The FAQs right off the top. The next book of the Dresden Files is I’m working on it.and I was supposed to turn it in this Christmas and if that happens on time, then I’ll reckon you’ll see sometime early next spring. So there, now you know that. Cuz everybody always asks me that like first thing. I just thought I was gonna beat you to the punch to that tonight.

Q: Are you still planning on doing a kids book with Maggie and Mouse?

A: Am I still planning on doing the young adult book with Maggie and Mouse when Maggie goes off to school? Yeah.

Q: Is there an HBO show still in the works?

A: No there is a possible show in the works. It doesn’t necessarily belong to HBO or anybody else. In my dream world, it goes to Netflix but we’ll see what happens or if it happens.

Q: When are we going to get some mermaids? And how is Nemesis spread from person to person?

A: Probably not until the big trilogy at the end because wizards don’t like to go in the ocean and they don’t do unless they’re desperate. How is Nemesis spread from person to person? ::sing song voice: I’m not going to tell you. That would make it way too easy But I will tell you that it go to Lea through the dagger.

Q: Any Cider Spires short stories?

A: No, I still have too way much world build before I can start spinning off little stories about the place. And much more to do on this book, which I’m very much looking forward to. I’m almost like Hey Dresden, c’mon get out of the way, I want to go to this new place that I haven’t seen before. And you know, Dresden is over here going “But we still have to do awesome”. yeah you’re right – we do have to do awesome. I’m so sorry about the city, but you know Just stay out of town on Midsummer and you’ll be fine.

Q: Do you work on multiple projects at once or one thing at a time?

A: I work on one thing at a time. I’m writing the short story which is Butters’ first mission as a knight. It’s kind of awesome; he’s out training with Michael and they’re doing cardio training and he pulls up and stops. Michael’s like “what’s wrong?” Butter’s’ is like “that guy”. Michael says “what guy?” Butters’ is like “the bum asleep on the bench. There’s a giant yellow exclamation point floating over his head. What? You don’t see that?”It kind of starts from there. Butters- Knight of WoW. I’ve gotta finish that up and send outlines for a couple graphic novels to Dynamite. One of those will be Harry Dresden vs the Joker, pretty much. Although in this case, he’s called Puck. Cuz Puck is an awful person – he really is, in the Dresden Files. He doesn’t run around being cool; he’s terrible. And fun. And there’s another one where we’re gonna go catch up with the all folks who went off to form their Feng Shui out in California after Blood Rites. There’s a problem and so Lara is hiring Harry to resolve her problem for her so she doesn’t lose her grip on the White Court and that’s the other graphic novel. After I get those two projects knocked off, then the rest of the year, it’s back to Peace Talks. It’s Peace Talks, Peace Talks, Peace Talks. Which is really winding up looking like a royal rumble of who would win this fight.

Q: Is Harry going to allow Bob any role in raising the new spirit baby?

A: No, Harry is going have that “Dad with shotgun” talk with Bob. Is what it amounts to. You’ll see more of that with the book. We start off early with Bonnie.

Q: In Proven Guilty, Harry is run off the road by a car and it never goes back to who ran him off the road Are you ever going to tell what happened?

A: Yeah, that’s weird right? Yeah.

Q: I heard once that you had a conspiracy theory about the show. I can’t find it anywhere. Mind telling us about it?

A: You gotta understand that I have no proof behind this. Because if you have proof, it’s not a conspiracy theory. And in fact, it makes it a worse conspiracy theory if there’s proof. What you need for a conspiracy theory is pictures and yarn and thumbtacks. That’s what you need for a conspiracy theory!

So this is my conspiracy theory. Set the wayback machine for 2007. Bonnie Hammer is the president of the Science Fiction channel Bonnie Hammer, who does not like science fiction. They put her in charge of it. I can only assume that it was corporate Siberia. I assume she made enemies and that was the result. So she’s in charge of the Science Fiction channel and she’s giving them GhostHunters and Extreme Wrestling. Which don’t get me wrong – I like wrestling. I watch it for the writing. But maybe not on the Science Fiction channel?

