UMKC and he was living in a basement karate studio and he had like a little closet where he kept his room. And he was about a forty year old Japanese guy named Shiro? Shintaku? And Mr Shintaku, he was my teacher he was a really good guy but what I didn't know is that he was from an old Japanese family and when I say an old Japanese family I mean he has a direct ancestor in the Tale of Genji.

Oh my god.

Yeah. I saw pictures of him in the middle of a five million dollar Shinto wedding on top of a New York skyscraper about ten years ago. He's from /that/ kind of family, he was living in complete poverty in this little place because his teacher master Oyata? who lived in Independence, he was like an old school true martial artist and he was- he had said "well you know what if you want to come learn from me you are welcome here but your family's money isn't. If you want to learn from me you're gonna live in my school, you're gonna teach for your rent, I'll pay you enough for food but that's all you can have here. There's not gonna be any cars, there's not gonna be any suits, you can get your stuff from a secondhand store. You need to get away from that if you want to learn what I have to teach you."

And so he did, Mr Shintaku, I mean I saw his 6-dan black belt test, they shot three arrows at him. /At/ him, not past him, /at/ him. Two of them had red feathers, one of them had blue, he had to deflect the red ones and catch the blue one. And he didn't know what colour they were because master Oyata held the feathers behind his hand and he didn't know what colour they were until they released them. And he was about fifty feet away, he had less than a quarter of a second to do it and he did it.

Oh my god.

That was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen in my life. But back to the question, so martial arts when you're having conversations about martial arts people say "what's the best martial art?". There's no best martial art because I mean, if you are a long tall skinny quick guy man Tae Kwon Do is for you, that is a great art for you, maybe crane style Kung Fu you'd be super well suited to that. Maybe not so much wrestling, maybe not so much Jujitsu, maybe not so much some of the other arts that rely- maybe not so much boxing. It's gonna depend on who you are and what you can do and the kind of resources you have that you were just given, which martial art is the best martial art.

For wizards magic is the same way, Harry is good at... he's very good at very direct magic and he's very good at magic that takes a lot of time and love and investment to build, his gadgets that he makes for himself are second to none in the wizard world even though he's a punk kid. He can blow things up as well as some of the heaviest hitting wizards around but he sucks at a bunch of other things. And so as a wizard you find out that there's some things you are going to be very good at and some things you aren't going to be good at and if you want to be a serious wizard and be seriously skilled with your magic and expressing that power you've got to find one that matches what you can do. So that's why everybody's style is slightly different and all wizards I try and build them "this guy's practical, this guy's romantic about the old days, this guy is completely focused on the self-discipline that comes with not needing any magical accoutrements to go along with what you do" and so that's why they're all different. Magic isn't just vanilla it's based on who and what you are an expression of what you believe as well which also affects it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHJU5NwFiXk

I've had a number of people ask about Drakul, let's see... Brian asks: I just have two questions, where was Drakul in Peace Talks and what are or were the Daoine Sidhe compared to the modern Sidhe? That's Gaelic right?

Yes, traditional Irish faeries. They're the ones who- in legend they're the ones who drove the Fomorians into the sea and they were- the Daoine Sidhe were really intermixed with the Gaelic gods so they were- and plus they have a really super oral tradition so they have a gajillion versions of every single one of their legends so because the various tribes and clans had their own versions of the various stories. So the Gaelic stuff, the Irish myth is always fun and complicated because you can always play with it because there were so many different people that were telling the various stories so that makes it a lot of fun.

Is that where the banshees come from?

Yeah I mean most of the Sidhe stuff comes from- a lot of the faerie stuff especially if they were any faeries that were really pretty and then ate you came from France because they loved their romance faeries and their sex faeries and friends, but a lot of the other stuff where you're actually getting with the gods and the fae and so on that's all stuff from the islands and just depending on where you go there you can get all kinds of different stories, we get into a bit more of that in this one and I hope people have a good time with it, as far as Drakul goes, come back in September.

----

How much more upset is Ebenezar going to be if he finds out that has known about his other grandson since the Skinwalker incident?

Oh yeah absolutely. But at the same time Luccio's job is basically to find out stuff about wizards and wizards they're- in the Dresden Files universe they're very big on keeping their secrets, on gathering information and keeping stuff that they know that nobody else knows that's wizard crack and they're all addicts so.

----

Trace asks, we now know that the Tuatha are enemies of the Fomor, are there still some of the Tuatha around? Are any of them now part of the Sidhe?

Yeah the Tuatha are about and the Tuatha are folks that- they sort of straddle the line between powerful faeries and like, demigods/full on godly gods, kind of depending on where they are. And they also kind of intermix with like Balor and other beings that were essentially Titans, they were very much parallel to the Titans anyway. But uh... where'd this question start? Oh my gosh I'm sorry there's been a lot of interviews lately.

Are they now part of the Sidhe?

No, Mab kind of took over a lot of the mantles of power that went along with that when the fae queens were created so they're kind of red- because they were attached to these godly beings they're kind of mostly retired like a lot of the rest of the gods, they're kind of out doing other stuff now and they're not nearly as invested in guiding and protecting humanity as they should have been but we might get to see some more of that in the series as we keep going. I mean, I just get to do more and more fun things from here on out, we can do the parallel universes and then we're gonna get to do the wrestling book before too much longer, the kaiju book, it'll be a good time.

----

Okay Christine has a question, she says I have a question about the names of the faerie queens with the exception of Molly, they seem to have pretty clear connections to their courts or mythology. How about Sarissa's name? Is it made up or is it a reference to something else like the spear?

Well you might consider that perhaps Mab named her children the way she did for a reason. That's what I'm gonna say on that one.

So follow the clues.

She intended her child to be a weapon.

----

Somebody was curious about the line of succession, what would happen if Mab died? Who would be next in line or is that a secret that we're not supposed to know yet?

Um uh uh I guess you'll have to find out if it happens, we'll see.... Now I'm thinking about it, damn it people.

*laughter*

Oh wow, that'd be bad... wow, yeah I'm not gonna tell you anything. I'm not gonna tell you anything at this point, yeah that would be awful, that'd be a terrible thing.

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-wua9p-e40f53

A quick search doesn't reveal a Dragoncon 2015 transcript so back to Dragoncon I go.

Good morning Mr. Butcher, kind of a technical question less story related but you've demonstrated in the past that you can have moving magic circles like on the barges and they still function even though the movement doesn't disrupt them in any way, so can you have them scaled elsewise like in a piece of wood on your arm that works as a shield, something like that? Is that still applicable?

That probably wouldn't because you've got to have some kind of connection with what you're standing on, you've got to be grounded in some sense in order for it to work. Unless you had somebody who was so squirrelly that they really that that was grounding it, was putting a magic circle on a plank on their arm. Because there's nothing- one of the things about magic in the Dresden Files universe is that so much of it is grounded in not only in emotions but in your subconscious so it's got to be stuff that you really believe. I suppose if you were weird enough you could believe all kinds of odd things about magic and make it happen which is why when you deal with someone, if you're dealing with a wizard who is like literally actually insane, which is what happens if you start messing with too much black magic then all kinds of weird mutated things could happen. I think that probably the nightmare of the council is that you find somebody who is crazy enough to just bring Outsiders directly in, to heck with the gates we'll just bring one in right here right now, and that is like the spookiest thing that the wardens worry about is something like that happening so. There's a very grounded genuine interest all through the fabric of the Dresden Files universe to make sure that wizards don't do crazy stuff like advertise in the phonebook.

*laughter*

You see a wizard that's getting a little bit twitchy that's genuinely something to fear because reality can start warping at that point, so.

---

I just wanted to ask, we recently learned that a lot of- at least several knights of the cross were very short term, they picked it up, they did their stuff, they put down the sword. Would you consider doing a series of short stories about these short term knights of the cross?

