Jim actually answered this one already, years ago. It could be hard to find on the forum for that reason, I haven't checked. Anyway, the answer is, Ivy retains spoken words when they are intended to be a form of recorded information; that is, the oral traditions of teaching from times before writing was convenient, or spoken epics, memorized stories like fables, stuff like that. When the words being spoken are intended to be stored in the listener's memory, basically, as written words are intended to be stored on the pages of books.

I'd hazard a guess that she also gets the occasional seminar or lecture as well. (And, gack! All the awful, awful presentation slides. In addition to the greater horror that is the internet.)

Wait-a-minute.....
Ivy is *how* old? (~4, as of SF.)  And we think SF is approximately the year 2000?
When did the internet start to explode in popularity?
Circa 1996 as the year(s) of the previous Archives' demises is looking very suspicious.

To make it an Official Question:
Did the rise of the Internet play a role in Ivy's mother's craziness?

Huh.  Some of the discussion on the thread pertaining to the sample chapters from Cold Days just pinged my brain: what the heck counts as a day in the NN?  They clearly have ways of keeping track of time in the mortal world-- the transfer of the table is sufficient proof of that--but time is fluid in the NN, so what sets its passage?

The NN overlays/is tangent to the mortal world in some pretty convoluted, non-constant ways: a meter's difference in either world could connect to a point many, many kilometers distance away. In this context, what sets the position of the sun and stars (and, I suppose, Moon) in the sky of the NN? 

If the stars are somehow inconstant, is navigation in an absolute sense even possible, or is it landmark-to-landmark?


....Bleh. Not exactly plot-important, but an interesting point.

...Heh.  He's got quite the rap sheet, doesn't he?

A single quibble: why would the Council not suspect exposure to/hosting of a Denariian?  From the report, they are aware of the organizations of the Knights of the Cross and of the Order of the Blackened Denariius; why is there no speculation (or, more specifically, no warnings) regarding the potential that he has claimed a coin?

(I mean, the man made a fool of himself while attempting to speak Latin in SK, and, IIRC, went to some trouble to ensure that he could speak English in PG, but only two years later, shows fluency in two obscure languages and nobody bats an eye?* Etruscan, maybe: they know about Thomas.  But Ghoul?  I mean, who teaches Ghoul?  I don't think there's a correspondence course for it, and I'm not sure anyone would survive an immersion program.)

*Yes, I know Lash could have helped in PG.  But the Council saw only that Harry insisted upon speaking English, possibly enlisting the aid of the Summer Knight and Lady to do so.

Dusting off a very old set of questions:  who signs the Accords for a group or coalition like the Red Court or the White Council?  If an individual signs on behalf of the whole, what happens when that individual dies or is otherwise no longer associated with that group? 

Is such a signature binding in the same way as swearing on one's power is binding*, or is it merely the certainty that Mab (or whoever is enforcing that particular version of the Accords) will ensure that Accords breakers die that keeps the peace?

*Related to this, is this part of what Peabody was doing with requiring all those forms and signatures prior to TC?  (I mean, on top of the whole mind-control ink.)

Other questions that might be answered, if asked:
Are the specific duties of each Sidhe Queen within her Court clearly defined or separated?  If so, how are they divided?

Will Harry learn to communicate with Mouse as clearly as he was able to while transformed into a hound?  Can Mouse and Mister communicate that clearly?

Does the name of each Denariian have significance w/r/t the form or powers it has when it manifests?  (e.g. Lasciel shares a root with lascivious, Ursiel was bear-like....but I have yet to find a good root for e.g. Urumviel or Anduriel) 

If the "-iel" is as important as implied in GS (I believe it's the "of God" part....) why have the Denariians not sought to get mortals to rename them?  (And, oh dear, what did Harry do by truncating/naming Lasciel's shadow "Lash"?)

Do the Venators know about the Archive?  If they do, is she a target?

Is the information that Ivy has about the Denariians largely the kind that she 'literally cannot let out of her head' or is it the kind that she chooses not to release as a sort of non-aggression pact?

