Volume 7, Issue 4 – April, 2004
Jim Butcher: “Longshot” Makes Good
Pity the poor citizen living in Harry Dresden’s Windy City. Vampires, of varying persuasions and degrees of lethality, inhabit trendy clubs and posh nightspots. Werewolves vie with poodles and rottweilers for leg-lifting room at local fire hydrants. Ghosts and ghouls and things that go bump in the night jostle for elbow space on the El and on every street corner. Where can beset Chicagoans turn for surcease from all these horrors?
The Yellow Pages, of course. That’s where they’ll find Harry Dresden, Chicago’s only listed working wizard, and hero extraordinaire of Jim Butcher’s enormously popular series, the Dresden Files. Harry, a noir-ish cross between Sam Spade and Gandalf the Grey, is the wise-cracking creation (and sometimes alter-ego) of author Jim Butcher. In addition to the Dresden Files, Butcher is working on a second series, Codex Alera (tentatively set for publication by Ace in late 2004) and somehow trying to find the time to level his Everquest ranger. Alas, poor ranger….
Crescent Blues: In Death Masks one of the characters calls Harry a man of many shades of gray. What is it about a character that is neither all white nor all black that appeals to you?
Jim Butcher: I tried to write Harry not as a shining hero or as a villain, but as somebody you might actually meet or know — or at least as somebody that you can understand why he makes the decisions he makes. So if he winds up making a decision that [makes it look like he’s doing] something really bad there’s usually something behind it that is motivating him. Harry is basically a decent guy but he doesn’t always make the right choices. He tries.
Like where Harry makes a decision that “good” characters wouldn’t, and the “good” characters get upset about it.
[Decisions] that are a little bit over the top or too violent. Yeah, in Death Masks Harry is faced with a choice in a situation where there is a villain who is the bleakest, blackest kind of villain you can have: despicable. And Harry knows if they let him go the guy’s going to turn around and stab him in the back and its not going to be just Harry who’s in danger but his two friends, the Knights of the Cross, who are with him.
Harry knows that the Knights of the Cross are too good to put this guy down. They won’t harm him, in fact, they kind of go a step beyond that — in terms of, they feel like they are there to protect even that guy’s freedom to choose between being a good guy or a bad guy.
Harry decides that there’s no way he can leave the guy where the guy might come back to hurt his friends. And in good conscience, he can’t do that, but at the same time, in good conscience, he can’t kill the guy either, and he understands why his friends don’t want to do it. But he’s willing to try and find somewhere in the middle, somewhere where there is some gray area. So he attacks the guy pretty viciously and cripples him to the point to where he won’t be a threat. “
Harry doesn’t kill him but he does remove him from the equation of the story. And in doing that he feels it’s the only thing he can do it to protect his friends as well as himself, but he’s really thinking more of them than of himself. He doesn’t like doing it but he does it, because he thinks it’s necessary. He just has to hope that his friends will forgive him for it later. He doesn’t really care much what the villain thinks because that guy’s a jerk.
Harry’s world is a blend of traditional fairytales and biblical nightmares. Where did you come up with it?
Much of it from Scooby Doo. When I was a kid there were all kinds of things that I would watch on TV that would be interesting or intriguing to me or scary, like Damian and The Omen. When I was young, they were just the scariest thing ever. [Those movies] gave me nightmares.
Watching something like Scooby Doo was something that I thought was fun as a kid. You know, you get to the end and, ha ha ha, it’s not actually a hideous bog monster, its Old Man Witherspoon. “And I’d have gotten away with it too if it weren’t for you meddling kids.”
But in the Dresden world it isn’t Old Man Witherspoon, it is the hideous bog monster, and that very real monster is something that Harry has to face and deal with. I think in one of the early books I call science one of the most successful religions of the 20th century because everybody believes that there’s a rational explanation for everything. In Dresden’s world there isn’t one. Sometimes the thing underneath the mask might be even worse than you thought it was. And it’s not usually an old man, and there are nasty evil things that are still out there and they’re just as dangerous even if people don’t want to believe that they’re real.