Meanwhile, her vice president comes along, a guy named David Howe, and he was the one who was behind bringing the SciFi channel’s Battlestar Galactica to immediate and popular acclaim. So when you’re the president of a company who works for somebody else and your subordinate comes up and does something awesome, that does not necessarily reflect well on you. And certainly not in Hollywood, where the motto is “it’s not good enough to succeed; you also have to make sure your friends fail.”

He gets behind the next project and his next project is the Dresden Files It was coming together pretty well. Just about two weeks before the show started shooting, all of a sudden all these changes got made to the internal structure of the show. I suspect it was Bonnie Hammer that was behind it, but I don’t know. That’s why it’s a conspiracy theory.

Originally the show was going to be a serial. It was going to cover the events of Storm Front and Fool Moon in the first season, and kind of interweave the plots. And the big showdown would have been extremely crazy because it would have been wizard-Loup Garou- Shadowman all at once. It would have been insane. But, two weeks before, they said we’re going to get this producer from Charmed on and he’s gonna be in charge now. And the guy from Charmed came on and said, “we’re not going to do a serial. We’re going to do episodes – nobody likes a serial.” And everybody was like, “Wait? Are you using the same word? Are you talking about breakfast cereal maybe? Because people dig serials.” We told him that we didn’t have time to re-write all these episodes. They were built to be one right after the other, which was where they get their punch from. And the Charmed guy is lke, “oh it’s not a big deal. We’ll just change the names of characters and disconnect all the episodes and do them out of order and it’ll be fine.” (At this point, Jim gives us all the eyebrow.) And that’s what happened. Plus he was the boss from Los Angeles, when they were filming in Toronto. You imagine how well that worked out.

Lots of little things would happen that would sandbag the show. For example, by the time the guy in California would write changes to a script, he’d turn them in by 9. But 9 in California is midnight in Toronto. So by the time changes came, and scripts got printed out and taken around by exhausted production assistants, it would be two in the morning.

Q: With Harry being a nerd who loves movies and sci-fi, how has he managed to go this far without making some sort of Zuul or Vinz Clortho reference to Rashid the Gatekeeper?

A: Uh, partly it’s the Gatekeeper and the Gatekeeper is really scary. Also, I haven’t gotten there yet. It hasn’t been right. I gotta feel it. I gotta feel the nerd come on or it doesn’t work. You must feel the nerd come around you…

Q: Are we going to revisit the inmates in Demonreach and see who some on those people are?

A: Those people are there to be locked up there forever and ever. The only way you would ever see who any of them were is if something horrible went wrong. So no, cuz that would be awfu!

Q: Would you write any more short stories for anthologies or with other people?

A: I actually edited a book this year. I wanted to try something new. so I tried on my editor hat and I edited a series called Shadowed Souls. Which actually has the short story of Molly on her first mission as the Winter Lady and so you get to see what her job is and what her position is within Winter Court and why it’s so important that she does what she does And it’s also her team up with Ramirez, so those shippers.. Toot Toot!

Writing with other people, not so much. I agreed to write a short story for Correia, in his Monster Hunter International universe, because I think the janitor at MHI would have a really interesting job. So I want to write that story. And there are also several of us who are putting together a story about a bad guy that goes through multiple realities, so everyone’s characters are interacting with him for a bit. Basically, each of the author’s get like ten thousand words of the story that we’re supposed to handle. So Harry Dresden will be involved with part of it and then wash his hands of it and walk away shaking his head.

Q: What is the difference between wizards and muggles in the Dresden Files?

A: First of all, you have to be born with a certain amount of talent to be able to touch magic at all. Sometimes that talent is greater and sometimes it’s lesser. But you’ve got to have one particular gene that flips the switch and says, “Yes. Weird.” Once you’ve got that, then you’ve got to be in a position where you can develop that talent and be in a position where you have the intelligence and the drive and the focus to make something of it. It’s just like any other talent, actually. Some people are born with a really great genetic setup to play basketball. That doesn’t necessarily make them Michael Jordan, because not only do they have to have the gift, but they also have to be in the situation to express it. If you were born with the awesome basketball gene spread and you were also born Inuit, probably you aren’t going to get a chance to express that. I always built magic in the Dresden Files as something was a talent like any other. You’re born with it, but that doesn’t make you a wizard without a lot of hard work as well.

