The Dresden Files > DF Reference Collection
WoJ transcription help needed + mention new WoJ's here
Fannan:
These interviews/Q&A sessions are a pleasure to listen to and read, thank you all again, especially Serack, SO MUCH!!
thelordbeans:
--- Quote from: Serack on August 21, 2011, 09:57:54 PM ---Edit, for Ghost Story release WoJ sources that are currently available on the internet it looks like the Kansas City signing is the only one that is not already either done, or pledged to be done by someone (someone has already done one segment of that one, but didn't pledge to do any others). Now that someone gave me advice on how to post them on youtube, I will be posting the bits I have of the Bevercreek and Boston signing as soon as I get the chance, and then those will need transcriptions.
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Cool, I'll get started soon
Edit: here's Part 1
Jim: So I'll come to a place and they'll ask me if I'm going to do a reading, and I can never really get behind that because I'd like to think that most of my fans can read. What I'd really rather do is question and answer, if that's okay with you guys... *audience agrees* ...but for that to work, somebody has to ask a question!
In what book will we find out who fixed Little Chicago?
Probably not until 19 or 20. Since I'm a lazy writer, probably 20. I think that would be good for the last of the case files, so I'll hold off on that one.
Jim: I originally said that Changes was about the midpoint of the series, and he asked if earlier plots had pushed the middle point later, and if so does that mean we're getting more over the series before we got into the finale.
The midpoint of the story is not necessarily the geographical midpoint, it's sort of where things get good. *grin* I was just so confused after Changes came out and there was a little bit of a reaction *audience laughs* and I couldn't understand it because I was happy: "Come on he's dead! Now I can do the good stuff," and I guess we'll see how that works out. I occasionally forget that not everybody knows the whole story.
Any chance for another Dresden series like on TV?
I am willing to forgive Hollywood for killing the show when it did, and for Sorcerer's Aprentice. I'm just saying if you ever held up the posters... if it had been anyone but Nic Cage I might not have thought twice about it. The one actor in Hollywood that I know has read through the series, except for Valerie on the TV show, who played Murphy. She was the only one of the cast who had actually read the books and came up and started kneading me about them when I got to go visit the set. She was cool after that. Some people complained because she wasn't blonde but she's cool, she read the books.
Are you familiar with TV tropes and is Bob turning Orange and Blue a reference to one of them?
(LordBeans) http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlueAndOrangeMorality
Yes, I'm familiar with TV tropes but only because somebody said that I got put on there as one of the guys who is in the definition for doing Crowning Moments of Awesome. *Jim effects an excited voice* Okay I'll go surf there! But as far as the orange and blue thing, that's not a reference I know of. *audience mentions morality* Okay I'll have to go look! It's probably one of those things that got ingrained into me when I was watching who knows what. I always think that I think of something cool and original like Bob the skull himself I think is cool and original and then I sat down with my son one morning and watched the opening credits to old Scooby-Doo and said to myself "Aww man, I'm not nearly as cool as I thought." Then I watched the second reel of the Last Unicorn. (LordBeans - I don't know what this is a reference to) "Aww man, I was so cool a few minutes ago!"
I read the short story from Marcone's point of view, Even Hand, and I noticed that John Marcone is not his real name. Is that going to be significant?
Sure is if somebody tries to cast a spell at him using the name John Marcone! That would be a big deal. We'll have to see how that works out. Actually the character that's really interesting is the Mirror Mirror universe Marcone, and we'll get to him in a few books.
Are any of your places like Mac's pub based on real places?
No, except the ones that are based on real places. For example, the Field Museum, where I have actually been now. I've got pictures of myself coming right in front of Sue. Also the big Shedd Aquarium that they have there by the Field Museum. I got to go stand there by the big windows and look out on the tanks where they have whales and dolphins going by.
Just so you know, if you go by there and ask them: "Hey what would happen if these windows were broken? No, I need it for somebody's shot amount or something. No no, it's for professional reasons!" They do not have a sense of humour about it.
Are you thinking about writing a seventh book in the Alera series?
If I go back to Alera, it'll probably be years from now and I'll have to pay off my gambling debts or something - a good reason - and I would either go a couple of generations in the future where we would see a much steampunkier Alera after guys like Octavian got through messing the place up. Either that or I'd also give consideration to writing the incredible trouble-making angel A-team of cursors that Erin has to put up with, where one of them's a Canin and one of them is a Marat and so on, kind of a Justice League of cursors causing trouble. But it wouldn't be a story that's on the same "Let's animate mountains and smash the world" kind of scale that the first one was. I wouldn't want to disappoint by going back to that.
thelordbeans:
Part 2
What about an anime or an animated movie for either series?
I would be delighted with those because then they could blow up as much stuff as they wanted, and it wouldn't really cost them any more than not blowing up stuff, which makes it a major difference from television. In my head it's kind of an animated series anyway, as I'm writing it. There's some moments where you can actually stop and say "Oh my gosh, what he's writing looks like an anime writer's panels," and yes, it does. It's what it is in my head; I just have to write it down that way.
Jim: Over here in the red shirt... you are expendable, sir!
Is there any real or historical person or place that you want to Dresden to interact with that you have not already?