Do you have a specific destination for Harry? Do you know where he’s going?
Very much so. I set out and was sure I knew where he was going in the beginning and while my perceptions of his world and the kind of things that he faces have changed, Harry is pretty much on course. If I get to do what I want, I’ll get to do about twenty case books. And then at the end I’ll do a big old apocalyptic trilogy because big old apocalyptic trilogies are fun.
Will Harry survive?
He will. You know, I don’t see how he could possibly get through this whole thing alive. But then again there’s all these heroes getting killed and coming back now so I may have to come up with something better than that…
How far ahead have you plotted the Dresden Files? Have you plotted the entire arc or are you taking it book by book?
I’ve got a good idea where I want the overall story to go. I’ve got an over-story for the entire series. A lot of it is tied into Harry’s origins — his parents and the kind of lives they led early on. I keep dropping small hints and stuff about what’s been going on in the past. Which should become more important as the series goes on.
I’ve got sort of stepping stones — where I want the character to be at any given point in the story arc. So far I’m doing all right. So far he’s on track. The thing I don’t have planned out is his romance. His love life is something that is more organic. I don’t really have anything blocked out for that. I like playing with it, I like having that as something that I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen and as a result I think I’ve got some good stuff to work with.
I understand that the Dresden Files have been optioned.
The books were optioned to an experienced Hollywood producer [Morgan Gendel]. He’s won a Hugo award and spent a long time working as a regular writer for Law and Order. He has produced some other things more recently, and it looks like he is in position to go for a first big production. I wish him all the best, and I hope he’ll be able to do it.t.
What’s your dream cast for the Dresden Files?
My dream cast…. For Harry, Nick Brendan and James Marsters are both people I could see in my mind. That’s Xander and Spike from Buffy, of course.
I’ve also thought of Vince Ventresca who played Darien Fawkes on The Invisible Man, because poor Darien could never catch a break. He [Darien] was always totally outclassed. He wouldn’t just get beaten up; he’d get humiliated. And every opening teaser section before they played the intro would always end with him saying “Oh crap.” He [Ventresca] would just be perfect for Dresden from that angle.
And then I’ve also thought, before I thought of that, maybe someone like Will Smith could do Dresden, because Will Smith can be insouciant and people outclass him so well. He’d save the world a lot in every sequel, but yeah, if it was a dream cast he might be there.
Speaking of James Marsters, how did you, Marsters and the Dresden Files audio-books (Storm Front and Fool Moon) manage to come together?
For me it was real easy. The folks at Buzzy Multimedia called me up and said, “Hey, we’d like to do an audio.” And I thought that was a great idea. And they said, “And we’d like to get James Marsters to do the reading for it.” And I thought that was an even greater idea. And I said, “Yes, that would be wonderful.”
So we signed up to do it and they went out and got James, and it worked out. I thought he did a great job reading the books. I’ve been nothing but happy. Other than actually writing the books, my only contribution has been going “Yeah!” on the other end of the phone. They’ve really done a great job. I’ve been very happy.
Marsters has narrated the first two books in the Dresden Files. Will he do any more?
He’s talked about doing more work, [but] there’s not a contract set up right now. But we’re looking forward to the future and we’re hoping to be able to do some more.
When you are writing do you have a specific vision of who your characters are? We talked about casting, do you see Will Smith, or James Marsters, or whoever, as you’re writing Harry?
No, actually much of the time when I thinking about it in my head, I see it as an anime cartoon. Harry’s kind of exaggerated and overdrawn, and he looks more like Peter Parker, probably.
I wonder why….
As I said, I like Spiderman. Spiderman is very cool.
Do you ever write about any people that you know?
Not so far. Occasionally, I’ll write in characters that I really loved. When I was a kid, my sister took me to see The Karate Kid with Pat Morita. I loved that movie. It really sparked my interest in martial arts. Not that Daniel learnt karate and beat people up, but how he was taught and the kind of thought that went behind it. I admire that so much. So, when I write a character and I’ve got a character that’s calling for an elderly Japanese samurai type character and I gotta borrow from that, because I can’t deny that, that was part of my past that was great fun. So I got to borrow from that when I was writing that character in Death Masks.