I'd think about it. I don't know if I would- I don't know how I would do that and make it convincingly cool. It would be a neat project but not something that I could carry on for a long time so I- it might be something I do as a spinoff thing when I'm done with Harry's story. The thing about the knights of the cross is it's tough to make them really cool and convincing characters if you don't have somebody to contrast them against. Michael can crash through the door being the cool paladin in the white cloak with the shining sword and everything and that's awesome but you've got to have Harry Dresden standing there next to him going "really?" or it loses something, it can get cartoony kind of fast.

The short stories- yeah most of the knights of the cross, they pick up the sword for a day and they do something that needs to be done and after that they put it down and that's the only time in their lives they were ever meant to do that, they were the right person at the right place at the right time and one of the archangels spotted them and said "here, do you need some help?" and that's how most of the knights- or or worse they pick up the sword and do it and they die trying, that is something that happens sometimes with knights as well, sometimes you lay your life down and that's part of the idea of being someone who is taking danger upon themselves, who is being a sacrifice, who is getting in the way- interceding for other people who can't defend themselves. People who do that, they understand that, that's sort of the essence of what heroism is and a lot of knights, they died doing the right thing, so.

----

So we know that the faerie ladies can be replaced obviously and I assume that extends on up the hierarchy so I was wondering if Mab was the first winter queen.

No Mab was not the first Mab. Mab was originally winter lady and Lea was her Jenny Greenteeth, she was her sidekick and handmaiden and so when Mab got promoted Lea did too so she got to be much more powerful and awesome. That was a while back when that happened, and the same thing with Titania, but the Winter queens actually died the last time things got awful in the wizard world so things are about to get awful in the wizard world again and they're a bit nervous. And they're a bit nervous about Dresden- well Titania's /very/ nervous about Dresden, Mab's keeping her enemies close, so.

---

Two questions, first off in Dresden, Norse myth has been around in the last few books quite a bit, Odin actually was Merlin's teacher and Merlin was the one who made Demonreach, I recall Odin locked a certain trickster god named Loki up in a cave somewhere, is Loki in Demonreach and will we ever hear from him?

He is not in Demonreach, there are no snakes dripping venom there and Norse gods are awfully literal about that sort of thing. I don't know if we'll hear from him or not, maybe? By the end we're going to get Wagnerian by the end. But I don't know if we'll hear from him or not but the Norse gods are a little bit more- I kind of like them for the story because moreso than most of the other western mythos I think the Norse gods are a little bit more fallible and human and a little bit less professional wrestler which is actually what several of the gods are doing because you get much more worship as a big wrestler in WWE than you do as a Greek god these days but anyway. What? It fits.

But yeah we'll get into it a little bit more as we're going up because we're kind of bringing in the all-stars at this point, Harry's getting to talk with Hades and so on. Several times I've been asked the question "aren't you worried you're overpowering Dresden? He's getting all these powerups" and I'm like "no, because I know what he's gotta fight". I'm giving him just enough to keep wiggling on the hook, that's exactly as much power as he needs so.

*second one is about Vord creators showing up and gets Protoss showing up bit again*

---

I've got sort of two subconscious questions for you and sort of how it interacts with magical gear, can I block lightning bolts from Thor and sort of the more complicated one is exactly how is Bob reacting to my subconscious? How does that work?

Okay when you're Bob's owner when you're the one who's in possession of the skull Bob acknowledges you and who you are and Bob is a spirit of intellect and takes his shape based on what you look like and the way you are, he's sort of a mirror. So horribly evil necromancer guy picks up the skull he's horrible and evil and Butters picks him up and he's even nerdier which is basically how it works. Now what was the first question about blocking lightning bolts?

Lightning bolts, rightsaber.

Oh with the rightsaber? The rightsaber, right.

*laughter*

I don't know, I haven't gotten to play too much with it yet I know that the sword of faith purely as an expression of faith is both more and less powerful than it was before. For example it's going to be a lot- it's gonna be way easier to misuse than just the standard sword would be and I think it has less of an effect on just sort of regular everyday kind of muddled human beings, you're just not gonna be able to use it on them it's gonna be like hitting them with the cardboard core of a roll of giftwrap. And even that is wrong and will make the sword vulnerable but on the other hand it's just going to be hell on wheels against the truly evil so poor Butters (ohboyherewego.jpg) he's going to be trying to thrash his way through a situation trying to figure out what's going on and the horrible demon pops up and it'll be like "oh thank god, now we get to the simple part. *fwoosh*)" The poor guy, he's not even gonna get to full sword experience of "at least I have something sharp and menacing", he doesn't have that, so. Poor Butters, I often think that about many of the characters, poor so-and-so. I'm writing the next book right now, it's poor Murphy *from here it's teasing Murphy's dying*.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_DcWwAtEiw

I have a bit of a fannish question, Harry rebuilds Little Chicago on Demonreach, what happens?

Oh dear god.

*laughter*

Yeah I think CNN is gonna cover that one. Because the island is just- it's full of horrible negative things and so anything you build out there kind of has all this horrible negative energy associated with it and so ugly things are going to happen as a result. But yeah that's what would happen although- I mean my god what is the- I'm trying to think what is the worst thing Harry could do that is perfectly practical for him and yet would convince anyone who actually looked at it that yep, supervillain and megalomaniacal model down to the last ridiculous detail of Chicago is that, that is exactly the way to do that, it's like yeah, Lex Luthor would have that in his basement, uh huh.

So Harry would be there just thinking "oh yeah sure I'll give Demonreach intellectus over Chicago oh crap I just caused all this evil to happen"?

Well that could be a thing, but no we've got- I mean after all we still have- there's a lot of stuff to come yet, but trust me. But yeah Harry wouldn't do that out there oh my god.

*laughter*

Let me rephrase that, /not even/ Harry would do that out there.

*more laughter*

---

Will we ever get to see Thomas wield Amoracchius again?

I don't know. *points at wife* And I don't want to hear any Amoracchius jokes from you Kitty. Maybe, if he still has fingers, he's having a rough time in this book guys, that's all I'm gonna say for right now.

----

So I have a really specific question, so I've noticed that every time Toot Toot has shown up he seems to be getting a little bit bigger and I'm just wondering, is that all the pizza?

The fae kind of in general are sort of very malleable creatures, they're water creatures, they're very malleable and Toot Toot is essentially what happens when a fae starts progressing through the ranks and that's what he's doing. Because he's been doing all this stuff that has significant supernatural and moral and ethical weight, he's risking his life to defend Dresden against monsters he has no business fighting, that kind of thing. And as he keeps doing that as he keeps helping and helping to push the balance of forces in the various books that's got a weight, that's got significance, that's reflected in how he's growing and how he's growing in power and he's growing in power not only among the Za Lord's guard but also among the fae in general he's getting bigger and bigger and it's because of Dresden. At some point he's going to be looking at himself and going "man, I want to be little" but he's getting all these responsibilities, the Sidhe come from somewhere.

----

So my question is concerning Dresden's daughter Maggie so I know it's probably in the ballpark of can't tell can't say but if she one day became a practitioner would she be more on the end of Dresden with evocation and making things go boom really easily or would she be more like Molly with veils and glamours?

We've got people who do that so I'd have to come up with something different for her. I'm not sure if she's going to wind up a practitioner at all, we'll have to see. Because she was born of a half-vampire mother and that's bound to have an effect and magic is such a force of creation the way it's meant to be used by mortals that having that entire destructive vampire nature might not quite have gone very well along with that at all.

---

Are we ever going to see Harry Dresden free of the Winter Knight mantle and if so is that going to be a story killer?

How to answer this the best way I can... Maybe if he survives the trilogy I'm still not sure if he's going to. But we'll have to see, it's one of those things that I'm not sure he's gonna want to carry around his whole life because there's just so much stress involved in it but at the same time you don't wave at Mab and say "hi we had a good time, see ya" and walk away, that's not who she is so we'll have to see how it turns out. Some of the stuff I know the general outline of the story, like I know what the headlines look like as the story progresses, that's the best parallel I can give you but a lot of the specific details and the bylines and so on that are in those articles are just written in Simolian so I'm not quite sure what they say yet, details are stuff that happen as I'm working so, maybe *shrug* I'm working on it we'll have to see.

And by extension of his mantle is his daughter included?

