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The Dresden Files > DF Reference Collection

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TheCuriousFan:
Announcer: There are some aspiring writers, I would take it, out there. How did you make the sale?

Jim: Making the sale was, I got a letter of introduction from my teacher to her editor who published several books per day, her name was Ginger Mccannon?, I got a letter of introduction and recommendation for this manuscript so Ginger Mccannon said "yeah I'll give it a look" and she had it for two and a half years without having time to look at it because of the sheer number of submissions that editors get. And the fact is that she kept it for two and a half years which is really encouraging unless you were the guy waiting that long. And so during this time I talked to several other people and a friend of mine suggested "you know what you really need to do at this point, if you've got the skills you need, the next thing that you need to do is that you need to start making contacts in the business because you need the network. This was the nineties, networking wasn't as big a thing back then. Folks weren't quite as aware of it, the social networks were just now coming online you know, Google was just now coming online. And so I said "well, okay, what do you think I should do?" and she's like "well there's no substitute for going and actually meeting people, go meet them face to face, go talk to them". And so I started going to conventions and going up to editors and agents and introducing myself and talking and I literally snuck into a coffee clash that was full, past Klingon security. I actually arranged for there to be a distraction so that I could sneak into the room. And then, I remember I was sitting there and someone rolled in a couple minutes late and went "oh I'm so sorry" and came to the table and all the chairs were full and it was me and a couple of editors and this horrible, this horrified look on his face as he saw the chairs were full and I looked around and I'm like "well, we can pull up another chair right? I mean, he's here" and they're like "yeah, we can pull up another chair" so we got another chair. And I tried meeting people and finally a notion occured to me that's like "well maybe, what I should do is I should be focusing on the editors and agents who, you know, actually publish things that are kind of like what I want to publish and actually represent people who write things like I want to write" and I said "Well, who is there?" and at the time urban fantasy was basically Laurel Hamilton, and she was pretty much it. And so I said "well okay, let's find out where Laura Hamilton's agent is" and so, Laurel was actually going to be at a convention so I arranged to go to the convention and I was on a mailing fanlist and so I collected a bunch of questions from the books on the list and I went up to Laura and I said "hey, can I have 20 minutes of your time at some point in the convention, I've got some folks from your fan mailing list with some questions and I would love to be able to share them" and Laurel's like "yeah sure" and uh all these people were talking to Laurel, it was a writing convention so they were all aspiring writers and they were all like me and they were all talking to Laurel about Anita and Jean-Luc and Richard and so on, I could see this kind of desperate glaze coming over her eyes as she was there because this was just non-stop and so I looked at Laura at one point and I went "do you like Buffy?" and she's like "I love Buffy" "do you like Babylon 5?", really, I felt like Gerald Ford on The Simpsons "do you like Babylon 5?" "I love Babylon 5" so we talked Babylon 5 and Buffy for like an hour. And the next day I was kinda wandering around at the convention sort of bumping into walls, what I normally do and Laurel spots me and says "hey Jim! do you wanna go to lunch?" and I'm like "Okay, I like lunch" and so I wound up at lunch with Laurel Hamilton and 3 other authors and 3 agents and 2 editors and they all liked Buffy and Babylon 5. Because they were all fellow nerds and so by the end of the convention, every agent who is there that I had met, including Laurel's agent, including a couple other ones, including my current agent, had offered to represent me and I'm like, actually I was sitting talking to Jennifer Jackson who is currently my agent and I looked at her and I'm like "you want to represent me now?" And she's like "yeah" and I'm like "but you rejected me" and she's like "I know" and I'm like "two weeks ago" and she says "I know, but that was before I knew you played the Amber diceless roleplaying game". And that was basically how it went.

Announcer: I can understand innate talent, where did the balls come from?

