Jim Butcher, KC signing, Parts 6 and 7 (video courtesy LogicMouseLives)
[unknown question]
….Dresden probably have a good time, wind up using their powers for a bunch of things that nobody ever really thought about before. I’ve only seen that because I’ve been watching the Avengers on Netflix, the animated series of the Avengers on Netflix. It’s actually pretty cool. I’ve been figuring out what everybody’s actual superpower is, on the show. For example, the Wasp, where she can shrink down to fly and shoot stingers at people and so on, her actual superpower is not shrinking, flying and shooting the yellow [unintelligible] people, her actual superpower is “I am just annoying enough that you cannot ignore me no matter how mighty you are, I am just annoying enough that you can’t not pay attention to me, that’s my job. That’s my superpower in the story.”
You’ve put harry Dresden through so much, and he’s suffered through so much, after Changes, where can you possibly go from there?
[Jim lets out a maniacal/evil giggle] You haven’t read the new one yet, have you? Get to the end of the new one, that’ll give you an idea. And we’ll see what happens after this. I just finally go the first sentence of the next book written, which is always the hardest part, after that, everything’s easy. By the time I got to the first sentence of Book 14, it was like, “Ah, that encapsulates the whole deal!”, and we’ll have a good time playing that out.
Do you figure out the end of the story before you start writing the beginning?
When I’m smart. When I’m smart, I do exactly that. When I’m not smart, I sort of wonder what’s going to happen. Normally, I know what the end is going to be, I usually know a big, flashy, high special effects budget sort of scene that’s going to be in the middle, I know about half-a-dozen one-liners that I want to use, and small bit scenes that I want to use, and then, that’s enough for me to get started. I did not do as much pre-planning on Ghost Story, probably because I wanted it to have more of a nebulous feel to it, I wanted the story to have something that seemed kind of misty around the edges than a normal Dresden Files story would be because that was sort of the setting that we were in, and partly because I was an idiot, and just didn’t get it done, and maybe next time I’ll remember to shut up and listen to my writing teacher and write my outline before I start my story. You would think I would get that by now.
Did Dresden lose domain over Demonreach when he died?
Have you gotten to the end of the book? Ok. You read the book, I’ve already answered that one.
Does Harry…ok, Marvel or DC?
Marvel, and here’s why: I’ve never been a Superman fan. I’ve never liked that guy. Now, that said, I’ve been more impressed with how they’ve handled Supes lately, because it seems like they finally understand, “Wait a minute, not everybody likes Captain Perfect flying around over there!” Did you ever see the Marvel-DC crossover of the Superman-Spiderman team up? Superman and Spiderman teamed up together, which makes sense because Peter Parker is a photographer and Clark Kent’s a reporter. And the bad guys blew up some kind of computer, and Spiderman’s like, “Oh, man, they blew up the computer, we’re going to have to do all kids of legwork to try to figure out…” and Superman, before Spiderman is done with his sentence, reassembles the computer that’s been blasted into tiny pieces, puts it back together, and then starts accessing the information on it, and Spiderman actually looks at the computer, and looks at Superman, and then asks, “Why am I here?” and that’s actually written into the book, and I admire the Spiderman writers who were handling that. That was really interesting, that they were able to pick up on that at the time. Actually, DC sent me an email and said, “Hey, would you like to a guest stint on Batman or Superman, because we would love to have you.” And I said, “That would be fantastic, but I don’t know the story well enough for the people who love them.” And I could show up and just sort of write a thing, but that wouldn’t be the same thing as someone who loves the story showing up to play with it, so I wouldn’t do that. Spiderman, though, yeah. This one more day stuff, no. We can do better than that for Spiderman.
How many books do you plan on writing?
The Dresden Files books’ll be about twenty-ish of the case books, like we’ve had so far, it could be a little bit more, it could be a little bit less, depending on whether my kid goes to graduate school, and then we’ll have a big, old apocalyptic trilogy to cap it all off. Because who doesn’t love apocalyptic trilogies?! It’s my sisters’ fault. The first movie I remember them taking me to see was Star Wars, and yeah. Blame them, not me.
Are there more short stories coming?
Yes, there are. Right now, I’m about two-thirds of the way done with the second of the Bigfoot trilogy of stories, which I’m having fun writing. Bigfoot’s the client. He comes to Harry, he’s got some problems with his kid, he can’t exactly walk into town and help, so Dresden gets hired and is on the job. The first one’s called B is for Bigfoot, and the kid’s in grade school. The next one is I Was a Teenage Bigfoot, and the kid’s in high school, and then Bigfoot On Campus, when he’s in college, so the three of those, and several of the short stories, and the one that didn’t make it into the anthology, Curses, will be in there, and any others that I write, because I still owe some short stories. I’ve got to start writing these things, man, they’re so hard. Writing a short story, you have to do everything in the short story that you’d do in a novel, except you have to do it in this much space. It’s like trying to have a knife fight in a phone booth.
Have you decided in a title for the next book?
Book 14 is going to be titled Cold Days. Which will make more sense after you’ve written Book 13.
Where does Curses fit in the timeline?
I’ll have to find it. I think it’s between Dead Beat and Proven Guilty. I’ll have to check my notes to be sure though. I can never keep this stuff straight. I’ll go check on Wikipedia and…seriously! You people keep much better track of this stuff than I possibly could, because by the time you read it, you just have that one version of the book to be read, whereas to me, I’ve got eleven slightly different versions that strongly resemble the one version, that are all the drafts that I write, and then I’ve got all the versions that could have been, that I decided not to use for one reason or another, in my head, and it gets hard to keep them straight, after a while. We’re thirteen books in, I’ve got a couple of hundred slightly different Dresden Files in my head, it’s hard to keep mentally highlighting which one is the actual canon. Which is why I go to Wikipedia. For crying out loud, if I didn’t have that I don’t know what I’d do. How many children do Michael and Charity have again? Look it up. Oh, right, ok. What color were the different panels of Harry’s car, again?