No Maggie's not included in the mantle, that wasn't part of the deal, so.

Thank you.

If you're asking for a kid in a magical transaction that gets put in bold print you know, that shows up.

*question was interrupted with talk about how fans know what's in the books better than him because of edits/rewrites*

Because of that, the reason you pull so many is because of what you write, to one extent or another, has changed us. It's changed the way I consider who is my family for instance. Of all the characters you've ever written, it's not who's your favourite but who's the most important to you?

Pretty deep question, geez.... Michael.

*cheering*

Because without Michael Dresden would have spun off into an abyss five or six books ago (so around the time of White Night or Small Favour), I mean that would have happened without Michael or Maggie, so. Plus writing a character like that makes you ask an awful lot of questions about the nature of good and evil and how you behave to attain the ends that you think are good and right so yeah it's complicated, issues of faith are tough and you kind of have to face it at some point in your life, what it is you're going to believe in, so. But I think Michael is probably the most important character for that.

Now one thing that I love about the Dresden Files in particular is that it's so all-inclusive, you take all the world and you look at all the mythologies and things that are in there and there's a little bit of everything in there. Now the one thing that I would love to see in the Dresden Files that I don't think would really fit anywhere else would be aliens, whether it was in the form of some magical construct that brought down aliens or if it was actual aliens but is there any chance of something like that coming into the Dresden Files?

I mean in my headcanon because this isn't really something that's been planned but in my headcanon there's two kinds of encounters with aliens in the Dresden Files universe. One when the fae are bored and they want to do something to mess with mortals' heads that's one way to get aliens. The other way is when they crash when their high-tech ships get too close to all the damn wizards on this confusing little planet. And that's how Roswell happened in the Dresden Files universe, that was the same time that Morgan was out there fighting the Skinwalker and it was Morgan throwing magic around that brought the spaceship down.

But so really the aliens have basically just hung up a beacon just outside the solar system that says "this planet is just too weird to bother with, stay away".

----

So I don't know about the rest of you but the Dresden Files has made me laugh, made me cry, made me cheer when Harry does something cool and gets away with something, the one thing I really want to know is I was rereading Turn Coat just recently and the entire library of all the masters for over a thousand years, are we ever going to see any tales from those?

You're reading tales from those.

No I mean Ebenezar's.

Oh Ebenezar's journals.

Ebenezar's journal, his master before him, are we ever going to see any of those?

How long do you expect me to live? But yeah that's why I put those journals in there because that's what these books are, they're Harry's journals that he writes later on. But Ebenezar's journals, the most exciting parts of his journals are centered around the Seven Years War, the French and Indian war because that's when Ebenezar was the young hothead doing things and so was Langtry. All the senior council wizards were the young passionate punks during the French and Indian war that's something that I'm like oooh and I've got all this story written about George Washington as one of the knights of the cross wielding Esperacchius. That was when Washington was a young kid fighting the French and Indian war on behalf of England and so on so forth. It would be a ton of fun to write that, the problem is that I've kind of got this story that I'm doing right now so I'll have to get to it at some point.

We know that White Court vampires are born White Court vampires and they turn the Black Court and the Red Court both turn people, what would happen if a Black Court/Red Court vampire turned a White Court vampire before it had been turned into a full White Court vampire? Would that affect the powers from the White Court vampire or would they just get the Black Court/Red Court powers?

I think they would wind up having to duke it out with the White Court vampire's hunger which is always there and always present it's just sort of quiet until the point at which it emerges, so it would be an issue of the hunger would be trying to stop it from happening and it would have to break in one direction or another but it would make for a really really nasty White Court vampire if the hunger won. And it would just make for a particularly good looking Black Court or Red court vampire, so.

---

In terms of Toot Toot if he continues to grow and become a full on Sidhe lord or something like that would his intense loyalty to Dresden create a conflict of interest in either of the courts and what would be the implications of that?

Well Toot's a Wyldfae at the moment, he doesn't have an allegiance to a court. He's got a default allegiance to the Winter court because of Dresden's allegiance to the Winter court because of his deal with Mab. But Toot Toot is essentially considered Dresden's operative and tool, he doesn't really have any standing of his own in particular in any of the courts, that's Dresden who has that standing and so Toot Toot is like under his aegis but he doesn't really have any juice of his own yet. So Mab doesn't really care about Toot, she just thinks of him as one of Harry's implements like his staff or his blasting rod.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Js2pG5ell5s

[TheCuriousFan]

Another batch of interesting bits from Tyson's Corner VA 2018, Lexington 2018 and ConnectiCon 2019.

In Proven Guilty the first that Harry encounters big daddy Scarecrow his arm is chopped off by Thomas' saber, he's hit by the van, falls into a bus shelter... why is he not hurt by iron like he is in Arctis Tor?

Part of that is because of the nature of the way phobophages work, they're not actually there, they're projecting energy into a body. When he was in Faerie that was a different story. But when they're coming over to the Earth... nobody wants to drive their /own/ car in the demolition derby, you get a junker car and that's what he's doing.

Second question, when somebody is making... when a scion is embracing their supernatural power, how much of that can they do before the powers that be say "you've made your choice, you can't live as long as you have without saying you're basically on the supernatural side"?

An infinitesimal amount, to get the power you make the choice otherwise you don't get it (how this meshes with Irwin and Meryl I have no clue).

Sarissa lived for a long time and apparently she never made a choice.

Yeah she never went one way or the other.

So she just got to live.

Yeah she was just floating along. And you know her mother was queen of Faerie and that *unintelligible*

When Harry died at the end of Changes did that count against *crowd rumbling*

I think you're the biggest guy here you should be fine.

*laughter*

Does that against the death curse for him that he would die alone?

No not really (yay for inconsistency) because he more or less wasn't actually dead, he was just on life support and so far gone that his spirit was floating out there somewhere, basically Mab was just maintaining the silver cord that entire time until his body, until the wizard metabolism could start healing him back up.

---

How did most of the creatures in Demonreach get trapped in there and does it have anything to do with the circle on top of the island?

Second question I'm not telling you, first question I mean the warden of Demonreach put them there, that's how you get in there. That's some place that you know- it was fairly ballsy of Mab to step onto the island and say "give it your best shot kid" but she's that kind of person, so.

---

Are we ever gonna find out what Kincaid is?

Probably eventually. He's a scion but you'll see eventually.

---

We've done the Fae, we've done the Fomor, am I going to be introducing folks from other parts of Celtic mythology like the Fir Bholg?

You may have noticed in the course of the series that those things are popping up more and more, maybe it means something.

---

When Harry does on multiple individuals they always have unique reactions, are we ever going to see what they're seeing?

I don't know, I don't see how, it's all first person point of view, it's all from Harry's point of view. That's kind of the limit for all of us though, what do people think about us? When they look at us what do they see? You don't know, you can look in a mirror but that doesn't tell you what kind of person they think you are.

I was thinking more along the lines of someone else like Billy and Georgia, maybe they would have a soulgaze and talk about what they saw.

And eavesdrop on it? That's cheating. I suppose that could get it done... I mean I know what it looks like I'll see if I can figure out some way to put it in, that seems like something that would be sort of towards the end of the story.

---

In Proven Guilty there's a character at Splattercon!!! who seems to guide some of the events, like pointing Molly towards fear as a motivator, her name is Sandra Marling and I was wondering if she would ever show up again in future books?

How to answer that one properly... well that probably is the proper answer. Oh yeah that's right, I'm not gonna tell you because it's way better to find out the other way.

---

In Cold Days I noticed that Lacuna and Toot Toot are sort of like miniature versions of Murphy and Dresden where Lacuna is sort of a warrior princess Amazonian type and Toot Toot is just like a dangerous spaz. Was that on purpose or am I just reading into things too much?

I didn't do it consciously but there might have been some leftover English major stuff happening, you know, when I wasn't looking.

---

About Mouse, he hid himself so Harry tells the Buddhist monk that this is all there is and tried to contact them to say "we've got one more", so do they ever find out? Do the monks ever come back and ask to have Mouse back?

You're assuming the monks weren't intending that from the very beginning.