When and how did Lord Raith acquire his protection?

Have we been Kenobie'd ("From a certain point of view.....") about the identity of any characters?  (I very deliberately would refrain from asking "Who?"-- that would certainly not be answered.)


Just for fun, some questions that are probably not important:

Will we see more of Harry's parents?
What happened in Istanbul that Eb and Kincaid are still feuding about?
How much of the battle at CI (and its immediate aftermath) does Maggie remember?

When Eb caused the eruption of Krakatoa (or the New Madrid quake), did he supply all the power released in those events, or did he simply cause stored power to be released? 

What do other wizards do for hot water?  For employment/monetary support?
Who mentored/trained Carlos?  Is he/she still alive?
If Odin is still kicking around and active, where are the Jotuns?
How far above (or below) a magic circle does the barrier extend?  Is it a column?  A dome? 

Last, for discussion, there was a WoJ in response to a post by kmosiman (linked here: http://www.jimbutcheronline.com/bb/index.php/topic,11471.msg494046.html#msg494046)

   

Quote

Demonreach may not be friendly to humans but he is not violent to others. All the animals on the Island are welcome and make their homes there. While he may have a dark nature, nothing on the Island is corrupt or foul.

Two of these three sentences are precisely, absolutely correct.  One of them is lethally half-right.

We've had relatively little new info on Demonreach since that was posted, but I'd like to formulate a question that would help nail down the little logic problem he gave us.

Jim Butcher, KC signing, Parts 6 and 7 (video courtesy LogicMouseLives)

[unknown question]

….Dresden probably have a good time, wind up using their powers for a bunch of things that nobody ever really thought about before.  I’ve only seen that because I’ve been watching the Avengers on Netflix, the animated series of the Avengers on Netflix. It’s actually pretty cool.  I’ve been figuring out what everybody’s actual superpower is, on the show.  For example, the Wasp, where she can shrink down to fly and shoot stingers at people and so on, her actual superpower is not shrinking, flying and shooting the yellow [unintelligible] people, her actual superpower is “I am just annoying enough that you cannot ignore me no matter how mighty you are, I am just annoying enough that you can’t not pay attention to me, that’s my job. That’s my superpower in the story.”

You’ve put harry Dresden through so much, and he’s suffered through so much, after Changes, where can you possibly go from there?

[Jim lets out a maniacal/evil giggle]  You haven’t read the new one yet, have you? Get to the end of the new one, that’ll give you an idea. And we’ll see what happens after this. I just finally go the first sentence of the next book written, which is always the hardest part, after that, everything’s easy. By the time I got to the first sentence of Book 14, it was like, “Ah, that encapsulates the whole deal!”, and we’ll have a good time playing that out.

Do you figure out the end of the story before you start writing the beginning?

When I’m smart. When I’m smart, I do exactly that.  When I’m not smart, I sort of wonder what’s going to happen.  Normally, I know what the end is going to be, I usually know a big, flashy, high special effects budget sort of scene that’s going to be in the middle, I know about half-a-dozen one-liners that I want to use, and small bit scenes that I want to use, and then, that’s enough for me to get started.  I did not do as much pre-planning on Ghost Story, probably because I wanted it to have more of a nebulous feel to it, I wanted the story to have something that seemed kind of misty around the edges than a normal Dresden Files story would be because that was sort of the setting that we were in, and partly because I was an idiot, and just didn’t get it done, and maybe next time I’ll remember to shut up and listen to my writing teacher and write my outline before I start my story.  You would think I would get that by now.

Did Dresden lose domain over Demonreach when he died?

Have you gotten to the end of the book?  Ok. You read the book, I’ve already answered that one.

Does Harry…ok, Marvel or DC?

