The Dresden Files > DF Reference Collection

WoJ transcription help needed + mention new WoJ's here

<< < (29/56) > >>

Ziggelly:
I'll do both the Patrick Rothfoss  interviews in the morning. I was almost done with the first one, but my computer decided it was a great time to die on me.

Serack:

--- Quote from: Ziggelly on August 21, 2011, 03:16:10 AM ---I'll do both the Patrick Rothfoss  interviews in the morning. I was almost done with the first one, but my computer decided it was a great time to die on me.

--- End quote ---

Oh noes!!! I hope you got a chance to save.

Edit:  When you are done with that, I highly recommend you watch this rothfuss video also from the SDCC.  It had me laughing so hard I cried.  (I just watched it again, and I am yet again wiping at the bottoms of my eyes)

jeno:
(psst, hey, Serack - for the Jim Recommends thread, there's also the works of Lois McMaster Bujold. He's mentioned and recced her stuff multiple times. I seem to recall him offering to bear her children at one point, but possibly I am making that up.)

Serack:

--- Quote from: jeno on August 21, 2011, 10:23:02 AM ---(psst, hey, Serack - for the Jim Recommends thread, there's also the works of Lois McMaster Bujold. He's mentioned and recced her stuff multiple times. I seem to recall him offering to bear her children at one point, but possibly I am making that up.)

--- End quote ---

I was going to add those Friday, but I can't snatch the URL for the pictures from Amazon as easily from this computer as I can from the one I built that topic from(I'm forced to use an old version of I.E. on this one), so it will have to wait.

Although, if I get some down time later, I might try to work out a way to do it from here.

But there are a LOT of books and author's that Jim has recommended, and I will be putting a lot of effort into that topic in the future... there's a lot of editing involved though, so it takes me a bit of time, so I'm doing it bit by bit, and I spent a lot of time yesterday on the compilation.  I really wanted to get that topic started though because I was pretty excited about the idea of helping people find good books and help them support the forums at the same time.  So for now, it is a work in progress.  Hmmmm I'll add that to the title.

Actually Bujold's bibliography is so large that I don't think it would be pratical for me to add it to the post... but that could change.  I might just make that a seperate post within the topic.

Oh, and what Jim has said (on multiple occasions) is, "Professionally speaking, I want to have her babies."

Ziggelly:
No, I didn't get to save, because I was stupid, so I had to start over from scratch. I was very mad. That was like... two or three hours down the drain. *Shrug*. Such is life, I suppose. One down, two-thirds of the other one to go. You guys should really watch those videos though, because it's very cute to watch/listen to Pat. He's such a fanboy. :D
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Patrick Rothfuss Interviews Jim Butcher (SDCC, 2011)
Diction by: Ziggelly

PR: Hi, there. My name's Patrick Rothfoss, and I'm here at Comic Con at the SUVUDU booth, interviewing Jim Butcher – the fabulous Jim Butcher.
JB: No, just this one.
PR: *Chuckles*. When I got the opportunity to do this, I absolutely jumped at it, because I have been, like, an increasingly gooey fan of the Dresden Files for years now, and I found myself doing something recently that I have not done for decades. Knowing that Ghost Story was about to be published, I had actually re-read, or re-listened to in the case of the audiobooks, every single book leading up to Ghost Story, which is like... thirteen?
JB: Yes, book thirteen.
PR: I have not done that since high school. And my reading time is very precious these days, so I need to make that like a statement of intent to how much I absolutely adore these books. And this is the first time I got to meet Jim, out here at Comic Con, and so in addition to being a fantastic author, I found out that he's also a lovely human being, a snappy dresser, a wonderful kisser... *Jim laughs*... and he smells like fresh baked cookies, too. Ah, god, you probably want to edit that one out.
(Video commentary: Not a chance. Mmmmm... cookies)
So if I could just bring a couple of questions on you...
JB: Okay.

