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blue_shadow_2015 Stockholm Q&AQ: Can you tell us something about your new upcoming series, the steampunk series?
A: The new series is a steampunk series. I wanted to call it a steam opera, but my editor told me, "No Jim, you're not allowed to make up brand new genres." I'm like, "OK, fine, whatever, it can be steampunk." But it'll be coming out this fall; it's called The Cinder Spires. The first book is called The Aeronaut's Windlass. The setting is a world where the surface of the world is a very dangerous place to live and so most of humanity lives in these enormous nearly indestructible black towers called "the Spires". All trade and travel and commerce and diplomacy is accomplished by airship between the spires, and two of the more powerful ones are beginning to position themselves to go to war with each other.
And the monarch of one of the spires, the Spirearch, has decided that he needs to assemble a mission team to get jobs done for him in order to get his spire positioned as advantageously as possible. So the story is kind of...I like to say it's X-Men meets Hornblower, but that didn't sound very steampunky, so now I say it's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen meets Hornblower. I would like to tell you that you'll like it because there are good characters that I really enjoyed making or that you'll like it because it's really tightly paced, because even though I'm writing something that is a little bit more like Codex Alera, I tried to pace it like a Dresden Files book - kinda compress all the action into a small area. And I'd like to tell you that you'll think it's a cool story world, but really, what's going to sell the books is that there are talking cats.
And the cats, they don't speak human languages, of course - they speak "Cat". They understand human languages, except when they don't. But they sort of exist alongside humanity, they don't like to mix too much with humanity because humans keep trying to feed kittens, and then kittens become dependant on humans and don't learn to kill things for themselves - and that's BAD. And humans - you kinda have to get along with humans though, because they have opposable thumbs...and matches! So the cats wind up being kinda like this little fuzzy mafia. "I notice your warehouse is rodent free. Perhaps you would like it to continue being rodent free. Perhaps there will be cream waiting every Thursday at three p.m."
One of the cats has a pet human, so the Spirarch recruits her to be part of his team because somebody who can understand cats and who knows how to approach them and talk to them is very handy, because cats see and hear everything and they get everywhere, and they're completely silent, and so they're a fantastic source of information.
Another one of the members of the team is a down-on-his-luck privateer, a captain, who was successful enough in his privateering at the end of the Spires that they actually sent a battlecruiser out to kill him. He manages to survive, and get away and come home. But his ship's all busted up, and though he doesn't really care for the Spirearch at all, the Spirearch is willing to fix his ship, and he can't say "no" to that.
There's basically a princess of the Spire, a daughter of the most powerful house there. One of the warriorborn - about 3% of the population in this world is born slightly different than the rest of humanity, with a much higher metabolism, and much stronger and much faster. If you get in a fight and your side has warriorborn, and their side doesn't...you win. So you gotta have a warriorborn along so another one doesn't come tromp you. There's an etherialist which is - there's crystal technology that does a lot of the airship stuff, along with the more primitive steam technology, and there's etheric engineers that run all of the machines that are based on the crystal technology, and there's etherealists who sorta do everything the engineers do, only without that troublesome "machine" part in the middle. You know, they just sorta "get to it" at the end. As a result, they're a little bit off...an etherialist who's walking around and bumping into walls and talking to people who aren't there - he's probably safe. He's probably okay. It's the etherealist that's looking at you calmly and inviting you to tea that you have to worry about - there's something definitely, deeply wrong with that one. You definitely want the guy that's a little bit weird on your team and not the calm one.
I had a great time writing it; I had a stronger response from my beta readers for this book than I have for anything else I've done. It's the longest book I've ever written. It checks in at almost 200,000 words. It's a nice, big, thick read, so we'll see how it goes. I'm so sick of it now because I've been editing it over and over for the past several weeks, but eventually the characters will be like "Jim, we have to do another story" and I'll be like "Shut up! I'm trying to write Harry Dresden!" But that'll be out late September, early October.
Q: Cool, I think a lot of us will be excited to read that then. What, if any, tease can you give us for Peace Talks?
A: Peace Talks is all about the various signatories of the Unseelie Accords are having a convocation in Chicago to try and work out a way to settle down all the discord that's been happening due to the Fomor seizing power in the vacuum left behind by the Red Court. So, I believe what's going to happen is they're all going to get together, they'll have a nice dinner, they'll hash things out, and then have a coupla beers and sing some songs, and everything will be FINE. Cause, you know, I want to surprise everybody. Everybody's just looking for it to explode, and so on. This book is only set a couple of months after the end of the previous one [Skin Game], so, you know, Murphy's still undergoing surgeries and so on to get fixed because when you get hurt like that, it takes a long time to get better. When you're not some kind of superhuman, "I work for Queen Mab", living punching bag... Let's see, we'll get to see a lot of, more of Harry and Maggie; Mouse will be in this one, we'll get to see the White Council getting involved with things again, so we'll have them on stage.
And I'm going to get to do a bunch of fights I've been longing to write since i first started writing this series, so that's going to be fun. And we will have a good time with that book as well - as soon as it's written, which, I have to stop doing things like going to Sweden and stay home and write books. It's really a good thing I'm kind of a hobbit at heart because, you know, bad things can happen to you when you go on adventures...there can be trolls and dragons and things like that. Stay home on the couch, that's not going to happen! And earlier I'd said that, and Kitty said "Yeah, but if you stay home on the couch, nothing good happens either!" And I'm like, "Speak for yourself! I've got a series to do! That's important stuff to me."
I've also got to do a few more Dresden short stories. I'm going to have to do "Harry Dresden does jury duty", and I gotta assume that the lawyers ran out of people they could strike, and that Harry was left. I got called to jury duty myself, and I had a book due, so I really hated wasting the time. So I'm sitting here like this the entire time [arms crossed, leaned back, serious look on face], the lawyer takes one look at me, and goes, "Huh-huh - no." Like that. I'm like, "That's right, judgmental long hair - you don't know which way that guy's going to break."
But let's see, we'll do the story of Molly's first job as Winter Lady, and you'll actually get to see what her job is, what the Winter Lady's supposed to do, and what Maeve was not doing. Molly's got, like, 150 years of backlog to clear before she can even catch up. Let's see, I think I'm finally going to write the Hawaii story, where Murphy and Kincaid go to Hawaii. And there's volcanoes and shark gods and everything, so that'll be fun. What else? Oh, sometime probably next year, I'm going to be writing a series, at least a few books, that are going to be young adult books when Maggie Dresden goes to school. Maggie is...she's going to be going to St. Mark's Academy for the Gifted and Talented, which has been mentioned in some of the short stories. Dresden walks in and says "It's too bad you're not St. Mark's Academy for the Resourceful and Talented, because then you'd be "SMART". And as it is, you're just "SMAGT." " So, that's the school where all the scions, the offspring of supernatural beings who live around Chicago - that's where they go to class, because it's kind of been declared neutral territory. And the law is, the kids have to sort out their own problems. So Maggie's going to be winding up going there, she's got terrible social anxiety issues because she's had [sing-song voice] some trauma. Unless she has Mouse along, and Mouse is kind of her "people-person", he's the face man. Unless, of course, things are on fire, and people are bleeding and screaming, at which point, she's completely normal...because she's Harry Dresden's daughter. But that'll be really fun to write, and we're going to end that at middle school, so we'll see how that works out.
But okay, so that's my work for the near future, so now you guys know what I'm doing - I'll be on my couch.
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