Marvel, and here’s why: I’ve never been a Superman fan. I’ve never liked that guy. Now, that said, I’ve been more impressed with how they’ve handled Supes lately, because it seems like they finally understand, “Wait a minute, not everybody likes Captain Perfect flying around over there!”  Did you ever see the Marvel-DC crossover of the Superman-Spiderman team up? Superman and Spiderman teamed up together, which makes sense because Peter Parker is a photographer and Clark Kent’s a reporter.  And the bad guys blew up some kind of computer, and Spiderman’s like, “Oh, man, they blew up the computer, we’re going to have to do all kids of legwork to try to figure out…” and Superman, before Spiderman is done with his sentence, reassembles the computer that’s been blasted into tiny pieces, puts it back together, and then starts accessing the information on it, and Spiderman actually looks at the computer, and looks at Superman, and then asks, “Why am I here?” and that’s actually written into the book, and I admire the Spiderman writers who were handling that. That was really interesting, that they were able to pick up on that at the time. Actually, DC sent me an email and said, “Hey, would you like to a guest stint on Batman or Superman, because we would love to have you.” And I said, “That would be fantastic, but I don’t know the story well enough for the people who love them.”  And I could show up and just sort of write a thing, but that wouldn’t be the same thing as someone who loves the story showing up to play with it, so I wouldn’t do that. Spiderman, though, yeah. This one more day stuff, no. We can do better than that for Spiderman.

How many books do you plan on writing?

The Dresden Files books’ll be about twenty-ish of the case books, like we’ve had so far, it could be a little bit more, it could be a little bit less, depending on whether my kid goes to graduate school, and then we’ll have a big, old apocalyptic trilogy to cap it all off.   Because who doesn’t love apocalyptic trilogies?! It’s my sisters’ fault.  The first movie I remember them taking me to see was Star Wars, and yeah. Blame them, not me.

Are there more short stories coming?

Yes, there are. Right now, I’m about two-thirds of the way done with the second of the Bigfoot trilogy of stories, which I’m having fun writing.  Bigfoot’s the client. He comes to Harry, he’s got some problems with his kid, he can’t exactly walk into town and help, so Dresden gets hired and is on the job.  The first one’s called B is for Bigfoot, and the kid’s in grade school. The next one is I Was a Teenage Bigfoot, and the kid’s in high school, and then Bigfoot On Campus, when he’s in college, so the three of those, and several of the short stories, and the one that didn’t make it into the anthology, Curses, will be in there, and any others that I write, because I still owe some short stories. I’ve got to start writing these things, man, they’re so hard. Writing a short story, you have to do everything in the short story that you’d do in a novel, except you have to do it in this much space.  It’s like trying to have a knife fight in a phone booth.

Have you decided in a title for the next book?

Book 14 is going to be titled Cold Days.  Which will make more sense after you’ve written Book 13.

Where does Curses fit in the timeline?

I’ll have to find it.  I think it’s between Dead Beat and Proven Guilty.   I’ll have to check my notes to be sure though.  I can never keep this stuff straight. I’ll go check on Wikipedia and…seriously! You people keep much better track of this stuff than I possibly could, because by the time you read it, you just have that one version of the book to be read, whereas to me, I’ve got eleven slightly different versions that strongly resemble the one version, that are all the drafts that I write, and then I’ve got all the versions that could have been, that I decided not to use for one reason or another, in my head, and it gets hard to keep them straight, after a while. We’re thirteen books in, I’ve got a couple of hundred slightly different Dresden Files in my head, it’s hard to keep mentally highlighting which one is the actual canon.  Which is why I go to Wikipedia.  For crying out loud, if I didn’t have that I don’t know what I’d do. How many children do Michael and Charity have again? Look it up. Oh, right, ok. What color were the different panels of Harry’s car, again?

PART 7

At what point did you realize that Charity had had her own experience with the magical world, and had been a practitioner in the past, and at what point did I know that Molly was going to be Harry’s apprentice? 