---

Can the three queens give Harry conflicting orders?

Ooooh, they can /now/.

*laughter*

That's awesome. You people brought this on yourselves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZJiv_GT-Jc

----

So lots of stuff happened on that Halloween when Harry was born, Margaret died, Lord Raith got cursed even though he's supposedly immune to mortal magic but if it wasn't mortal magic.. was that part of the bargain with Lea?

Man I don't remember Lord Raith ever being immune to mortal magic, did I write that? No I think you're thinking of the Loup-Garou *tangent about how words you pick up from books don't come with pronunciation guides*

There is at one point Harry casts- does some spell at Lord Raith that is drawn into some kind of like field around him.

Oh that's right because he had the three porn star witches backing him up like the ones from Macbeth, that was my Macbeth reference, Macbeth, porn stars, sophistication. And they were covering him for that point and Dresden hadn't known about it then so. And what was the rest of the question?

I was gonna ask if that was part of Margaret's bargain with Lea.

Oh that whole thing with Lord Raith and so on, nah not so much. Margaret really... she created a lot of drama, she was kind of that kind of person and so yeah there wasn't nearly as much thinking ahead she was an extemporaneous sort of person so that wouldn't have been her bag to plan that out.

*unintelligible*

Can you just repeat the questions?

---

In vault seven in Skin Game every non-architectural artifact that we saw was pretty much directly related to Christianity and the history thereof in some way, so three questions, one, was vault seven dedicated to Christianity explicitly or did that just happen?

No no, that's the superweapons vault. That's where all the weapons go, not like the awesome weapons just the ones that the mortals might pick up and use to wreck things, you know, so.

Question two, are there other vaults after vault seven? So eight, nine, whatever?

Probably yeah, I only got the tour you know, so, I don't work there or anything, /yet/.

Are we going to see other superweapons from other vaults?

Um... maybe. I don't know, maybe. I mean it's not like it's very easy to go rob it, it's not like everybody could just go do that. You've got to have a lot of resources to pull it off, I mean somebody like the White Council could probably do something except I would just love to see the White Council discussing with each other "so okay who's going to be the one who dies?". I'm pretty sure that would get filibustered for a real long time among that crowd so.

*unintelligible comment presumably about the White Council not doing anything*

You know actually I think the White Council not doing anything is... that's favourable, I kind of feel that way about the federal government. I don't care who's in charge of it mostly I just say "could you just leave me alone please" and I think that's really mostly what you want.

Throughout the series we've seen Harry's powerlevel go up, how's his powerlevel in Peace Talks compared to the senior council?

The question is we've been watching Harry level up as he's gone through and you can be like "that's a fireball, he's fifth level, ice storm sixth-seventh level" like that. But the question is Harry's powerlevel as we've gone into Skin Game how does he compare to the senior council. And the answer is he compares to the senior council the same way he always has, he's this huge muscular thug as wizards go, that's what his power is, he's a powerhouse. But people who are better at magic can still whip him just like the big guy doesn't always win in a fight, it depends, big guy has a great advantage and all other things being equal the big guy usually wins but it's enough all by itself, Harry's big all by himself but he's still learning his skills, the senior members of the White Council would tear him apart, it would be like a good fight but still he'd wind up on the ground, so.

Are there any pantheons of gods you're really excited to write about or refuse to include?

There's none that I /refuse/ to include, but it's a lot easier to put pantheons in there that don't really have like a billion people following them anymore, you're just less likely to tick somebody off that way. I don't mind writing about Christianity because I grew up on the "fun" end of fundamental Christianity as opposed to the mental end and I'm familiar with both so. Lost my train of thought.

Pantheons.

So I'll do the Christianity stuff a little because I'm familiar with it, I've memorised books of the Bible I'm okay on my theology for Christianity. It's less so for other religions and systems of belief that I have not participated in and so don't really have the inside information on because reading books doesn't give it to you, you've actually got to talk to people and see them and it takes time and that's hard.

But I do want to do some other pantheons because you'll notice there's more of the old gods popping up as we're going along which means nothing don't think anything of it, don't worry about it.

*laughter*

But it's also- I mean there's been casualties among the pantheons since they were originally established. Thor is on the outs with Asgard in the Dresden Files universe, he sort of wanders the Earth alone because he's sick of- he had this huge disagreement with Odin back when Odin decided he was gonna be mainly mostly mortal and playing by the mortal rules so he could stay involved. Thor is just like, his general modus operandi is he goes around to campuses and then walks on and tries out for the football team and then gets on the football team and then goes there for four years being awesome and having to restrain himself from being too awesome to get noticed by the NFL because he doesn't want to do that. But yeah I mean there's this short story in my head I keep meaning to write about Dresden going down to the University of Oklahoma where this storm cell went crazy and riding around with the guys from the NSL trying to catch her and his driver is Thor who is interning for the NSL while he's playing for the OU and Harry never realises it but that's the story in my head, I keep wanting to go back to it. I kept thinking "ah put it in a comic book or something someday" but it just hasn't worked out that way.

----

Do you think there'll ever be any contact between Bonnie and the Archive?

Maybe. The Archive is- poor Ivy I mean she's had a terrible life she got the Archive dumped on her a few minutes after she was born and never got the chance to learn to be a human or to learn to be a kid or interact with other people, she's kind of had a miserable life. On the other hand, she would have a lot in common with Bonnie I suppose so yeah maybe, we'll have to see, a lot of the little stuff I don't know what is going to happen until it happens so I just have to be working on it.

Have you ever considered doing a side story with Ebenezar?

Nah not really, I have considered doing a spin-off series with Ebenezar. I mean I've thought about it I don't know if I ever will, it would be the French and Indian war from the point of view of the supernatural world so we'd have like Ebenezar when he was a young hothead and the Merlin when he was a young hothead that hated Ebenezar. And then you'd also have like this young knight of the cross running around with the name Washington (wow the swords' standard for good behaviour must have been /nonexistent/ back then) and that would be cool.

That would be real cool.

Yeah that would be cool, because hey, the sword of hope is a cavalry saber. How do you get through Valley Forge? Maybe if you have a sword of hope it helps, you know, like that.

---

Speaking of parallel universes what is your favourite that didn't make it into the books?

My favourite would probably be from Changes, my favourite parallel universe is Harry the necromancer because he definitely would have gone for necromancy before he went for the coin at the end of the day. Because corpses are gross but demon seductresses are frightening, so that's different. But it would be pretty cool and then all of Harry's friends would be dead.

How do you determine the powerscaling of all the different pantheons you use in the series?

I use the five dot scale from World of Darkness way back in the day. So basically if a normal human could do it or do it using tools and equipment that's one dot, if it's somebody who is clearly supernatural and could really whip up on regular mortals on a steady basis that's two dots, heavyweight white council folks they're three dots, like that. It's just different weight classes is what I do, so.

---

So we know that Giles De Rais was a winter knight, how does Joan of Arc fit into that whole scenario?

Joan of Arc was probably a knight of the cross and probably not terribly stable either. I mean her instability sort of fell in the direction of zealotry anyway, so. I think she was probably a knight of the cross for a while.

---

I know there's been some stuff come up with like shapeshifting and stuff like that, there's also communities of people that aren't comfortable in their own bodies, would the magic in the Dresden world... would it be possible to use that magic to change one's body without breaking the laws of magic?

Yeah probably. Shapeshifting is really hard, it takes a long time to learn unless you've got somebody who's like a really really good teacher. I think Billy and the Alphas did it in about a year and a half. But yeah no reason you couldn't, you would probably have to set something up so that- you would either set something up so there was a continuous stream of power going into whatever it was to hold your form in place or maybe build a magic focus or something like that to make it happen but yeah it could be done.

---

Could you use the Nevernever to travel to a different part of the galaxy, step out on another planet and talk to people on another planet?

Ooh that's a good question... I don't think it would be practical, I mean you would still be covering distance in the Nevernever, I mean it would be more practical than you know, trying to float there but it would still be- something like that would be have to be a hell of an epic journey and go through complete weirdness and I'm not sure you'd come out the other side sane but I think it's doable. You would just have to have somebody like- maybe if Margaret had had more time she could have tried something but at the moment the farthest that anybody has gotten in the Dresden Files world is the Moon, so nobody's tried farther than that yet.

