I didn't read a book once because of it's ridiculous cover art. Years later, my brother highly recommended the book. I ended up loving it.

Agreed. And he usually manages to do it well enough that the inconsistency can be explained away.

On Butters and such. I always assumed Shiro was Shinto. Death Masks doesn't specifically mention what religion he was before he "converted." Shiro serves "Heaven. Or the divine in nature. The memory of my fathers past. My fellow man. Myself. All pieces of the same thing."

Sanya isn't an atheist. He's a Trotskiest. "Because it must be done. ... For the good of the people, some must place themselves in harm's way. some must pledge their courage and their lives to protect the community." That's what he believes in.

I don't know what kind of Jew Butters is. There are a lot of atheist Jews and a lot of pious Jews, but Butters faith is in stories.
For the Knights, it isn't about what religion they are; it's not about faces, skin, flags, membership lists, files. "God sees hearts." It's about what they believe in.

With that context, it would make sense for Butters to where a red cross. The imagery of a knight would appeal to Butters.

Shiro professed to be a Baptist. He discusses it in Death Masks. The whole "I found out I had become a Baptist. So I tried to be a good Baptist," conversation. He considered being a Baptist... incidental (I think that was the word he used).

Later than I'd like, but I'll take it, yo.

I agree with most of it, but I disagree about first books. I think The Sorcerer's Stone is almost perfect and I think the writing is better than SF. That said, I completely agree about Butcher learning faster and I think he is now a much, much better autor than JKR.

My issues with the first books of both are that they mainly fall into the same trap. Most chapters are pretty much "I went to a place, and this thing happened. I left that place." Tons of first books fall into the same pattern. Iron Druid was a particular offender throughout the entire series, and Alex Verus would have fit it if Jacka's chapters were shorter. It's the kind of thing that comes from writing based on a rigid outline, mostly (though not really in Jim's case; it's formulaic, but I believe he wrote Storm Front pretty much as he went). Outlines are great, but I prefer it when books don't read like an outline.

Sorcerer's Stone was mostly about the wonder of uncovering a secret world, and it's got a fair bit of wish fulfillment baked into it (poor, abused Harry is saved from a devastatingly poor home life and is revealed to be not just special, but wealthy and famous, and he's a star athlete based on some kind of natural talent). It's fine for what it is, and I like it well enough, but I'm not the target audience for it.

And yeah, Bad Alias, some of the details of the supernatural creatures were retconned a bit, but the point is that magic itself functions in the exact same way from Storm Front through Skin Game. And Harry didn't even know that there were multiple Queens until Summer Knight.

The thing about Vampires is that White Court vamps don't follow the same rules. I assume that's what you're talking about. Because Red Court + Black Court can't do thresholds, and have never been depicted crossing one. So it's not "some breeds," it's "one breed," and that's because they're born human (and still apparently have trouble calling on their Hunger after crossing one). I think Harry even stipulates

In Storm Front, the only thing I recall about the Nevernever as it relates to vampires is that they wouldn't be able to rip someone's heart of their chest with a simple spell on the mortal realm, and would have to do it in the Nevernever. That rule gets twisted in Changes, but that took countless human sacrifices and a leyline, which is the kind of thing you'd notice in Chicago (and way too much effort to kill a mob enforcer). The only other thing I can remember is their "corporeal form" bit, which I took as a reference to the Red Court fleshmasks, which we see in Storm Front.

The Chauncy bit is kinda whatever.

Potential counterpoint: the lights went out in the hotel during a confrontation in which a significantly-powered Ward was thrown up. It's possibly the result of mortal magic use.

I think that if Peabody were Infected, he would have spread Nemesis to the Senior Council ASAP. He was using mind-affecting ink instead of transmitting Nemesis itself, which would be the logical way to do things, in my opinion.

Though that may be explainable by the process of Nemesis Infection itself. Jim hasn't revealed the precise method of transmission. If it requires overpowering someone and holding them down for an hour or something, then that's going to be difficult for someone like Peabody.

What we know about that:

1. It should be possible to spread Nemesis via an inorganic object. The object itself may or may not need to be sufficiently powerful on its own. The Athame could have been used for a couple of reasons that I can see: either it's necessary for the object to have a certain level of power (Athame, the Swords, relics like the Holy Grail or some other kind of artifacts), or it simply had to be powerful enough to tempt Lea into trading for it.