The answer to that is: when they appeared. I knew that Charity just couldn’t stand Dresden, and I had to have a good reason for her to really not stand him and really, the best reason that anyone could possibly have for not liking somebody is because they remind them of themselves, something they hate in themselves. So I thought that was just perfect. And then I gave her all kinds of good, rational reasons on top of that to not like him. “You get my husband arrested, and in trouble, and beat up!” Ok, well, good point. As far as Molly goes, I knew she was going to be Harry’s apprentice by the end of the first book she showed up in. No, not the end of that one. By the end of Death Masks.  By the time she was sitting there with the Knight of the Cross, prank-calling the grocery stores with him, just to play around with his head, you know, that was like, “She’s not going to get away from being Dresden’s apprentice at this point.”

Are you a Game of Thrones fan?

I like the TV show.  Because I like Tyrion effing Lannister. He’s a great character. But as far as the actual story goes, I’m upset with it, because for a fantasy novel, it has so little fantasy.  I can’t get involved in it, it’s all this politics and backstabbing and people, it’s like “I’ve got people like this that are running my country right now. [unintelligible]”  You get to the end of the first season of the HBO series, and it’s like, we’ve had one girl who didn’t burn her hands when she should have, and a zombie.  And that was it.  Give me a higher budget.  I need things getting to explode when you do something to them.  At least True Blood level of supernatural coolness.

Can you explain the significance of the dagger that Lea gets and is it the same dagger that Harry uses on Lloyd in Changes?
I’ll answer the second part of that first, which is: no, it was not the same dagger. He uses one of Medea’s knives in Changes.  And that dagger [transcriber note: I think the dagger he’s referring to here is Lea’s dagger, not the one that killed Slate—see the rest of his answer below, which implies that Lea’s dagger is younger.  Medea is ancient Greek and thus predates Morgan Le  Fay.]   That dagger--did this even go into the books?  Maybe not--originally belonged to Morgan Le Fay, like, the original Morgan Le Fay, that was her personal athame, her ritual knife. Which is a big deal.  As far as the significance of what it did, I’m still being coy about that.  It’s going to come into play later on.  Suffice to say that an older and wickeder dagger was needed by Mab for such things as she used in the last book.

Maggie LeFay, Morgan LeFay, is that a generational name, are they related? 

No, the “LeFay” is something that gets added as an honorific in the wizarding community, it’s one of those kind of mixed names that you give somebody that is sort of a name that she’s earned, so it’s a bit of status, and it also means you’re insane. Which everybody thought Harry’s mom was, being a big-time explorer of Ways and hanging out with Faeries and generally kind of doing things that most wizards considered to be pretty crazily, stupidly dangerous. When you’re somebody who can live for three or four hundred years as long as nothing goes wrong, you tend to be a little conservative, really, you get a lot of benefit from that. And certainly, in Maggie’s case, she was bucking the trend, and we’ll probably get into a little bit more of why she was doing that later in the books.

What happened in Minnesota?  You’ve got something…Harry went up to Minnesota because someone saw something in a lake. WHAT HAPPENED?! [transcriber note: HEAR, HEAR!]

Uh, I’ll get there.  That’ll probably be one of the short stories.   That was when I didn’t really plan for all those mentions of between book things, and things that had gone before, and so on. I had originally planned those out so that I could write short stores if I wanted, I had actually thought about doing that as a graphic novel, but they wanted something a little bit different, and to go after the Fool Moon graphic novels, so I write them all new story after them. Which is actually cool enough that I should have made it a novella or a book or something myself, I almost feel bad I’m giving this one to the graphic novel, but that’s ok. It’ll be a good story.

At the end of Dead Bead, Harry threatens Mavra, says that he understands how to use necromancy against the Black Court, and then the last thing that Harry says to Lash is that they need to talk about Outsiders and how they relate to the Black Court.  Are the Black Court more than just a court of vampires?  Do they have more metaphysical significance?

Long question, what it amounts to is do the Black Court of vampires have more significance that just being corpse-y vampires?  Are they tied in somehow with the over story of what’s going on.  And the answer to that is: I’m a really lazy writer. And if I could possibly use something more than once, or use it for more than one purpose, I will.  And I’ll leave it there.

Is Thomas going to be wielding Amoracchius?