Yeah, several, but I'm going to use them so I don't want to give away too much yet. I've also thought about going back and writing the French and Indian war in the Dresdenverse which would be really interesting because that's back when Ebenezar was a young hothead and most of the Senior Council guys were running around causing trouble, dumb enough to get into the kind of things Dresden does every book. We'd have sasquatches and the French and everything, it'd be a lot of fun.
Are there any clues or certain points in the books that you thought people might have picked up on by now but have not?
*After Jim repeats the question for the audience, the same audience member that asked the question also asks "And what are they?" to laughter*
Jim: I refuse to repeat that part of the question.
Actually, no. Everybody's picked up on I think all the major plot stuff that I've done, and pretty much somebody's picked up on all of them. Nobody's put them all together. In each individual part, where things get revealed as the plot goes on, in the future you're going to have people go "I called that!" and they get it. They would be wrong on like ninety percent of the rest but for that part, yeah, they nailed it. It's actually possible to put together the big story too because the guys who are researching the role playing game did it and were writing it in the book and I had to tell them, "NO! Stop that. You may not put that in the role playing handbook because you're giving things away that would be way more fun to give in the actual books. So don't do that or I'll scream and throw a fit at someone."
Is there anybody that you based Dresden on? How did you go about creating Dresden?
First of all, you have to understand that I created Dresden as an excercise in my writing-a-genre-fiction-novel writing class in order to prove to my writing teacher how wrong she was about all her ideas of writing. This was in the grad program of L.U.'s college of journalism and the professional writing program there, and she had been trying to give me very good advice for a long time, which I'd been ignoring because *Jim effects a slightly pretentious voice* I had a bachelor's degree in English literature, whereas she had merely published forty novels. So I'd been arguing and arguing with her for a couple of years and finally I said, "Okay, I'm just going to be her good little writing monkey this semester. I'm going to do all of her little worksheets and fill out all the little things and follow this very artificial, very terrible process that she's trying to get us to get involved in, and I'm going to show her what terrible, cookie-cutter papal crap comes out of it, and that's when I wrote Storm Front." (LordBeans: papal?) Which showed her!
Dresden himself I put together from two sources: one, classical long-term popular wizards, and two, long-term popular private I's. I started with Merlin and Sherlock, and those were the first two that I used. I started listing, in this very artificial process, all the common traits of these popular literary wizards and all the common traits between the successful Private I's. I noticed a couple of interesting cross-overs: one, all the wizards and Private I's get all of their real power from knowledge. They go find things out. That's what really makes them dangerous. What made Gandalf dangerous was not the fact that Gandalf had a medium-sized special effects budget that could throw fire and stuff like that. What made him dangerous was him running around, finding things out, and going down into the dark musty vaults of Minas Tirith and looking up all these old records and realizing, "Wait a minute, this is how we kill the guy!" Private I's kind of had to function the same way: You could have a Private I that was scrappy and good in a fight, somebody like Spencer who could box you to the ground if you want to play that kind of game, or they could just plug you if you want to play rough, but that's not really what makes him dangerous. What makes him dangerous is his ability to go places and find things out. Whether they're going to a literal underworld like the mines of Moria or going to a metaphoric underworld like the underside of the Boston crime scene, that's what they do. So I said, "Okay, well these are the things I want to put together. What else do I need from wizards? All wizards are grumpy. I'm going to put that in because it's just true. All Private I's are mouthy. As much as I could tell, all the popular ones. And they both tend to be arrogant. You look at Sherlock Holmes and he's a terribly arrogant character, kickingly so arrogant he almost seemed innocent of the fact that he was so smart. So what are the other things about the hard-boiled American private I's that make them popular characters? Well, they all mouth off to exactly the wrong people at exactly the wrong time, and they'll do it every time. And they can take an enormous beating, yet still drag themselves up and continue pursuing their goal. Those were the basic character traits I put together for Dresden."
Will the history of Collin Murphy - how he killed himself, et cetera - turn out to be important in any way?
Well, no. Because that would require that he actually killed himself. So I'll just leave it at that.
What do you feel is your biggest cliche?
An easier question would be what is my biggest avoidance of cliche, because there are far fewer of those.
The wizard with fireballs was probably it. I tried not to, but I played too much DnD when I was young. It was going to happen. I tried to avoid it but it didn't work out. Though I did have fun playing with fireballs in the same way we used to do in all the old DnD games: *effects nerdy voice* "3000 cubic feet of fire! And we're in a ten by ten hallway that's this long and still spread out by... and why are you slowing down the game with that? I'm saying it'simple math!" *audience laughs* Yeah, I'm in a room with kindred spirits here.
Serack:
--- Quote from: thelordbeans on August 22, 2011, 09:08:55 PM ---(LordBeans) http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlueAndOrangeMorality
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It is often stated that any link to tvtropes must be accompanied with a warning
thelordbeans:
--- Quote from: Serack on August 23, 2011, 01:17:44 PM ---It is often stated that any link to tvtropes must be accompanied with a warning
--- End quote ---
lol, I hope I can be excused considering my hyperlink showed the address of the site itself, which is named tvtropes.org
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