Have you done any martial arts or sword fighting?
I’ve done some fencing — epee and saber. Then I got involved in a number of live role-playing groups that have various amounts of swordplay and derring-do involved in them.
What kind of character do you role-play?
The guy I played this last weekend was a loud-mouthed troublemaker who gets frustrated when things are really complicated and who gets to do much kicking down of doors and hacking up of people. The game was this wonderfully intricate game based around Dante’s Inferno and all these different demon lords that were plotting against one another. I was like: “Fine, let’s just start killing everybody and we’ll figure out who the real powerful one is when we can’t kill him.” And people said, “We can’t do that, that’s not a good rule.”
I like to play rakish loudmouths who get into a lot of trouble. I’ve played these types of characters and actually get to fence people on like balance beams and stuff like that. That’s really the kind of character I tend to get into. I can limp off and not feel too bad about it ’til later.
Sounds a lot like Harry.
Yeah, there’s some of that that leaks through.
Where do you see yourself in five years?
Oh my gosh. Well, my Everquest ranger should be at least 65th level by then.
How much does your gaming influence your writing?
I think I’ve done a lot of computer gaming online, face to face gaming with every gaming system that you can think of. And one of the things [playing the game master] forces you to do is come up with a world that is consistent and makes sense.
If you can go to your players and say, “Okay, this world is consistent and makes sense,” they can approach you and say, “Well, if your world is consistent, then this should happen.” I have to be flexible enough to go: “All right, you’re right, that should happen. Let’s figure out what goes from there.”
I think that’s done a lot for me when it comes to the books. When I’m writing, I want that world to be consistent, and I want the readers to trust me the way my players will. Then they can say “If this world is consistent then this should be like that.”
“You’re right, it should.”
You know, folks have come up to me and said “Won’t this affect this and won’t this detail you’ve mentioned here interact with that one over there.” And I have to go, “Hmmm, yes. It probably would.” There have been many times people have come up and asked those kind of questions that made me give them answers that were like, “Oooh, that’s really neat! I could put that in a book.”
Since we’re talking about games, the Dresden Files: Playstation2 or online?
Playstation2, where he could just have a blasting rod in one hand and a staff in the other and blow up everything. That would be fun, that’s the kind of game I would enjoy, ’cause I wouldn’t have to balance anything, or worry about characters or ask: Is this a black, white or a gray decision? Is Harry taking a step towards the dark side, and oh my gosh, shouldn’t he have known not to put his hand on that coin? If he could just blow things up, that would be fun.
You write about the supernatural. Have you ever experienced the supernatural yourself?
I’ve known people who have had things happen that they told me about and I trust them enough that I just can’t blow them off. And I’ve had a couple of things happen to me that are odd. But which I can’t really go, “Ah, that was really something strange.” The closest thing I think I have is when my son was very young. He was two years old, and I could only understand about half of what he was saying. And he was taking a bath. There wasn’t enough water in the tub to worry about, and he’d been taking baths on his own for awhile, so I had no problem being in the next room. So, he was in there splashing in the bath, and I was in the next room talking to my family, and I hear him in there talking.
After a while I came in and said: “Hey there, what’s going on?”
He said, “I’m talking to Grandpa.”
“Grandpa” had died a couple of years before.
I said, “Grandpa, huh?”
He said, “Uh huh.”
“What’s Grandpa doing?”
“Grandpa’s going fishing and going to college. He said he didn’t get to go to college.”
And it was like “Aaaargh!” It was very strange, because one of the things my father always wanted to do was go to Alaska on a fishing trip but he had put it off year after year and finally didn’t get to.
Another of the things he’d said that he’d always regretted was that he’d never gone to college, and it got in his way — that he could have done much better in life if he’d had a college degree. So that, coming from my son who was not old enough to have known that about my dad and was certainly not savvy enough to put it all together — being at that kind of just-babble-back-things-he’d-heard age — that was quite odd.