I’m not sure, actually, where those are going to fall out.  There are several different places where I could put them. And all of them would be fun, and I’m just trying to figure out which ones are going to be the most fun.

You’ve mentioned several times that marriages are used to seal pacts and alliances, will Harry be forced into a marriage, and will it be with Lara [Raith]?

What makes you think that Harry hasn’t been forced into a marriage already?  I mean, the whole thing with Mab, come on. Read more book. Read the most recent one, and see if that doesn’t give you more answers. Certainly, he’s in it deep with Mab at the moment, because there’ll be none of this, “He’s going to get out of this because he was technically dead”—no, it’s too easy.

You mentioned you’re working on another fantasy/sci-fi project, can you tell us anything about it?

I’m having way too much fun with it. It is influenced by the Black Company novels by Glenn Cook, also excellent fantasy, if you’ve never read them.   It’s called the Fortress trilogy and I think it’s going to be the prequel trilogy to my epicepicfantasyepic, but it’s so epic, it’s a prequel trilogy. That’s always been my dream, to write a huge, huge swords-and-horses fantasy, and we’ll start off by writing a prequel trilogy for a warm-up and we’ll see what happens.

Here's Part 4 of the KC release party Q&A (as it seemed like parts 1-3 and 5 were already taken/done.)

Great and powerful wizards are stabled(? Stapled? Stable?), but his statement is that, generally speaking, by the time they get to the end, what they actually accomplish in terms of the big finale of the series is fairly small and is my plan something like that for Dresden? 

Yes and no. The problem with most of the wizrds that do that is simply that they weren’t the central character of the series.  Gandalf is not the central character of the series [Lord of the Rings], that was Sam. Not Frodo, Frodo was not a central character, Frodo was a junkie who was along for the ride. Sam was the man.  Similarly, with classical wizards, with characters like Merlin, Arthur’s the central character, in that story, for the most part. Oh, there’ve been Merlin stories [unintelligible].  But am I going to all the way to the end of this to have Dresden be the one who pushes the button that says, “Destroy the universe, Y/N”, it’s not going to be  anywhere near that simple.  Hopefully, if I do it right, which I don’t know, because I’ve never written a 20-book epic fantasy before, I’ll set it up to where if it had been anybody else, it would have ended in disaster.  But because it’s Dresden, we all get to keep getting along, is kind of what I’m trying to come up with.  If you’re doing your job as a writer, by the time you get to the end of your story, if any other individual other than that character is making things happen, if somebody else had been there is all would have ended horribly wrong, if you’re doing your job right. Hopefully I’ll be able to do the same thing, but like I said, it’s big, and I’ve never written a story like that before.

What things would I go back to the earlier novels to change to tell things now?

Oh. I don’t know.  I would probably scrap the first two books completely and re-write from the ground up everything about it, which would probably be a disaster. I’ve learned that going back and rewriting a novel doesn’t work anywhere near as well as you think it should.  So at this point, I’m happy to accept the flaws and imperfections from early on, because that just means, “Oh, wait a minute, now I have a good direction to go to keep things moving the way I want to go.  I probably would never have figured out that the whole thing about [wizards] recovering from injury has a lot to do with them living a long time, because they have far groovier telemeres than any of us have, that their DNA copier works better than ours does. I probably wouldn’t have figured that out if somebody hadn’t pointed out, “Hey! I’ve been keeping track of the folks, and physical therapists, and I just wanted to let you know that in the past five years, Dresden’s abrogated on about seven and half years of therapy, and you need to be aware that this injury would have required this kind of surgery, and this kind of recovery and another surgery to correct that and some more therapy and by the time we get to that, he’s already been busted up by the next book, which would have done this and this and that.”  Ok, ok, so obviously, wizards are cooler than that.  I figured out how. And that’s why, and that’s a good reason, and that’s why they live a long time, too. Awesome. This is working out great.  As long as I can stay on my mental toes, I guess we’ll be all right.

Have any of my characters surprised me or done something I wasn’t expecting them to do or developed in a way I didn’t want them to go. 