---

Who's your favourite sidekick and who is your favourite villain?

I like Michael as a sidekick because I like writing- Michael's like the only person in the Dresden Files universe that really has a lot of moral authority that Dresden respects. There's Michael and there's Ebenezar and Dresden will scrap with Ebenezar but he won't scrap with Michael, he's too good, you can't scrap with Michael you're the bad guy if you scrap with Michael. He's probably my favourite to write as a sidekick as far as sidekicks go.

As far as villains I like most of my villains. Nicodemus is really creepy for me to write, getting into his headspace is weird because he's just so just sort of generic predator and he just doesn't care about things and people are like these little annoyances that flutter away before his eyes anyway so really killing them doesn't make any difference on a practical level as far as he's concerned. Mab is a fun villain to write, I enjoy the hell out of writing Mab she's just a good time. Trying to think which of the other villains... I mean Marcone is... I don't know if Marcone is a villain or an anti-hero, it's sort of hard to call depending on what kind of story I'm writing and how he's connected to it. Although I did enjoy writing Marcone's viewpoint and reading for it too. The voice director, apparently I just read through the story and did it and got to the end and the studio tech was like "was that it?" and I was like "yep last page" and he goes "okay" and I didn't think it was a big deal but then the voice director who's operating from New York I think came over to the intercom and went "hey Jim if you ever want a job voice acting or narrating I think we can work together" and I'm like "okay- wait was that unusual?" and he was like "yeah most people don't do it without stopping".

*laughter*

I'm sorry, I just knew the words that were coming next because they came from my brain.

Are you interested in doing anything else with the Oblivion war, maybe writing another short story or making Harry blow it up by accident? And if that were to happen what would happen to the Archive?

I'll tell you right now, people who are involved with the Oblivion war, the people you /don't/ want in the war to forget things so they go away is wizards. Because these guys they hoard information like gold is what they do and you're trying to make information go away to win this war, if you bring the wizards in you're never gonna win, nobody wants the wizards involved. "Say you think the White Council might be-" "NO", that's kind of the response from the folks fighting the Oblivion war. It's not something that Dresden can get involved with, in a story from Dresden's first person point of view the things people keep from Dresden I have to keep from you and the Oblivion war is one of them. It'll probably show up in the spinoff series because the Oblivion war is this weird thing, it'll get hot for a couple of days or a couple of weeks and then nothing happens for thirty years and then something else happens and you've got to jump on it. And so you can't really tell that story with a fairly limited young person like Harry who has a limited experience you have to have somebody's who's had like centuries of experience and then you can do the Highlander thing and skip through time following a storyline and that may be something that I do in the spin-off series which I'm tinkering with for after I'm done with the Dresden Files.

*the usual Monster LLC bit*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df_3c02lelg

Bob and Dresden, you broke up the band. What went into that decision was that something you knew you were going to do at the beginning of the story?

Oh gosh no. Well, Dresden was dead and as a result I had to do something with Bob I couldn't just leave him sitting there, he's too valuable, something had to happen and so it's like- what I did was something had to happen, either something fairly innocuous and okay to happen or something really awful had to happen so I flipped a coin and came up okay which I was dissatisfied with so I flipped the coin again and it came up okay.

*laughter*

I didn't like that answer so I flipped the coin a third time and it came up okay and I was like "alright alright the universe is telling me something so I'll find something else for you to do, let's have Butters mess with him because Butters is getting more and more into the whole supernatural thing and Bob would be a massive resource and then he could be a baby sorcerer". So that was something that I hadn't even considered but when I came upon it it was like "yeah okay I have to do something about this," I mean it's not like they can just pop him under Dresden's arm in the coffin or something. I mean that would be an awful thing to do to Bob, good lord.

*question about sex in the Dresden Files* That's actually a perfect segue into my question that I do not know if you will be willing or able to verify but I have to try. Are there exceptions to the restrictions that we learned about Molly's mantle placing on her in Cold Case?

Well I guess if you're good enough at hand to hand.

*ugh from the audience*

There you go there's your answer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6q3sZeg7u8

[TheCuriousFan]

This is it, the final collection of interview bits from PHXCC, Dragoncon 2017 and Murder by the Book 2020 unless someone has some more interviews with interesting stuff in them.

Of the short stories points of view that Jim has written before, whose point of view does he like writing best other than Harry's and can we expect more in the future?

*snip Zoo Day teaser and Brief Cases mention*

But yeah I really enjoy writing from other characters' points of view because you never see Dresden from the exterior point of view you only see Dresden from his point of view. From his point of view he's this big goofy nerd, from the exterior point of view he's a frightening psychopath.

*laughter*

I mean he never makes eye contact with anybody, he's always mouthing off, you know he's this huge looming presence and you don't really get to see that from Dresden's point of view because he knows he's just a goofy nerd who would rather be at home reading a book, you know, so that's always a lot of fun. Writing from Marcone's point of view was very reptilian, that was unpleasant. Murphy's point of view is... I've done a couple with her and she's always fun. I did the Molly point of view story that came out recently, poor Carlos. *teaser for A Fistful of Warlocks*

---

How did you come up with the idea of... I'm asking for a friend.

Okay.

I'm so sorry I don't know what's going on. Denarii?

Denarians.

Versus the knights of the cross?

I don't know, I just did it. I mean I borrowed some from oh... Simon- not Simon.... no no no no no there's an author and I can't remember the name of his series now. It's a good series but I was reading it when my dad was dying so I've never been able to go back and read again. But he actually had- there was a magic sword in his series that was magic because it had a nail from something that paralleling the crucifixion in his fantasy world in it, only that wasn't actually the truth it was actually a magical sword that was magic because some wizard had magicked it. But I was like "oh wait I'm trying to work the power of faith and belief as part of the magical system in the Dresden Files universe so why not have one that actually is like that?" It was like ooh that'd be awesome that'd be fun. But if you're gonna have these monumental paladin good guys you also need to have enemies that basically make them almost irrelevant as far as Dresden is concerned, you know, because just having them there... I had to set it up so that whenever the knights of the cross were somewhere, their job was essentially to make it a fair fight. That was kind of their superpower is, you can't just overwhelmingly say "this is what's happening" no there's a knight of the cross here you're gonna have to fight for it, and that was the whole point of using them. So in that instance I'm like "so what I need to do is I need to have about ten times as many equally bad bad guys as there are good guys" so I need thirty something and it's like "well you know we've already got nails from the cross so we'll just take thirty silver coins and use those too", that's how that needed to work out, so that was where that came from.

---

I know it's from Harry's point of view but do you have a favourite character in the Dresden Files?

Um.... it's hard to say I mean... you're asking me about my favourite child. Um, it depends on what I'm doing with them. If you mean just like personal enjoyment in writing I love writing Bob because Bob can be irreverent at anyone and that's fun. I love writing Mab because she is just the funnest villain to write. For doing emotionally revealing stuff I like Michael and Father Forthill. It just depends on what we're doing. For sheer villainy Marcone still creeps me out more than anyone because he's just... he's not quite as ruthlessly mechanical as Nicodemus is (behold, the greatest bit of comedy in any Jim Q&A), Nicodemus is putting together a watch and if you're grit in the gears you're out of there and that's all there is to it there's no sense getting worked up about grit in the gears you just remove it and that's the kind of person he is so for just sheer villainy he's fun. Toot Toot is a lot of fun to write, he's all depressed because he keeps getting bigger, yeah he's kind of in an emo phase now in my head. But anyway it's all just different things for different reasons, there's characters that I love because they get to do different things for the story but it's not an issue of "this is the absolute best character ever" because if you don't think that about every character you do you probably can't do that as a writer. When you put characters together as a writer you sit down and you figure it out unless you're writing some ridiculous throwaway character who you'll only use for one book... Butters. But yeah I love writing all of them and if I didn't I wouldn't be doing it, well at this point I might be because there's a monetary consideration but I try not to think about that too much because I try to remember that I am a twenty five year old writing his dumb wizard books because that guy was onto something, he's kind of a stranger to me now I haven't talked to him in a long time but twenty five year old me was onto something when he started putting the series together. Way more enthusiasm than sense that's for sure but at the same time it seems to be working out so.