Yet, at the same time, it was okay. Yeah my dad can hang around and make sure the kid’s all right in the bathtub, no problem. That’s fine by me. That’s a positive experience of something that was just too wild.
However, there is one that was really, really odd. I can’t honestly say that it was something weird or supernatural. One night though, I’m in Norman, Oklahoma, driving home. I was probably coming home from a gaming store, or something frivolous like that. And it’s dark, not quite dark yet, with the sky just a little bit light, but there’s lots of shadow, and the street lights haven’t quite all come on. That weird kind of in-between twilight light, where you can’t see things very well.
I’m driving down the street, and I see this woman stumble out of the bushes, and she’s wearing shorts and a tank top, which were appropriate to the season. It was late summer and blistering hot. And she’s covered in blood. Down one side, all the way down one leg, one of her shoes was soaked with it and she had a hand up to one side of her chest and she was reaching out towards the cars as they went by. And I remember going by and being so totally freaked out by seeing it. On the next street, not twenty yards later, I slammed on the brake and turned in a driveway, turned around and went back. There was no one there, there were no cars stopping, there was no fuss, there was no anything.
And I was like, okay, well, either something has either just dragged her back into the bushes or that was something really weird. So I just kind of started whistling the theme from Kolchak, the Nightstalker, and moved on. But that was something that really creeped me out for a long time. You see people when they’re acting in a slasher movie, and they’re covered with blood, and they’re acting, and you think that’s what fear looks like. When you see someone who’s really afraid, who’s really in pain, it’s not pretty. It’s not dramatic like it is on the screen. It’s really horrifying. I was genuinely scared. I was sure that was real but when I went back, nothing there.
Did you ever drive that street again?
All the time. I went back all the time and never had anything else like that happen. I would get freaked out occasionally. I mean, it was right by my home. It was not a couple of hundred yards from my house.
Nothing was ever reported?
No, nothing ever came up. In a little town like Norman, where nothing ever happened except bikes being stolen from the university, or something like that. Well, except once in a while someone would get their head cut off. I mean, there was something like a decapitated head found with no body. You know, such a friendly little town except for that occasional psychopath with that decapitated head thing. Gosh, and we moved away from there. I can’t believe it.
Think of all that material you had for Harry.
Oh it’s true, it’s true. That was my weird thing. That was my creepy one, and then there was the good one with my kid, which I really put a lot more faith in. Because, maybe, I was just had by someone playing a joke cause it was a college town.
You have a second series coming out. What’s it called?
It’s titled the Codex Alera, the first book is called The Furies of Calderon. The codex is a book, and Alera is the name of the realm where everyone lives. Calderon is this big rich valley out in the middle of nowhere in Alera. It’s where the characters that are involved in the first book live.
What’s the book about?
The story is about a boy who gets asked to do a favor by a girl and against his better judgment agrees, and as a result, winds up nearly wrecking his country. There is a large plot going on in a large and politically complex realm, and the events of it are centered in this valley out in the middle of nowhere that’s on the border between the realm proper and a nation of barbarians who live next door.
As a result of the hero agreeing to the girl’s request, he finds himself embroiled in the midst of this plot which could result in a great number of deaths and a great deal of hardship for the peoples of the land. The story is about how he gets involved in it and how the other folks who are involved, the folks who are really right up in the teeth of the gears, so to speak, of what’s going on, how those folks deal with what’s at hand and it all affects how the situation comes out.
Could you tell us something about this series’ hero?
My hero lives in a world where your social status is based on how well you can use the Furies, and Fury crafting. And my new hero is a freak who can’t use any Fury crafting at all. He has utterly no ability to use any of them whatsoever.
How is the magic in Alera different from the magic in Harry Dresden’s world?
[Alera] has a technology that’s based around magic. The magic that they have is a symbiotic relationship with spirits that inhabit the elements of the land. They call them Furies. Then all the technology that they used is based around the use of these Furies. Your station in the world is, by and large, determined by how well you relate to the Furies. How well you can use the Furies or use them in Fury crafting.
So, if you’re a dirt crafter, you have some kind of empathy with the spirits of the earth, and you can perform feats of superhuman strength. You have an empathy with animals, and you can do other things that relate to an empathy with the earth.