Jim: I don't know, you try something long enough, I blame most of it on Harry Dresden, on the way to that conference, on the way to the airport to go to that conference, I blew out a tyre on the way to the airport. This was a red-eye flight and it was literally 3:30 in the morning and I was halfway there and I was 5 miles-this was on the road between Norman Oklahoma and the Oklahoma city airport and I was literally 5 miles from the nearest phone. And I was right at the side of a highway, it was freezing cold, there was sleet coming down and the tyre blown out on my Firebird. On these old Firebirds there's this one nut that was a special lock nut to keep people from stealing your tyres as though stealing the tyres off your *unintelligible* car was a big deal. But the damn lock nut, you could not get the thing off and it had frozen on and I was on it for like half an hour, I had grease all over myself and I had taken the skin off my knuckles, I couldn't feel my fingers anymore and there were semis going by like 3 feet away behind me as I was trying to change this tyre and I finally just sat down and it's like "what am I gonna do? If I run I can get to a phone in maybe an hour-stopping here for now.

TheCuriousFan:
Reserved.

Serack:
*cheer*

derek:
Jim Butcher Evening at Kiama Library - Part 1
Kiama Library, Kiama, New South Wales, Australia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHxy_9lR4kk

Jim: Okay, so I was a college student and I intended to write novels. I was going to be a serious novelist. I was going to write swords and horses fantasy, epic fantasy, and that's what I was going to do.

And I set forth to do that. I wrote my first novel.

It was awful. I wouldn't have made Osama bin Laden read that novel. I really wouldn't. It was that terrible.

So, I wrote a novel after that and it was awful. And I followed that up with a third novel in that series - (inaudible).

I tried a fourth novel. It was kind of more of an X-Files-y thing and that was really, really bad.

The fifth novel was just a rewrite of the first novel and it didn't help. Rewriting really didn't make it all that much better.

So, I spun off into some other -- a new fantasy series for novels six and seven, and I still was not getting anywhere with any of it. And at that point, my writing teacher, Deborah Chester, had been trying to give me advice the whole time, which I had not taken because I had a degree in English literature and I knew what I was doing, whereas she had merely published forty novels.

So one semester I decided, 'You know what? I'm going to prove to Debby how wrong she is about everything. I'm going to be her good little writing monkey and I'm going to fill out all her little sheets, and do all her little forms and outlines and plan out everything ahead of time, and use all these stupid little devices. And she is going to see exactly what horrible, cookie cutter, pablum crap comes out of a process like that.' And I wrote the first book of the Dresden Files, which showed her.

So, it was a good age of my life to start realizing that maybe I didn't know everything. I think I was about 25 at the time. That is also when, as a young man, you start thinking to yourself something along the lines of, 'There might be something to life other than boobs.' And also, that's why -- I don't know how they have it set up in Australia, but in America that's when the car insurance rates go down, at that same age. I don't think that's a coincidence at all.

But anyway, so it was at that point that I started learning how much I didn't know. And then I actually started learning to write. And the Dresden Files, I wrote -- the next three books I wrote were the first few books of the Dresden Files and the one after that was the first book of the Codex Alera. And all those sold at that point.

But I remember taking that first chapter of Storm Front in to let her read. She picked it up and looked at it, read over the first chapter and looked up and said, 'Well, you did it.'

And I said, 'What?' Because I was used to very no holds barred, harsh criticism. And she said, 'You did it. This will sell. I don't know if this will be the first thing you sell, but this will sell.'

And I was like, 'G-G-G-G- Okay.' It was like the first positive responses I had gotten from her, ever. And it turned out she was right, to boot -- about the whole thing. Ugh, insufferable.

And then three months later, I was kicked out of the School of Professional Writing at the University of Oklahoma, evidently for not having what it took to be a professional writer.

Also, the dean who was actually teaching me one of the classes had asked me to come to an alumni dinner and talk about the professional writing program. And I said, 'Well, what do I say?' He said, 'Well, just speak your mind about it.'

Apparently, you're supposed to know better when the dean tells you that. Your mind is supposed to be in a certain place where you should know.

I don't get along in those kind of structured organizations real well. I don't know why that is. Anyway, that was how I stumbled into writing.

When I started writing Codex Alera, actually I wrote those on a bet. I was on an online list -- this was before I got published -- and I was on the Del Ray Online Writers Workshop, which was a big discussion group where people who wanted to be writers could go on the internet and yell at each other instead of actually getting writing accomplished.

There was a giant discussion going on on the list about whether the great idea was the absolute core, indispensable part of writing, was the most important thing, or whether the writer's presentation was the most important thing. And for me, it was all about presentation. It's all about the writer.