---

Harry's daughter Maggie was born from a woman who wasn't entirely human during it, is that gonna have any effect on her?

Oh I dare say. You can't just /not/, you know, so.

---

In Changes when Dresden is threatening to go into his green notebook, did you know in advance where he was going with that or did you decide at the moment?

Oh I didn't know. In Changes I didn't know what was gonna happen until I was writing it, there's some things that I decided ahead of time and there's some things that I have left to the story so that I can make the choices that make sense for the character as I come up on them so I don't know a lot of the things that are going to happen, I kind of know the general direction, I know which way the arrow of history points but I'm not sure about all the details along the way. So yeah Changes could have gone three ways, we could have gone with Mab to back him up to go after Maggie, he could have summoned Lasciel's coin and used that to go get his daughter or he could have picked up the Word of Kemmler which he still had in his memory and used the Darkhallow and gone and become this necromancer lord essentially and gone after his daughter. And depending on which road he took it would have been a very different story as we go along and I wasn't sure which one he was gonna do, he would up going with Mab. Which I thought made sense at the time, plus I really like writing Mab so. On the other hand I really like writing Lasciel, so it was a tossup. And zombies are awesome so we could have wound up with that too, though that would have been terrible because probably we would have had Murphy running around as a secret undead and that kind of thing, you know... That would be a really good story actually.

*laughter*

That's an awesome anthology idea.

No, you can go to hell sir.

*laughter*

Oh my gosh, more short stories, /no/. Practicing saying that, no.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CUtuL8JvnM

I was wondering how Harry manages to heal himself so quickly especially in the earlier books from a dislocated shoulder, gunshot wound to the thigh, etc etc

It's not so much that he heals quickly as that- typical healing patterns for humans are you get considerably better in fairly short order and then there's like this long trail-off period where it takes more time to recover from an injury. In the Dresden Files world wizards are a little bit better off than other people in that sense because they don't have the trail-off period, so it's not like- he heals faster than most humans but it wouldn't be remarkable unless you compared him side by side to somebody who was injured in the same way at the same time and then you'd look at Harry and go "wow he got better a /lot/ faster". That's a factor of wizards, it's a thing about their biology that makes them live so long is that they keep healing all the little things that the rest of us just have to live with. That's essentially how I did it because I wanted him able to get beaten up more and I wanted him to be able to recover in order to get beaten up more after that but I didn't want to give him enough healing to actually help in any of the fights. He gets just enough to get to the next fight and get beat up again, that's why it works like that.

---

Does Oberon still exist as a mantle?

Does Oberon still exist? No he died horribly around Shakespeare's time, Oberon tried to get between- he tried to run a game with Mab and Titania and you can imagine how that ended up. That was one of those things where Prometheus was like "oh poor guy".

*laughter*

With Brief Cases coming out next year have you ever considered writing a Donald Morgan focused pov short story?

I've thought about it, Morgan is such a harsh and rigid character it would be kind of cool to get inside his head because he's actually- as a person he's not all that bad a guy he's just a professional monster. There's a difference there somewhere. Morgan got to see a whole bunch of really really horrible things, Morgan's a guy who- his parents and family were killed by the necromancer Kemmler, he was rescued by Anastasia Luccio which if you haven't read the short story yet in the old west with Luccio, it's called A Fistful of Warlocks. And I'm writing that and I'm going "man this could be movies this is fun!", you know in my copious spare time I could do more. But it would be cool to write a story from his point of view because he's a guy who has seen horrible things and knows the kind of horrible things that can happen and so people look at him and go "oh you're too rigid, you're too mean, you're too harsh" and Morgan's like "you don't even know what harsh is, this isn't too harsh this is necessary to keep the real things out" which has always been his attitude and the attitude of many people who have to face horrible things that other people never have to see because they're out there facing it. He'd make a cool story but man it'd be kind of a downer because he had a bad life, it was a rough life.

So I had two quick questions, the first is whether the Archive or Ivy can receive digital data in addition to whatever's written down and the second is that it's been established that mortal names fluctuate so that it's not very useful to have them but Harry's worried about giving out his name to Chauncy in the second book.

Yeah giving out his whole name. Well yeah he doesn't want to give out his whole name to a frikkin demon from capital H Hell, not just some random hell but /the/ Hell, not generic hell, brand name Hell.

*laughter*

So yeah he didn't want to give his name to him. But the use of the true name for humans is different than it is for like other creatures, other creatures aren't as malleable as humans are, humans have free will, they have choice. And you go around your day every day as a human being making dozens or hundreds of choices that kind of inform who you are as a person. That's just what we do as humans and over time that can change you if you start making different choices and if that happens you don't think of yourself the same way anymore, you don't even say your name the same anymore necessarily. Not precisely, you'd have to get like a microphone and record it to see the digital thing changing but wizards just kind of get that part instinctively because they've been doing it for thousands of years.

Oh and as far as Ivy getting digital information, yes and she wasn't built for it and you'll get to see more of that at some point.

Something to look forward to.

These days Ivy is basically like *puts head in hands* "porn, so much porn".

*laughter*

Because let's be honest the internet is like- it's literally- the traffic on the internet is like fifteen percent of the entire traffic of the internet is porn, nine percent is League of Legends and then there's everything else.

*laughter*

No that's literally true I visited Riot games and between six and nine percent of the traffic on the internet at any one time is League of Legends all by itself. Yeah it's the largest intellectual property in the history of mankind. And I don't want to hear anything from you DOTA people you're not real gamers.

*laughter*

I have this fight with my nephew all the time, I can't not do it.

*snip the witch doctor story where he can't deal with eggs on a burger*

My question concerns Harry and Lasciel and I've always wondered what he would be fully capable of if he fully cooperated with Lasciel.

The Dresden Files at Changes- Changes was a huge crossroads for the series because I had a very limited view of what was gonna happen for the next eight or nine books after Changes. I mean I knew what Ghost Story was gonna be because that was the thirteenth book in the series and I've got a wizard PI so he's got to solve his own murder obviously. But it was a crossroads because Harry could have gone- taken three paths to go get Maggie. Well he could have taken a fourth path which would have been suicidally charge, that could have happened except I wanted to keep making money.

*laughter*

I had this thing where my kid was gonna go to school and perhaps he should have an education so I thought I'd do that. But his three choices were he could go with- because he still remembers all the stuff from the Darkhallow so he could have picked up Kemmler's work and become the new Kemmler in which case we would have had much more necromancy-ey series, he could have gone with Lasciel and summoned the coin and used whatever powers that she had given him or he could have gone with Mab. And he chose Mab as the most predictable evil, for what was gonna happen, not the least evil but the most reliable one. So he did that but had he gone with Lasciel, essentially she would have been his black magic tutor, Bob would have had a huge crush.

*laughter*

She would have been- she kind of would have been around him all the time, it would have been her keeping him alive over time over the next book, although it would have been a slightly different book. And then he would have been dealing with Nicodemus and company as frenemies rather than as enemies- on a consistent basis he still had to deal with them as frenemies in Skin Game anyway, so. But it would have been much different, he would have had different things that were temptations, Lasciel would have been trying to isolate him from his friends- I mean /actively/ trying to isolate him from his friends not kind of just entropy did the job for her the way Mab is planning on. But it would have been a much harsher story but a lot more sex too so I mean sales would have been fine.

*laughter*

The necromancer one I don't know how that would have flown with an audience so I'm kind of glad he didn't go that way. But I didn't know what he was gonna do until I was writing it, so.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQDTvMv1otI

Steven asks will we ever meet Mouse's other dark sibling?

Just because I talked about there being more of them and that there's at least one more out there, why would you think I would be foreshadowing anything?

---

Would you ever consider doing a non-canon Dresden where he goes full warlock?