PR: You end up with a nice framework for magic to work in. You make things fairly clear to the reader, the reader understands how it works, and it is a well established system that you stick to. Why did you end up doing that?
JB: Well, I had read many books about wizards, and what I found was that the ones that were most satisfying were the ones that had very clear understandings of what magic could and couldn't do, the kind of limits that were there. It was always very frustrating to me to see magic in operation as this sort of quasi-sentient force all its own. That was kind of the one thing that I never liked about magic, was magic that figured out what to do all by itself. And then I never really liked magic that was like “pop-machine” magic, either, that was like, as long as you say the right words and move your wand exactly right, there is what happens. So I decided to base my magic on physics. I wanted it to have certain laws that it had to adhere to. I even borrowed a bunch of Newtonian laws, you know: matter cannot be created nor destroyed, for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction. And I wanted my wizard character, instead of being sort of the shaman, the mystic, I wanted him to be more like a plumber of magic, you know: “I happen to be able to work with this stuff, I know how it works, I know what I'm doing, and I can make this shower go”... only in this case it's explosions and so on.
PR: That's interesting. Somebody said, “I like the plumber of magic,” somebody said, “you know, your guy isn't really a magician so much as he's an engineer”, and I'm like “Wow! I'll take that, actually.” And I kind of felt the same way about yours, because you do stick to, like, the laws of thermodynamics, and it all makes good sense.

Now, you have the basic magic that Harry uses day-to-day, there's alchemy – though I don't think you call it alchemy...
JB: Right, yeah.
PR: Was that a deliberate choice, to steer away from that term?
JB: Uh, yeah it was. In the Dresden Files, you have to remember that you're getting the whole world from Harry's point of view,  and when you're a wizard like Harry is, everything gets thought of in terms of 'this is how it works', because everything's a spell. Other people, for instance the werewolves and so on, they don't think of what they do anywhere near the same terms as Harry does. But he's a wizard, so he's got to lay everything out in the model that he understands. The old saying is: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem's a nail.” And that's the way Dresden approaches things.
PR: And Harry is that hammer.
JB: He is. He is. He's some sort of tool. *Rothfuss laughs*. I'm not sure quite what yet exactly, but a hammer seems good.

PR: So, do you, yourself, when you're writing them, do you draw lines in your head between, say, the sort of magic that Harry does and the sort of magic the people in Bayport are capable of? Or is it just an issue of skill and quantity?
JB: Well, it's all a little bit different, but everyone interacts with that kind of energy in a different way. For instance, wizards cause disruptions in technology and other things around them because, you know, people are never all one thing or all the other, people are a conflicted group of weirdos, and so when you have human beings that are using magic, that sort of self-inner conflict, that's one of the side-effects that comes out, that's why they wreck things that are around them. If you're a fairy who's using magic, you're doing the same thing as a human being, but you don't have that cluttered human nature. You can sit around as a fairy and play X-box all you want, you're never going to ruin it, and still be an awesome wizard, but not as Dresden.

PR: That's a great way of approaching that. The world-building that you do is one of the more phenomenal parts of the books, where it's a very graceful introduction to the world. You don't get the big, heavy, texty, info-dump in the first book that you have to slog through, we're slowly introduced to a lot of these elements as the series progresses. And you have vampires, but not any sort of cliche vampires. You have werewolves, but it's not the sort of werewolf were I go, “ugh, I used to play this at White Wolf back in high school.” Was that kind of a specific intention, that you were trying to branch of, or...?
JB: Originally, when I first started outlining the books in the series, I would say, “okay, well, the first book we're going to have him going up against an evil wizard,” so it's himself versus the kind of dark version of what he can do, and that'll be a good introduction, and the next one I said, “I want to do one about werewolves,” and we're going to be doing ghosts for book three, and so on, and I started building  this stuff up as I went along, and when I actually started going in, and digging in, and doing research, and I didn't just want to do research by watching movies, although I do that a lot, (I tried to stop doing that after college), but when I would actually start digging into old folklore,  and so on, I found that things were very very different from my basic grew-up-watching-movies-TV-Scooby-Doo-playing-D&D concepts of what monsters were. The whole bitten by werewolf turns you into a werewolf, that's so Hollywood, the actual werewolf lore, it gets back into... well, there are many different sorts of werewolves that you can kind of run into depending on where you go in world, and then what I realized after I'd done all this werewolf research, and had this big, confusing, pool of werewolf candidates, I went “okay, you know what? This is not going to be a 'who's the werewolf?' book, it's going to be a 'which werewolf is guilty?' book, so now we're going to have a bunch of different werewolves available, so as I go out and find stuff out, a lot of the times that's the fun of it, is where I go and learn things and go, “oh, okay, this is not quite the book I thought it was going to be, we're going to switch things around.”