Conversely, you could be born without a really awesome spread of talent and yet if you work hard enough, you can really make something of yourself. Most people can probably use a little magic. Most people could probably be dangerous in the Dresden Files world if they had enough training and worked on it for years and year and years. But there’s only a few who are really born ready to go to the NBA draft. And of those people, that’s who you see on the White Council. Those people who are born with that and who then developed it as well.

Q: How do thorn manacles work?

A: Do I explain that to you? Yeah, it won’t hurt anything. Why not? Essentially, what it does is when a wizard is drawing magic in, the thorn manacles divert it to somewhere else. Wizards have to give a little bit of energy from inside themselves, but mostly they have to pull it in from the outside. Mostly, the thorn manacles take the magic and shunt it out into the NeverNever and you don’t get to use it. The pain is the result of the energy that’s going by and going elsewhere. It’s inefficiency of transfer, if you want to put it in engineering terms. That’s really nerdy, so I won’t do that.

Q: Why did you base the Dresden Files in Chicago?

A: Because my writing teacher would not allow me to set them in Kansas City. They started off as a school project and were originally set in Kansas City. She read them and said, “You’ll sell this. I don’t know if this will be the first thing you’ll sell, but this is of professional quality and you’ll eventually sell it. But one thing: You can’t set it in Kansas City.” I asked why not. She said, “You’re already walking close enough to Laurell Hamilton’s toes that you don’t need to set this book in Missouri. So set it somewhere else.” There’s a globe in her office. On the globe, in America, there are four cities. One of them is New York City, which I don’t want to use because superheroes have that place all sewn up. And my editors lives there and would catch every city mistake I made. And sneer at me. D.C. was one of the other cities. And I didn’t want to write D.C. because then you have to write politics and you’re gonna piss off somebody. That’s how it works. LA was there and I didn’t want to use LA because it’s Los Angeles. And that left Chicago.

Q: Mac’s Ale. I’m a homebrewer and I’ve been trying to figure out what kind of beer this is. And I really need to know what you based this on.

A: Mac’s Ale is based off of my imagination and my brain. I’m not actually a beer drinker. I don’t like beer a whole lot. I”m more of a cider guy. It mostly came from my imagination and my beer drinking friends and from their descriptions.

Q: Are we going to see Mac actually do something other than what he’s done so far? Like actually pull some things off?

A: Maaaaaaaaaaybe. You’ll get to find out more about him, at any rate, Whether you’ll actually get to see him doing stuff is still a really serious question. I don’t know. I’ll figure that out as we go.

Q: How do I come up my names for people, places, things?

A: Mostly I look at the meaning of the name. I’ve got a giant book of names and their meanings and I generally try and find something that is either appropriate to the character for the name or completely inappropriate to the character for the name. One of the two.

Q: How did Harry get anywhere in Chicago in 20 minutes during Dead Beat?

A: Hey, when you’re on a T-rex, you don’t have to wait for lights!! As we all know, we clocked the T-rex at 35 miles per hour.

Q: When are we going to see dragons again?

A: Dude, I can’t possibly do a dragon thing unless it’s a whole book. So that would be book 20 or 21. Something like that. Probably 21. I think 21. That seems about right.

Q: Speaking of Molly and Ramirez, at least going into the short story you reference earlier about Molly’s first job as Winter Lady, what’s the status of their technical or non-technical virginities?

A: That’s awfully personal, don’t you think? Molly’s is still technically intact. Ramirez, we don’t really know. And I don’t think it becomes clear during the course of the story. Well, it kind of does, but you’ll have to read it.

Q: Will we ever find out who keeps letting the coins loose?