Yeah I was actually considering doing like fanficcing my own work, my own universe and doing a fanfic universe with the Dresden Files version of covid and just sort of writing that up and putting it up for free over the year and I decided I just didn't know enough about what the hell was going on to do that in a very responsible way because the information war out there has been- there's just been so much chaff in the air (I'm going to assume that the US got absolutely flooded with bullshit from the right because it was pretty clear over here) you can't really tell what's going on, so.

---

Steven asks, is Cowl more powerful than Merlin?

Yet to be shown. Wait, the Merlin or /the/ Merlin?

The Merlin.

It's one of those things where it's sort of iffy who's more powerful. Who's more powerful Mike Tyson or Royce Gracie? It sort of depends on the kind of fight they get into so I think it would be that way for those guys as well. The Merlin is not a guy who kind of gets up in your face and fights, the Merlin is a guy who fights you with nations and banking systems he's that kind of fighter. He's kind of the opposite of Ebenezar who is the "no I'm gonna come up in your face and settle with you personally myself" kind of fighter and that's a very different sort of power.

---

Steven asks is it possible that Dresden's daughter will be magic? *Bru appears*

My buddy Bru. Yes the genetic possibility for it is possible it's not common for it to be passed down through male lineage though, it's most commonly passed from mother to child. But it is something that is possible I don't know exactly what's gonna happen with that yet I'm still figuring it out. I think I've got a good idea for where Maggie is going in the future and I don't think it'll be what a lot of people are expecting but we'll see.

---

Sarah wants to know how much research did you do on the Irish Fae mythology and how much of it did you just make up?

The problem with the Irish mythology is that Irish mythology is oral mythology. It has been passed down by word of mouth and so there are different strains and flavours of that mythology it's incredibly complex, if you want to get into studying real Irish and Welsh myth good luck because it is a briar patch. That said what I did was try and get as close as I could to the spirit of those myths while taking the- sort of updating it for what I was doing with it for the overall story. So a lot of the exact things are not gonna be bang-on but I sort of regard that as the inevitable result of human beings interacting with supernatural forces is that the legends we have told each other and passed on down to each other are the result of a game of telephone that's been going on for a couple of thousand years so we're gonna screw things up all the time. And that seems reasonable with how we would interact with an actual supernatural world if one actually worked in our world. We would be telling each other stories about it- just a few of us would survive and get away to tell stories and those stories would get stretched and distorted and contradicted by new stories and by things that look the same but weren't the same and I figured that would be confusing enough that it would give me plenty of leeway to play within the context of this story but I'm not trying to write the real world story of anybody's mythology man I'm just writing the Dresden Files mythology and how it happened in this world.

---

Gregory asks why does the cover of the books have a wizard with a cowboy hat? So can you talk a little bit about kind of the aesthetics of the book covers?

That was all the art department at Penguin that decided that. I mean I've never written Dresden with a hat although before the end of it I'm gonna have to, I'm gonna have to give him the /actual/ Indiana Jones fedora from the Smithsonian as one of the artefacts of the American pantheon for him to be able to wear it. I think it's special superpower will have to be like he gets a movie soundtrack that only he can hear but it's a John Williams soundtrack so it's awesome, you know.

Can you tell us a little bit about how your titles are now- except for Changes, are all kind of two words, do you have a title in mind when you're working?

When I was putting the series together as a series one of the things that we did in class was that we went and analysed series that were successful. We just looked at them and read through them and wrote down what they had in common and one of the things successful series have in common is that they have a structure scheme for their titles, you know, A is for Alibi etc. And so I wanted a structured them and what I wanted was puns so Storm Front was originally called Semiautomagic, they didn't like that so then I retitled it Abracadabra and they didn't like that and then I retitled it Storm Front in reference to the way they were using storms to- the villain was using storms to get his murders done. And they did like that and I was trying for more puns you know with Fool Moon and Grave Peril- I actually got- Grave Peril was gonna be a different title originally (it was Knightmare) I'm trying to remember what it was but I'm forgetting it now, it's been that long, good lord the twentieth year anniversary and it's slipping out of mind. I was originally going to title the fifth book, the one about the Shroud of Turin, Holy Sheet but they wouldn't let me call it Holy Sheet so what I wound up doing was deciding that I was gonna have a consistent naming scheme of same number of letters in the first and second words- two word titles so that they could be presented as sort of these blocky symmetrical chunks on top of the book and in the first several books that is indeed how they produced it you can tell a Jim Butcher book from across the bookstore because it would have that symmetrical bump-bump-bump across the front that would tell you what the title was. It was just a marketing thing, there was nothing more to it than that I mean I wanted a scheme, not just sort of random names for the books I wanted a naming scheme.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp9De75UN1E

I'm free.

[TheCuriousFan]

What are some the favourite creatures that you have used in the Dresden Files? Some of the creatures that you've created?

I've gotta confess, mostly I like the creatures that just have a really good name that I really feel proud of so if I come up with a good name like Chlorofiend it's like "okay that's a good name I like that one." Mostly it works on that but I mean- I take so many things from folklore that I don't feel like I can take a lot of credit for anything. But occasionally when I make up something new though, it's like "okay, that's fun".

But the names are important.

Yeah yeah, /Octokong/, yeah like that. If they'd been more chimpy they'd have had to have been Octopong and that just sounds weird.

Yeah it sounds like a drinking game... Which series adversary do you think has been most difficult for him to beat?

*crowd voice says Marcone*

Well yeah Marcone he still hasn't got the better of Marcone, really, that's a pretty good one. Mab he hasn't really gotten the better of, Lara he hasn't gotten the better of. Really, Harry just tries to survive, basically I just write his worst weekend of the year every year and if he gets through it he's pleased with that.

Now from your perspective, do you think that Harry was more shocked to learn that he had a brother or a daughter?

*She asked this exact same question last year at DragonCon 2020 so skip, the answer is Maggie*

Would you say that there is a common thread that runs through all of your series or even just a couple of them?

Um well, if you want me to get all English major thematically-

Yes.

Well I would say the most common thread is the examination of power and how it's used. How you use it well and how you use it poorly and Dresden's been... he's used it well and poorly as he's gone along depending on his choices, but almost everybody he goes up against is somebody who's using power the wrong way, so.

Harry could write a book, couldn't he?

Probably yeah. And there's also a sub-theme of lifting up the people around you because increasingly as the series goes on it's the people that are around Harry that wind up helping him out- oh thank you very much guys, really very bright. Oh I can see everyone now! There are a lot of you! Hi. But yeah that's kind of one of Harry's- that's one of the recurring themes of the Dresden Files is the little people that he's helped grow up along the way that are now there to support him and help him.

This is from Randy, he says thank you, the last two books were phenomenal, was there anyone that you had planned to kill but didn't? If so, who?

*laughter*

I think I might have chickened out on Michael, I don't know, that was kind of a coin toss there.

*crowd groaning*

Geez.

Well I guess you know what the reaction would be.

What a room, my gosh. Are you sure you're here for /my/ panel? Wow. The imaginary people are so much more valued. But in the end I decided I could tell a better story of it going a different way, plus I got to have him go out for one last ride so that was cool as well.

This is from Daniel Parks.

Hi Daniel.

What piece of fiction do you enjoy that you think has an important story to tell?

I don't know. I don't read fiction for it's importance I basically read it for how much it's going to occupy my imagination and how much it's going to amuse me. Whether or not it's got something deep to say I think mostly comes from the person who's reading it anyhow. You can get just as much out of things that you really just find deeply and soul-satisfyingly entertaining. Lately I've been rereading the Belgariad.

*cheering*

Right? Such a good series. And he only wrote those five books.

*laughter*

It's kind of like Matrix 2 and 3 or Highlander 2, yeah I'm gonna put that follow-up series in the same hole as Highlander 2. But yeah I've been rereading that and I realised what a strong influence that had on me, I think I picked it up when I was about 13 and started reading that series and it really was formative for me. Another series that I read are the Spenser books by Robert B Parker because if you need a hardboiled private eye man he is the master of that genre. As a professional he's kind of my idol, he didn't start writing until he was in his 40s and he kept writing until he was in his 80s and then he died at the keyboard /like a man/.