PR: Now, in terms of your plotting, it's one of the things that I'm terribly jealous of, because I'm comfortable with my world-building and other elements of my writing, but there are a couple things that you do that just so thoroughly out-class me, and one of them is the plotting, where you write these books that have, in themselves, great, very tight, very satisfying plots, but it's not like a sit-com. With a lot of series, you have the rise, and the fall, and the action, and then at the end of it, it's like the Simpsons - nothing is ever going to change in any permanent way. But in your books, you break that tradition in the episodic fantasy. How do you do that?! Teach me!
JB: Okay, basically, when I think of a book, what I'm actually writing is, like, Harry Dresden's worst weekend of the year that year. That's pretty much what I've got in mind. And then, to do that, I've got to figure out what are going to be awful things I'm going to have happen to him, what are going to be the cool things that I'm going to get to do within the story, and then after I put that all together, then I spend a lot of time between the books thinking, “okay, what's going to be the fallout from what's happened?” That's one of the things I've always taken to heart very seriously, is that actions have consequences, and choices have consequences, and you've got to live with them. So for Dresden, that's one of the fun things to do is to stop and think about,  “okay, now, this is what's been going on for the past six months, or eight months, or nine months, in the the Dresden universe. How is everybody who's actually in this book, how do they experience that?” Everyone has a slightly different experience based on who they are and what they bring to their point of view within the story. You know, Murphy experiences the world very differently from Dresden, very differently from Dresden's brother Thomas, and so on. It's mostly just a matter of sitting down and thinking it out, and figuring out, “how do they experience this? What kind of spin can I put on it that's going to make it a fun part of the story?”Murphy mostly gets crap at work as fallout from her stuff, but I killed Dresden at the end of Changes, so everybody had to sort of look around and suddenly realize “oh my gosh! Somebody shot the sheriff.” Who's going to be the one who's going to step into his boots, and nobody can, so we've all got to.

PR: That's also one of the things that's really impressed me, is that, like, legitimately long-term bad things happen to people who are just doing their best and making decisions to help their friends, and they suffer for it, in significant, long-term ways. Now, and this is sort of the question that when someone springs it on me I kind of, “ugh, god,” but I am kind of curious: Do you think that that might reflect something of your own world-view?
JB: Ugh, god!
PR: Now, see? Isn't that an awful question? But I am kind of curious, because I find myself wondering, in my books, how much my world-view is sort of sneaking in there.
JB: To be honest, it probably does have something to do with it. It's not something that I consciously put in, but let me tell you, occasionally life will come along and brutally, senselessly, club you over the head with something. And it's not because of anything you're going to do, it's not always because of something you choose to do, many times it won't even be your fault, but it's going to happen. And learning to live, learning to get along, is not about learning to not get clubbed on the head, it's about learning to get back up off the ground again after you have been. That's always been a real strong theme with me, personally; whatever happens, you've got to take the punch and get up and keep  going.
PR: Harry is the “get back up” guy.
JB: He is. He is. And that was a very conscious choice in the beginning, too. I wanted a guy that I could beat up a lot. And it wasn't actually until about the fourth book in that a fan pointed out, “hey, you've done this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and he's taken all these injuries here. I'm a professional therapist, and he would take this much therapy to get back from this, and he would never recover from this..” and I'm like, “wow, you really have beaten him up a lot. You know, wizards must just be better at getting better than other people, I need to write that in. Hey, we'll tie that in with how long they live, and, okay, cool. That works. That's good.”

PR: I always think of that in terms of course correction. You get some feedback, or a Beta reader gives you...
JB: Absolutely.
PR: And then you're like, “oh, that's a really good point, I guess you can't have a million people living in a pre-industrial society, you know, everyone dies of dysentery.” So, how much of that do you tend to  engage in as the series goes on, because you have a story and a story and a story, whereas I tend to do a huge block of story, and then there's a three-year gap, how much course direction would you say you do  with the overall story in between books based on feedback?
JB: Considerable. I mean, when someone has a good point they have a good point, and I'm not a perfect person, so when someone will point something like that out, I'll go, “okay, how can I take this and how can I use it as part of the story, and either keep it the way it is and have a good reason for it to be that way, or else spin it, or fix it, or have somebody realize something new about the world that hasn't been brought out before. I mean, that's kind of the creative challenge is kind of “how to make this cooler  and better?” and not, “how do I let this be a big hole in my story somewhere?” How to make it stronger, instead of less.
PR: And I think one of the great strengths of your writing is the reasonableness of it. Because sometimes you can tell somebody's patching a plot-hole, and it's just like they're putting a poster over the hole in the wall, but when you present one of these explanations, it's so smooth, and it makes such good, rational sense, that it seems like you built it in from the very beginning.
JB: Yes! Oh, I did. All of it. Word for word, I've got it all laid out. On a scroll.