PART 7
At what point did you realize that Charity had had her own experience with the magical world, and had been a practitioner in the past, and at what point did I know that Molly was going to be Harry’s apprentice?
The answer to that is: when they appeared. I knew that Charity just couldn’t stand Dresden, and I had to have a good reason for her to really not stand him and really, the best reason that anyone could possibly have for not liking somebody is because they remind them of themselves, something they hate in themselves. So I thought that was just perfect. And then I gave her all kinds of good, rational reasons on top of that to not like him. “You get my husband arrested, and in trouble, and beat up!” Ok, well, good point. As far as Molly goes, I knew she was going to be Harry’s apprentice by the end of the first book she showed up in. No, not the end of that one. By the end of Death Masks. By the time she was sitting there with the Knight of the Cross, prank-calling the grocery stores with him, just to play around with his head, you know, that was like, “She’s not going to get away from being Dresden’s apprentice at this point.”
Are you a Game of Thrones fan?
I like the TV show. Because I like Tyrion effing Lannister. He’s a great character. But as far as the actual story goes, I’m upset with it, because for a fantasy novel, it has so little fantasy. I can’t get involved in it, it’s all this politics and backstabbing and people, it’s like “I’ve got people like this that are running my country right now. [unintelligible]” You get to the end of the first season of the HBO series, and it’s like, we’ve had one girl who didn’t burn her hands when she should have, and a zombie. And that was it. Give me a higher budget. I need things getting to explode when you do something to them. At least True Blood level of supernatural coolness.
Can you explain the significance of the dagger that Lea gets and is it the same dagger that Harry uses on Lloyd in Changes?
I’ll answer the second part of that first, which is: no, it was not the same dagger. He uses one of Medea’s knives in Changes. And that dagger [transcriber note: I think the dagger he’s referring to here is Lea’s dagger, not the one that killed Slate—see the rest of his answer below, which implies that Lea’s dagger is younger. Medea is ancient Greek and thus predates Morgan Le Fay.] That dagger--did this even go into the books? Maybe not--originally belonged to Morgan Le Fay, like, the original Morgan Le Fay, that was her personal athame, her ritual knife. Which is a big deal. As far as the significance of what it did, I’m still being coy about that. It’s going to come into play later on. Suffice to say that an older and wickeder dagger was needed by Mab for such things as she used in the last book.
Maggie LeFay, Morgan LeFay, is that a generational name, are they related?
No, the “LeFay” is something that gets added as an honorific in the wizarding community, it’s one of those kind of mixed names that you give somebody that is sort of a name that she’s earned, so it’s a bit of status, and it also means you’re insane. Which everybody thought Harry’s mom was, being a big-time explorer of Ways and hanging out with Faeries and generally kind of doing things that most wizards considered to be pretty crazily, stupidly dangerous. When you’re somebody who can live for three or four hundred years as long as nothing goes wrong, you tend to be a little conservative, really, you get a lot of benefit from that. And certainly, in Maggie’s case, she was bucking the trend, and we’ll probably get into a little bit more of why she was doing that later in the books.
What happened in Minnesota? You’ve got something…Harry went up to Minnesota because someone saw something in a lake. WHAT HAPPENED?! [transcriber note: HEAR, HEAR!]
Uh, I’ll get there. That’ll probably be one of the short stories. That was when I didn’t really plan for all those mentions of between book things, and things that had gone before, and so on. I had originally planned those out so that I could write short stores if I wanted, I had actually thought about doing that as a graphic novel, but they wanted something a little bit different, and to go after the Fool Moon graphic novels, so I write them all new story after them. Which is actually cool enough that I should have made it a novella or a book or something myself, I almost feel bad I’m giving this one to the graphic novel, but that’s ok. It’ll be a good story.
At the end of Dead Bead, Harry threatens Mavra, says that he understands how to use necromancy against the Black Court, and then the last thing that Harry says to Lash is that they need to talk about Outsiders and how they relate to the Black Court. Are the Black Court more than just a court of vampires? Do they have more metaphysical significance?
Long question, what it amounts to is do the Black Court of vampires have more significance that just being corpse-y vampires? Are they tied in somehow with the over story of what’s going on. And the answer to that is: I’m a really lazy writer. And if I could possibly use something more than once, or use it for more than one purpose, I will. And I’ll leave it there.
Is Thomas going to be wielding Amoracchius?
I’m not sure, actually, where those are going to fall out. There are several different places where I could put them. And all of them would be fun, and I’m just trying to figure out which ones are going to be the most fun.
You’ve mentioned several times that marriages are used to seal pacts and alliances, will Harry be forced into a marriage, and will it be with Lara [Raith]?
What makes you think that Harry hasn’t been forced into a marriage already? I mean, the whole thing with Mab, come on. Read more book. Read the most recent one, and see if that doesn’t give you more answers. Certainly, he’s in it deep with Mab at the moment, because there’ll be none of this, “He’s going to get out of this because he was technically dead”—no, it’s too easy.
You mentioned you’re working on another fantasy/sci-fi project, can you tell us anything about it?
I’m having way too much fun with it. It is influenced by the Black Company novels by Glenn Cook, also excellent fantasy, if you’ve never read them. It’s called the Fortress trilogy and I think it’s going to be the prequel trilogy to my epicepicfantasyepic, but it’s so epic, it’s a prequel trilogy. That’s always been my dream, to write a huge, huge swords-and-horses fantasy, and we’ll start off by writing a prequel trilogy for a warm-up and we’ll see what happens.