*laughter*

And that's kind of the path I'd like to follow, I'd like that as well.

Before we get to the next question, I neglected to ask this in the beginning, how many Dresden Files cosplays do we have in the audience today?

Stand up everybody so folks can see you. All right... and there's a cosplaying dog over here too who I have christened Cute Cute so... it is adorable.

Very nicely done everyone.

Okay this is from Rob, do you ever plan to return to Alera?

I've got a couple of ideas about how I could go back, I might go back in like novellas or something like that that I can sell myself online, that might be a good way to do it. But I've got a couple different ideas I'm not quite sure where to go back because let's be honest the first Alera series was humans vs Zerg, it really was. So obviously the point to go back to that series is when the Protoss show up.

*laughter*

Which is like- they're like these crystalline beings (really more 3M tall treemen), point is, I could go back there. The other place I could go back is about five years after the first series and what we would be focusing on in that series is... Fidelias would be kind of Dumbledoring around in the background and Ehren would be McGonagalling around in the foreground. And then we would have the new class of cursors coming through, so I could write about them so it's gonna be the first Marat cursor, the first Canim cursor, and work with all of those folks and see what kind of story we can tell there because that would just be /fun/.

*applause*

Sounds like there's some support for the idea, okay, Karrin.

Okay this is from Mag, if you could be roommates with any character from the Dresden Files, who would you pick?

Oh gosh let me think... not Harry.

*laughter*

He would hit me in the mouth so many times, not Harry. Not Thomas, yeah I'd go with Mouse and Mister maybe, I think that'd be the right choice. Maybe Lara, briefly.

*laughter*

Or occasionally.

Oh yeah, Bob would be awesome, Bob would be the best Alexa ever. Kind of.

Now there's an idea for a short story.

Okay, William H asks, which magical being or beings are responsible for Covid-19 and what magical rites can we perform to end this pandemic?

Let's go ahead and blame this pandemic on the Jade Court. As far as curing it goes, that would be... that would have to be a White Council thing they would have to be on that, and I don't think they'd be too much better at it than any other government around.  But yeah, they would jump on it, I don't know how well they'd do with it but they'd try.

They'd make an effort.

Well they'd look like they were making an effort.

Okay, Kevin Mathis asks who created the White Court of vampires and/or have we met them yet?

Who created them? They've just been around for a long, long time. I actually haven't gotten to- I actually haven't gotten myself into the origins of that too much, maybe I should do that?

*applause*

Would that be okay with you guys? Yeah Harry's gonna be hanging out with Lara a lot so you know I suppose they've got to talk about something. He's gotta date her once a month, it's a whole thing, the lawyers have to look at the contract for the date and make sure things are within certain prescribed limits and so on, it's a whole deal.

Lee Jordan asks. one of my favourite trademarks of the Dresden Files is the witty titles, if you had free reign, what's the title you wanted to used but couldn't?

Hehe, hey man, at first I wanted to name the first book Semiautomagic.

*laughter*

And they wouldn't let me, the second book was always Fool Moon, what was Grave Peril let me think of... it was a different title when I got started. It's been so long I'm forgetting now but I remember that Death Masks I originally wanted to call it Holy Sheet.

*more laughter*

They got upset about that. Blood Rites was originally going to be Family Matters and they said no that makes it sound like a Norah Roberts book and I was like "yeah, I don't wanna share that success". But there's been a bunch of them like that, these days they more or less let me do what I want to because I kinda know what they're aiming for so.

While we're on that subject though, title of the next book is gonna be Twelve Months or Twelve Dates I'm not sure which yet. But yeah I was gonna do Mirror Mirror next but I think it'll hit harder if we see a little bit more of what- I don't wanna go away to alternate Chicago when we've got Chicago Prime changing on us and I want to be able to show that first before we go to alternate Chicago. Yeah, kind of a big deal.

This is from Dez or Dezzie, have you ever regretted killing off a character somewhere down the line?

Gosh it's a good thing I didn't kill Michael I guess, I might have regretted that here and now. But no I don't really regret killing characters because unfortunately the way the world works is that we lose people and we lose them and they're gone and we just have to figure out how to go on, that's life, that's something that's common to humans. So I don't really regret it when I lose characters- occasionally I've gone "aww this character would have been perfect" for something or other while I was writing but then I think to myself "oh but you killed them" "oh right".

This one has no name but they ask how has your son's witch and partner idea been coming along?

Whoever asked that, thank you very much, so this is my opportunity to brag on my son. My son, James Butcher I named him after my father, he's got his first contract now and his first book comes out soon. He's here, kid, where'd you go? Stand up a second I want to show you off. But James has his first contract, his first book is called Dead Man's Hand and it's scheduled to come out next October so keep an eye on that as an urban fantasy. It's a great idea I wish I'd stolen parts of it but I can't, it's my son, anybody else yes but not my son.

Maybe in the future we'll have to do the Jim and James?- we'll work on that.

Yeah then you'll just get someone up here who runs me down all the time, he's awesome at that.

Okay this is from Chris K, are you planning on working on the next Cinder Spires or another Dresden book?

The next Cinder Spires is about 40% done and I anticipate finishing it before my birthday and then I'll start the next Dresden and I'll want to finish that in January or February or so. I do have- I've got a novella that I think I'm gonna try and publish independently, a Dresden Files novella called The Law. It's kind of about Harry getting back on his feet after the events of Battle Ground, it's a much more PI focused thing because essentially now that Marcone's got not just all the underworld power but also the Underworld power backing him up Dresden has to exercise his authority a little bit more carefully when he goes up against outfit guys, you know, so. Essentially him and Marcone come to an understanding that he's not gonna use any of his supernatural abilities in combating some injustice that he's finding. It's Dresden going off and doing almost all PI stuff until the other guys break the rules so.

Instead of him for once.

I've been reading a lot of Parker lately, I kind of had to.

Ray C asks, must the fae queens' mantles go to mortals and does the mantle change their dna?

Yes and yes. Yeah I mean there's a lot of power that's happening there and in the end the Dresden Files universe is one that's in the camp of free will and for that to happen you need mortals around because we're the only ones who have it.

Does Molly still technically have free will metaphysically?

Wow deep question. And I'm not sure what the answer to that question is, I'm still exploring that because a lot of the stuff I kind of know the outline of it, kind of the "guess that Pokemon" outline but I don't get to see the Pokemon until I get into it and start writing about it. Molly at this point is still very- she does have free will cause she is exercising it to change things. Whether she will continue to have it or not is kind of a question because as the roleplaying game pointed out to me that I didn't realise that I was writing, the more power you get in the Dresden Files universe kind of the more trapped you are by that power which is sort of the way it works in real life too. So even though you're able to do all these incredible things you also have all these limits that other people don't have because they're not wielding the same kind of power you do. Zuckerberg, he's got an awful lot of money and power but he can't just go out to the restaurant, he's trapped by that.

*laughter*

He could but he might have a few issues.

Buy the restaurant.

Next please.

The Merlin said he was going to destroy the Red Court root and branch, what was his plan?

Oh the Merlin, he turned Dresden loose on them, geez.

*laughter*

They got wiped out. I don't know if you noticed but there was a whole book about it. I'm still- I question the morality of the people in this room because I just wrote a character who committed genocide and y'all are still backing him up. But yeah, the Merlin is a guy who- he talks one way but the things he winds up doing are something else. He's one of those folks that you kind of have- you know the Sherlock Holmes phrase "look for the dog that is not barking"? There's somebody who fled the scene of a crime and Watson was trying to figure out which way he went and Holmes was like "listen we know he didn't go this way because there's no dogs barking over there, one of the dogs would be barking if he had fled this way". So when you're looking at the Merlin and his actions look for the things he could have done and didn't and then you kind of see a little bit more about who he really is. Dresden doesn't have a clear view of really anybody on the White Council because he's got such massive issues with them, so.

*continue at 22:30*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g6EbjOFxKY