If you’re an air crafter, you can affect the winds, you can foretell the weather, and if you’re skilled enough, you can even fly. Flame crafters use flames for, well, the obviously pyrotechnic military burning things up stuff, as well as for emotional, inspirational, leadership type abilities. Water crafters are skilled at healing other people through the use of Furies and a certain sense of human empathy.
Metal crafters tend to make the best swordsmen, who can ignore tremendous pain and have incredible force of will to get done what they want to get done and to wield a blade. And wood crafters have an empathy with wood spirits of the land. They make able archers and they’re able to see and to know things that are around them and to pass through the wilderness unseen.
To a large degree the society is built up from what is essentially a Roman culture that then became based on technology. Their noble classes arose [based] on how well they could use Furies.
You have the First Lord of the Realm who is in charge of everything. He’s the one who can wield the most powers — he can call up volcanoes or crush you with tornadoes whatever he needs to do. He’s quite mighty. Then, as you go down the sociological tree, you got people who just use the Furies for normal stuff like cooking and telling the water furies to come out of the spigot and stuff like that
How many books do you foresee for this series?
I’ve got a contract for three. If I get to do everything I want to do I’ll get five books, possibly six.
Who will be the publisher?
This is with Ace.
When did you first start writing?
Probably when I was in fourth or fifth grade. I was always a voracious reader and I had a long battle of wills with my fourth grade teacher where she kept taking my books away. I’d be reading and she’d come and take the book and put it in the office and I didn’t get it back until the end of the semester or the year or something like that. So eventually, I started writing because they couldn’t take it away if I was writing and maybe it would look like I was working or something. I wound up doing that as sort of something else to do besides reading. I got bored easily.
It went off and on like that until my senior year of high school. This next will tell how cool I am. My senior year of high school I was cool enough to be skipping class, but I was such a nerd that I was skipping class to go to the library. I was in the library when Margaret Weis, who also grew up in Independence, Missouri, came in to speak to students. And so I just kind of sat in on it and she talked about being an author.
Of course, I had read all the DragonLance books, and I thought she was really neat, and I thought I was really lucky to happen to be in there, and I thought: “Gee, maybe I could be a writing type. Maybe I could be a writer one of these days.” Off I went to college and eventually decided, yeah, that’s what I want to do. I want to be a writer.
What was your first sale?
My first sale was the first book of the Dresden Files. I sold three books at once, Storm Front, Fool Moon and Grave Peril.
That was great.
It was fortunate. There were a lot of factors that came together, not the least of which was that I had them all finished. Said the editor, “Oh, they’re finished. I don’t have to wait for any.”
Oh, okay, that’s a good idea.
So you didn’t live up to your Internet nickname.
What, “Longshot?” Oh, I don’t know — the actual statistics for people who are trying to become novelists are really formidable. I read somewhere — and these statistics are all from my writing teacher, so they’re seven or eight years old already (and they might be older than that) — that publishers get something like 100,000 novels every year, and of those, they only accept about three from new novelists.
Of the books that weren’t accepted, nine out of ten didn’t really clear a profit, and that nine out of ten writers weren’t able to make a living actually doing writing. Since my goal was to go out and be a professional novelist, we wound up calculating my odds to be one out of 33,000. As a result, when I got on the Internet my nickname was “Longshot” whenever we had to have an Internet alias (which was much more prevalent in the early ‘Nineties than today). That’s still my address now.
Who inspires you?
I have to credit, in general, my dad and then after that, my family. My father was not a war hero. He was not really anyone who had gone out and conquered worlds but he was the sort of guy who would show up and if your world was shaking he’d settle it down again. He was just a damn decent man. I admire him very much to this day. It was his faith. He was very pleased that I was trying to become a writer. I still miss him very much.
Other than that, my wife is very inspiring. She’s inspiring — and not just from the nagging. My son, as well. My son inspires me to new heights of affection and frustration. And occasionally rage. He’s been a great growing experience.
What writers have inspired you?
