agatha christie wrote a parody of herself in the Hercule Poroit  serries, Ariadne Oliver. it's a comic character she inflicted on her hero.

is mac A god, maybe. is he THE God? nope.

the major difference between hogwarts and Dresden is the wands. take away a wand from a hogwarts wizard and you've got a muggle, powerless. Dresden universe wizards don't need a wand or a staff, they help but without his gear Harry is still extraordinarily dangerous. take away his wand and even dumbledore is  sitting duck

Chicago has a mystique with its dark and bloody history. Imagine Harry setting up shop in say....Dallas or Nashville.

chicago has no sense of itself. Boston has a certain pugnacious glee, new York a sense of motion and purpose, Philly a vague sense of inferiority, LA and DC sooo sure they are important while everyone else mocks them. Seattle has a sense of humor to itself but I could get NO feel for "Chicago." it's a cluster of different neighborhoods that happen to be next to each other. It's history is a serious of riots and mistakes that it absolutely refuses to learn from.

I got off the train and was struck once more by the sense that I'd never been in a major city like chicago that had so little sense of itself or it's personality. New York, Boston, Seattle all had a feel to them that was missing in Chicago, a place that was less a city than a group of neighborhood that  had clustered together on the edge of Lake Michigan.

Still there were good places to eat in the town and hopefully I could get dinner at one if warden Dresden's request didn't take too long. An expert in combat magic but a lack of formal education meant he'd asked for my help in deciphering the details behind ancient legends and texts. All from a collection of odd stones he'd found written in what t looked like middle east cuneiform but in an archaeological dig of local natives, which seemed to be laboring on a curse...If only Lord Carnarvon had called me in as soon. 

An apparently middle aged man of non-descript appearance, he's a wizard living in the north east, working as a college expert in ancient languages and cultures. He has an annoying tendency to wear somewhat anachronistic clothing, not bothering to keep up with trends his fashion sense seems to have gone on hold sometime around 1944.

Why Chicago?  did you live there? go to school there? He says he was inlfuenced by Lieber and tolkien but was it also Kolshak? (sp?)

that'll do it, thanks

remember in the story with the coven of porn star sorceresses Dresden had a crudely made silver belt buckle that gave him a massive energy boost? what happened to it?  I can see Butcher dropping it as too easy to fix little problems and he has more fun letting harry suffer, but there was no instory explaiantion was there?

my wide said she comes from 4 generations of women who don't cook. my father in law saw me as a kindred spirit. I cook well. My wife 'commits dinner"