2. It's possible to Infect someone quickly, like they did with Cat Sith. He was off-page for about, what, five hours? Ten? Cold Days all happens within a 30ish-hour period (Harry leaves the party for Chicago sometime after midnight but before dawn, and the final confrontation on Demonreach is before Dawn on the following day. 2-3am-->1-5am, in my opinion). But the point is that, between the time Harry first talks to Lily and Nemesis is revealed and the Wild Hunt v. Outsiders Cage Match, Cat Sith is captured and Infected.

3. Those who are Infected can be made aware of their own Infection. This means that Nemesis works best when it lays low for a long time, slowly altering the Vector until they're behaving in the way Nemesis wants. When Cat Sith was confronted with his out-of-character behavior, Nemesis was forced to take direct control. I take that to indicate that he was a rushed job, because we haven't seen that behavior from other confirmed Infected (namely, Maeve).

4. There is likely some kind of cost for Nemesis to spread to too many things. This is speculation, but I think that, if Infection was a free action for them, then they wouldn't have stopped with Lea and Maeve. I think that most of Winter would've been Infected. Maeve was Infected for years, and she has the time, power, and clout necessary to go around and Infect countless other Fae, but didn't. Either that means that there is a cost to spreading itself to too many different entities, or doing so would have had undesirable results—like maybe the Infection would've been noticed and stopped sooner.

It's also noteworthy that Lily wasn't Infected, despite the fact that Maeve spent lots of time with her, and doing so would've been easy enough. Instead, Nemesis opted to manipulate her. Why not Infect the new Summer Lady? Why is manipulation a better option? Surely it would've been advantageous to have both Ladies Infected and influence both sides of the Fae, right?

I therefore infer that there is some kind of cost associated with Infection. Either Nemesis can maintain a limited number of active Infections, or there is some other kind of cost I can't conceive at the moment.

5. No mortals have been confirmed to be Infected. Some insist that mortals can't be Infected at all, but I don't see why that would be the case, and haven't seen any evidence beyond "No confirmation of Infected Mortals = Can't Be Done." Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

6. The most powerful entity that is confirmed to be Infected was, at one point, Lea (in her own words, she's second only to Mab in Winter). Mab tortured her (or, at the very least, put her through "exquisite pain") to "cure" her of the Nemesis Infection. That means that, even if it can't be fully cured, the symptoms can be treated if the host wants to change. Lea is shown to have the "mad glint" in her eye once, briefly, after her treatment by Mab. It is possible that Nemesis remains within Lea, but is currently held at bay by something (maybe even simple negative stimulus conditioning, like that "How to Stop Being a Freemason" Monty Python sketch). It's also possible that Nemesis is gone, but the effect on Lea still lingers, and she must make the occasional conscious effort to suppress it.

That is all that I can recall about Nemesis.

On topic, I think that the likeliest mortals to be Infected in the future are:

1. Senior Council members. Any of them, really.
2. Kumori, if she isn't already. Cowl, too.
3. Fix. I think he'd be a good target.
4. I don't think it will happen, but Infecting Murphy would break Harry just as badly as her death would. In fact, it might be worse, because he'd be crazy enough to hope to fix it.

Those who may already be Infected:
1. Elaine.
2. I hate to say it, but Justine.
3. Christos.

I say Justine because of the shape of her character arc. She's gone through some radical changes throughout the series. Like, really, really big ones. In fact, when she reveals that she's regained her faculties to Harry (in White Night? I can't recall), she simply states that there's no time to explain how she's recovered, and it's never revisited. And now she's having Thomas's baby, which gives her leverage over Thomas, the White Court, and Harry. I think it's possible that, during her period of disability, she was Infected, and Nemesis managed to not only help her recover faster, but increase her influence in the White Court. Can you think of another mortal who worked so closely with anyone in the upper echelons of the White Court? Certainly not for as long as she has. Lara defends her with her life, and not just because Justine is important to Thomas.

That's my WAG about it, anyway.

I think it's possible that Rashid wasn't detecting Black Magic at all, but merely saw some of the results of black magic use in Chicago. As in, he saw the possibility that Molly would be tried and executed by the Council. I think it's an important distinction, because I don't know of any way GateBro could detect Black Magic over an area as large as Chicago. I mean, he has to manually check the Sidhe at the Outer Gates for Nemesis. We don't know that he can really sense Black Magic taint without being at or near the location in question—but we do know that he can take peeks into the future.

I doubt her copy had been copy edited (edited for grammar and such) and proofread yet (for clean pagination and such).

That reminds me of some stuff I noticed in my last reading of Blood Rites. I think it might be the worst (copy) edited book of the DF. I noticed so many mistakes (for a Penguin book, at least). The funniest one was "Harry said" instead of "I said."