Those people all work for me.   Occasionally they are harassable and I have to make sure to give them good motivations to do things that I knew they would do.  And occasionally they just kind of come out cooler than I thought they would be.  Butters, which was going to be my off-the-wall, one-shot, I-wanted-an-ME-with-a-sense-of-humor-cause-I-always-liked-them character.  I’ve seen [unintelligible], I’ve seen Prophecy and those characters are fun.  Which, if you haven’t seen those movies in a while, go back, because those MEs really are hilarious.  But after I wrote it, I was like, “This guy is just so zany, I’ve got to use him again somewhere,” because I hadn’t really planned Butters out at all, just said, “oh, I need an ME.” Or “I need an ME with a sense of humor”, so I built this guy real quick in 20 minutes while I was watching the end of probably a Star Wars movie, and said, “Ok, let’s go” and wrote him.  But he came out so neat, I said “I gotta use him again, I gotta find a good place to have this guy,” and figured “What better sidekick for a wizard going up against a gang of necromancers who animate the dead than a medical examiner whose job it is to deal with them all the time.  The catch here is that he’s absolutely no real help in any professional sense, I always like to plan things out for Dresden like that—I guive him a sidekick that’s great company, thematically appropriate, yet not actually offer any true assistance.  But that’s just kind of how he rolls.

If I could take any actor to play Harry and Thomas, who would I pick?

Oh man. I’d probably pick a mid-1970’s Harrison ford for Harry because I’m happy to pick actors from other times that I can’t possibly get. It’s only a matter of time before technology makes that possible, when we can actually have 1970’s Carrie Fisher starring across from 1955 John Wayne. It will happen, one day. But if I had to pick someone who’s actually working now, I’d probably pick Captain Tightpants for Harry, because he’s got a great action [unintelligible] and he was declined in that role.  [Transcriber note for posterity: “Captain Tightpants” is a reference to Nathan Fillion in his role as Mal Reynolds in Firefly and Serenity].  As far as Thomas, that’s a harder call.  Thomas in my head is the older brother from Lost Boys. Jason what’s-his-name. Yeah. Jason Patrick. He doesn’t look that good anymore, but I might also go with the guy who played Bryce in the first couple of seasons of Chuck, was actually very close to Thomas in my head, except his hair is too short. But other than that he looked pretty close.  And now everyone’s going, “Huh, who?” and now it’s like, “Wow, I am now an obscure reference to this room.”

Audience member: The White Collar guy.

Jim: Is he in that?  I’m not a White Collar fan.

Audience member: Matt Bomer.

Jim: Ok, Matt Bomer. Now we know.

Did good Bob make it out?  Is bad Bob still around? 

Is spoilers for the end of this book, which a lot of people here haven’t got to read yet.  And even if it wasn’t totally inappropriate for me to go completely spoiler-happy on this audience, [singsong] I’m not gonna tell you.  That’s my job as a professional storyteller. I give you some resolution on some things, and leave other questions still hanging, and that way you buy the next book and they don’t take my house away! 

What took the extra time to finish this book [Ghost Story]
This one was really hard to write because Dresden spends a whole big chunk of time not really able to communicate with very many people.  Which means I can’t write a whole bunch of snappy dialogue, which is the easiest, funnest part of my job as a writer. It was a lot of description and so on, and that’s grindingly slow for me.  That was part of it, was getting Dresden out of that quandary. Part of it was actually figuring out, “Oh, wait a minute, the actual plot that I thought was happening is not exactly the plot that is happening.”  And that only came together in the last month or so. A lot of is was that this book is longer than most of the other ones. In fact, it’s longer than all of the previous Dresden Files books. And also, life happens.  I got my kid who [unintelligible] that all of a sudden I wasn’t a full-time dad anymore.  There was a rebalancing issue to be dealt with. So there were a bunch of different things, and finally I did get it done and I called up my editor and said, “This just isn’t going to happen” and my editor said, “Jim, you’re a creative person. You people are squirrely.”…..

You are correct.

Is that from a WoJ?