If the writer can put his own fresh spin on a story, he can take an old story that you've heard a thousand and still make a good story out of it that you will enjoy. How many versions of Romeo and Juliet have you seen? That was my point.

The other side was if you've got a great idea, it doesn't matter how lame a writer you are. The great idea will sell the story. Look at Jurassic Park. That was their words, not mine.

But the discussion was going back and forth, back and forth. It was one of those discussions that, you know, pretty much you just hit the CAPS LOCK key and reply and start typing. That's how it goes.

Finally, this guy on the other side said -- and bear in mind, we were all just loudmouths on the internet. I'm still just a loudmouth on the internet, but now I've got some books published.

But this guy says, 'Why don't you put your money where your mouth is. Let me give you a lame idea and see you write a good story out of it.' And being the punk that I was, I said, 'No. Why don't you give me two lame ideas and I'll use them both.'

And so the guy did. He said, 'Okay, first lame idea is lost Roman legion. I am so sick of lost Roman legion stories. All the lost Roman legions should have been found by now. Lost Roman legion, number one.'

I'm like, 'Okay, good. What's number two?'

And he says, 'Pokemon. I am so sick of the Pokemon.'

I'm like, 'Okay, fine,' and I took it.

And I said, 'Lost Roman legion,' and I went and I researched lost Roman legions, which I knew very little about. I discovered that the lost Roman legion that everybody is talking about is the IX Hibernian Legion who marched off into what was supposedly friendly territory, into a storm, and never came back again. And that was the end of their legion.

So, I thought, 'Okay. Well, let's take this legion and where are they going to march to -- maybe they marched to somewhere and came out somewhere and that's where they are. So, where did they go to? Land of the Pokemon. All right, great.'

So, I went and started looking at lost Roman legions and I figured out, okay, the Roman legion was actually only about half Roman citizens and the other half was German mercenaries. And then they had about this many camp followers that were along with them, because even though you weren't allowed to get married in the Roman army, everybody did anyway only it just wasn't official and you had you had your camp followers along.

So I figured out, okay, this is actually a good pretty good sized colonisation force. They went off to this land.

And I went and looked at Pokemon, which is itself a fusion of two ideas. First is the Shinto religion, which holds that there's a divine spirit inside all natural things, a divine spirit, a Kami inside all natural things. A giant mountain has a huge Kami in it and a pebble has a tiny Kami in it. And you'd better respect the pebble. But if you don't, what's it going to do? It's a pebble. And then the second idea that Pokemon is made from is professional wrestling. So, they took Shinto and professional wrestling and (inaudible).

So, I decided, okay, you know what? I'm going to set up this world where these Kami actually exist, where people bond to them. I stuck my Roman legion there and I gave them ten thousand years to ferment, or two thousand years to ferment. And I said, 'Okay, now we'll start the story here,' and that's where we got started. So, if anybody wonders, Alera is set in about 2004, in the first book, so, you know, parallel.

So, this whole time, I put this whole thing together and I got the first few chapters written and I'm like, 'You know, this is actually kind of a cool story. I think I'm going to work with this.' I got back online, I said, 'Actually....'

And the guy is like, 'Well, where's this awesome story?'

I'm like, 'Well, I don't want to publish it here, because I think I can sell it. So, I'm just, I'm not going to put it up here.'

He's like, 'Oh. So, I'm right.' And I had to be like, 'Yeah, you're right.'

And then I sold six books.

To this day, I don't remember the guy. Who knows? He may be in an audience aiming some sort of assassin gun disguised as a sandwich at me one day. Who knows (inauduble).

So, basically, I have stumbled into a career in professional writing on accident and looked around in bewilderment at my good fortune. Mostly that is due to you guys, who put my kid through college. Cheers. So, basically, I'm a goober who happens to be standing at this spot and has lucked out a bit and has worked awfully hard a bit. But that's what I do. I make up stuff I think will be fun. I write down the conversations with my imaginary friends and I've somehow managed to con you guys into paying me to do it. And thank you so much.

So, let's just do like questions and answers at this point. Is that cool? Okay, but it only works if one of you asks a question. Thank you, sir.

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