PR: How often do you check your own Amazon rank?
JB: A couple times a week. It used to be more often. Less now.

PR: How many copies of your own books do you have in your house?
JB: I've got a... not quite a walk-in closet, but one of the double-door closets... that's just kind of stacked up with books.
PR: Really?
JB: Yeah, yeah, they're just basically waiting there to help burn my house down. I try to give them away whenever I can.
PR: Does it tend to accumulate?
JB: They do, they do. They add up.

PR: Do you have a vanity shelf?
JB: Yes, I do!
PR: There we go.
JB: Actually Shannon, my wife, the house that we're in right now, she actually got to design much of it, and she actually built these big shelves in the front room where I could put all my books up, and she gets one copy of every book as soon as it comes in and puts it up on that shelf.
PR: I'm so glad I'm not the only one! Although with all of the books, and all the foreign translations, that's got to be...
JB: It's getting to be a big shelf, yeah.

PR: Favourite authors?
JB: This is always that question where I think, “oh! I should have said so-and-so,” later on.
PR: Yeah.
JB: The late Robert B. Parker is one of my absolute favorite authors, Glen Cook, his Black Company books and his Garrett books I just love, The Deed of Paksenarrion by Elizabeth Moon, the Honor Herrington series by David Weber. Uh... y'all, naturally. Brandon Sanderson, I've really just been tearing into his work lately, which is just so much fun. I think he comes from that same, you know, “I really wanted to write for The Avengers,” sensibility at some point in his past, so when we're doing the magic, we have an unlimited special-effects budget. Hooyah! These guys are more like superheros than wizards. So I love his stuff as well.
PR: And Sanderson does the same thing that you're very good at, where he has this book where everyone's fielding these huge armies. Have you read The Way of Kings?
JB: Yeah, I'm in the middle of it right now. It's sitting in my hotel room, so...
PR: I won't give any plot-stuff away, but I mean there are these constant wars, these huge armies on the field, and if you're a certain sort of geek, you're like, “you can't maintain an army of a hundred-thousand people, with all the camp followers. It's just logically impossible because of the amount of supplies that need to be...
JB: But then he'll write in, “but you can if you can make food out of rocks! Poof!”
PR: And I'm like, “well, there you go. Thank you for being rational about this.” Uh, along those lines,  because, like I said, you write such great action, and it's not just action for the sake of action, it always moves the plot, and it makes the books such quick reads, and such good page-turners.

When you're reading other authors, what do you see? What authors do you read, even if it's not that the entire book is your favourite, but you see them doing something, and you're like, “I wish I could do that, I just don't have it in me.”
JB: The very best authors that I read are the ones that make me forget that I'm a professional story-teller. When I'm in the middle of the story, I don't have time to be noticing all the things that they're doing, you know, and going, “oh, that's a nice touch,” because I'm so busy going, “let me get into this and see what's going on next”, and being there in that world. It's one of the reasons that I like your world so much. When I am noticing these things, when I stop and go back through and re-read, which is what you have to do after, the first time you read you have fun, then I'll always stop at all the points that I thought really really grabbed me emotionally, and I'll try to say “now, why did this have me grabbing the book and ready to throw it across the room I was so upset? Or why was I laughing so hard at this passage? Why did this bring me to the edge of tears?” and I'll try to stop and figure that out and “how do they do that? Can I steal that?”
PR: Yes!
JB: Because, as a writer, that's what you do. That's the highest compliment as a writer is when another writer looks and you and goes, “oh, I wish I'd done that one! Can I steal that from you?”
PR: Absolutely. Uh, thank you so much, it's been such a treat for me, and I hope to see you around at cons in the future.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page