A: Kind of, yeah. But at the same time, it’s sort of necessary for them to be out in the world. They’re not designed to be kept in a vault somewhere and locked up. So it’s very very difficult for anyone to guard them, for example. Because the coins just do the One Ring thing to them until they get loose But yeah, they’ve been spread out in in all kinds of different place. And the best you can do is to pick a guy who you hope is as close to incorruptible as humanly possible and then leave him in charge.

Q: How much of Hannah Ascher’s precision magic was hers and how much was Lasciel’s?

A: Much of it was Lasciel. Hannah was basically just providing the muscle and Lasciel was providing the direction. So she was way better than she would have been otherwise without Lasciel there advising her.

Q: How much will Bonnie know?

A: You’ll have to see. The problem with Bonnie is not that she knows a lot; it’s that she doesn’t know how to apply anything. LIke she can tell you all about green and how many nanometers the wave of lenght of light that the color green is and so on, but she doesn’t understand that grass is green yet. Because she hasn’t seen it. When we first join Peace Talks, Harry comes home and Maggie and Bonnie are in the kitchen making pancakes. Bonnie has informed Maggie that she knows 317 recipes for pancakes and the ingredients that they have make 17 of them possible. And so they’re trying to make pancakes. But they don’t know how to tell when it’s time to fip the pancake over. Well, you wait until it’s golden brown. Well, what’s golden brown? It’s on the pan. It looks white from here. Harry gets to walk in and Bonnie turns to him and says, “Pancakes are inanimate!” excitedly because she just figured out that they’re inanimate objects. Bonnie has a long way to go before she’ll be anything. But she’s where Bob started.

Q: When are we going to see more of Ivy and Kincaid? Does Ivy know that Kincaid is the one who technically shot Harry?

A: We’ll see more of them next book and I won’t tell you that.

Q: Why do Justine and Murphy both smell like strawberries?

A: They use the same shampoo. They use that green Suave. And that’s why. It’s really good shampoo if you want to grow your hair long. It’s got no silicates in, so it doesn’t abrade the hair. Don’t ask me how I know that.

Q: One of the things I love about the series is when I recognize Chicago landmarks. How are you able to be so accurate with that?

A: These days I can actually afford to come to Chicago and look. So I do that to a degree. Originally, I had a couple guidebooks of Chicago and that was all I had to go on. After a couple of the books came out, I had some readers who lived here. So I could ask them. And now I have Google Maps. And more importantly, Google Street View. That’s useful to the point that I actually had a member of CPD SWAT approach me and say, “Listen, this scene that you set up in the short story ‘The Warrior,’ where you have the guy on the roof and you said specifically which lights were out in order to have the approach and so on. So that the sniper would have the best point of view. I checked that out and you were right. And I need to know who you consulted about that kind of information. Because we sort of like to keep track of people with that kind of knowledge.” And I said, “I just played Call of Duty and looked at Google Maps. And Google Street View. I’m sorry.” And the CPD SWAT guy is like, “Oh God.”

Q: Any more info on the young adult series with Maggie and Mouse?

A: No. I’ve got to have enough time to write it. I’m still trying to get caught up this year. It’ll be hopefully not before too much longer because that’ll be fun. Plus I’ve been planning on writing that one with my sister, so I would only have to do half of it. Maggie is a great character because she’s been through alot and she has a lot of social anxiety issues. She genuinely needs Mouse as a service dog next to her to help her stay cool and deal with people. So she has trouble in close spaces, in open spaces. She’s got a lot on her mind. Except when everything is totally going to hell and is on fire. At which point, she is completely normal. Because she’s Harry Dresden’s daughter

Q: Are we ever going to find out which of the Fallen said those seven words to Harry?

A: You’ve probably gotten all the answers you’re gonna get as far as that goes, as far as which Fallen said that. I mean, I’m not saying that Lasciel lied about everything but she could’ve. Or it could have been one of the others. But Lasciel was the one with the axe to grind.

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A big thanks to Jennifer McNaughton who filmed the event, and then transcribed it!