Copy editing + pagination is the shortest step in the process. When I did it professionally, a Peace Talks-length book would be the work of about two weeks, if I really dragged my feet. That includes generating the clean EPUB/MOBI/AZW3 files for eBook sales, laying out the document for printing, adjusting the kerning if they went with justified text (I'm a ragged-right proponent, because kerning blows—but eBooks are justified by default, so you have to do it anyway), etc. I had to learn HTML to make sure the eBooks were formatted nicely. I've read some pirated copies of Jim's books (I had already purchased the eBook iterations, but needed EPUBs with no DRM so I could copy + paste from it for some presentations on modern novels; I'd never steal from Jim). All of them had some of the worst formatting errors I'd ever seen. They looked like they were copied and pasted from PDFs.

For those who don't know, PDFs are a fixed-layout file format. No matter what screen size you're using, page 53 will always be page 53; you have to zoom in/out and scroll around to view it if you're looking at one on a phone. EPUBs are dynamic; they scale down to whatever you're reading on (a few years ago, they tried to roll out a fixed-layout EPUB, but it never took off because it's a terrible concept). But anyway, word processors tend to interpret all of the formatting in a PDF precisely. So the end of a line in a PDF will get a hard line break when you copy and paste it into Microsoft Word. That means you have all of these weird paragraphs with random breaks spread across a whole document. It's a real pain to clean that kind of thing up (there is no quick fix; you have to go through it and delete the breaks, fix the spacing, etc.)

Anyway, about 90% of the pirated books I've looked at (again, I owned them all already, it was only done for presentation purposes, hand to God) have been formatting horror shows. One of the copies for one of the Codex Alera books lacked quotation marks throughout the whole text. Some of the books had the infamous "I don't know what this character is supposed to be" blank, empty squares all over the place (some of the conversion programs and OCRs have trouble interpreting various punctuation marks if the fonts aren't Times New Roman (and some even if it is TNR)).

But anywho, when you have a Word document to start with, on the other hand, formatting everything perfectly is easy as heck. The only sticky parts are when you have images within the main document (children's books and cookbooks are annoying that way). But pure text? Pshaw. It can be done nicely in an afternoon. Unless, you know, Jim does things like manually press "Enter" twenty times to start a new page (page breaks, people. Ctrl+Enter.) Widows and orphans, adjusting the hyphenation, kerning, all that stuff can be done pretty fast.

I seem to have wandered a bit. The point is that Penguin should be done with that whole process by now, especially because (I assume and hope) they have multiple specialists working on each part. Still has to be done in stages (widows and orphans can fix themselves, justification changes when characters are added or deleted, etc.) but specialists can usually do their one task efficiently. It's been a month since Priscillie announced it, and I'd assume Penguin had it before her. Should be set by now, or close enough that it's not worth considering.

And as for copy editing mistakes: there is no such thing as a perfect document, not now, not ever. Any editor can look at any document and find things to change or mistakes to fix. The trick is to catch the ones that anyone would notice. Questionable comma placement is one thing, but mess up the tensing and everyone will say, "Gotcha!"

I caught the Blood Rites "Harry" mistake too, and rolled my eyes when I saw it. Whoever edits Terry Brooks's novels should be fired, for that matter, because all of his novels have extremely noticeable mistakes. I'm currently reading The Witcher novels (finally, I've been putting it off for years). Whoever is responsible for editing the translated text needs to learn how semicolons should be used, because they're all over the place. Not one has been correct, but they've all been wrong for different reasons.

Jim confirmed it without confirming it.

What are you going to tell us about who stole Mother Winter’s walking stick and the person who has it now? Uh, we’ll get there at some point. You should be able to figure it out, because it’s in the book. That’s stuff that I, uh, I don’t like to throw lots of new stuff in when there’s old stuff that I haven’t used yet, I’m fundamentally lazy as a writer, I like to make things connect. There’s already been a half dozen people who said, “Hey wait, it must be this!” and I’m like, yeah. But yeah, that was, uh, I’m kind of tempted to write, I keep being tempted to write the French-Indian War in the Dresden Files universe. Because it’s really interesting, there were a lot of things going on at that point in time. Except, to do that, I’ll have to learn about the French-Indian War.

Context: Ebenezer and the Merlin were both involved in the French and Indian War. So he talks about the Mother Winter's walking stick, then an event previously confirmed to involve Ebenezer as if they're related.

There's also another WoJ somewhere else where he pretty much responds so sarcastically that it's confirmation. Like, someone asks him, and he goes, "What?! Why on earth would you think that?! That's crazy!"