Writers I have really loved are Laurel K. Hamilton, the first several Anita Blake books. Loved them to death. They were some of the books that really made me want to write in the genre. Similarly I have loved lots of Joss Whedon’s work that I’ve seen.
In straight fantasy I like David Eddings, I like [J.R.R.] Tolkien, and Glen Cook’s Black Company books are very good. I read through [Robert] Jordan and the early Jordan books. I just loved them, but I just wasn’t able to sustain learning all the names as I went along. I finally picked up a Jordan book and I started counting characters that I didn’t know their names — in the prologue — and I got up to about 78 characters that I’d forgotten what their whole deal was.
At the time I was actually studying for a history test, and my history text was much shorter than the Jordan book. I had to go, “Well, okay, I’m going to have to wait until the series is finished.”
I also like George R. R. Martin, who writes like pouring molten gold down someone’s throat. And I like Spiderman.
Okay I like Spiderman a lot. I’m a big Spiderman fan. I’ve loved Spiderman from the time I was a teenager. For about six years I bought every title Marvel put out except Transformers and G.I Joe. And collected them, but Spiderman was always my major favorite superhero of ever. When the movie came out I was so happy, because it was like a geeky old friend made good.
You’ve got a pretty large Internet presence. How has the Internet influenced you with your writing? Or has it?
Oh, absolutely it has. It’s hard to quantify how it has. When you get on the ‘Net you get so many perspectives. Not only if you’re in a discussion group about somebody else’s work, but getting perspectives from folks on my own work.
It’s bewildering at times how someone can look at what I’ve written and see something so different than what I thought I was writing. Just by virtue of the fact they have a different point of view or a different set of life experiences, they interpret one small thing much differently than I might have when I was writing it. And it changes meanings for them later on.
I try and listen to people when they send me an email on the ‘Net about my books. I try and listen to them because I’m not writing the books strictly for me. There’s an audience out there, and I know that, and I want people to read [my books] and to have a good time. I like hearing back from folks about what they liked, what they hated, and what was just confusing. And I try and do what I can to accommodate the audience. It’s been great, because people can just call me up and say “I’m furious about this!” Or, “I’m desolate about that.” Or, “I love this.”
How do you keep track of all your characters and the continuity of your plots?
Well, I draw up a big half circle and then I put in the plot elements I want to happen along the way. And then I try and take each little section and say, “Well, what are some of the kind of emotional developments that might be going on with the character as I go forward?”
Some things I can see from planning way ahead of time, and some things I don’t see until I’m actually at the keyboard writing things. What I try and do is make sure that the events that happen in each book are discrete to themselves.
I want people to be able to pick up a book and read it and get it. And not have to go, “I don’t understand half of what’s going on.” I want the reader to be able to pick up any of the novels and pretty much understand what’s going on. Aha! This characters an ally, this character is kind of shady at this point, this character is an enemy. I can see that, and that’s all I need to understand to go forward in the story and have a good time.
Do your Internet fans help you track the details?
They do. They help me. A lot of times they pick up small details and things before the book will get out to the general public. I’ve got some beta readers and they will say: “Hey! It wasn’t winter during this last book, it was early autumn.” Or, “No, it wasn’t his right arm he got shot in, it was his left.” “You got the colors on the blue needle wrong.” “The door was green and the book was red, not the other way around.”
So they help me out with that in tracking the small stuff. The large stuff I try to keep a good rein on myself, but they help me out with the small details. They are invaluable.
How many cons have you attended as a guest?
DragonCon 2003 [was] the fourth. I’ve many, many, many, more cons under my belt as an attendee than as a guest. Many multiple times more. Being the guest is way more flattering. It really is. It’s much worse for my ego.
Fortunately, I have family and friends and my dear wife who can help me deal. They follow me around going, “Remember, Jim, you too are mortal.”
It’s really very nice. I get to hang out and talk to people. I make jokes and they laugh. That is so gratifying. I make jokes and people laugh — I enjoy that more than anything.
Don’t your friends laugh?
They do but it’s more that laugh of: “We’ll get you later.”
[Shannon Butcher: They laugh at him, rather than with him.]
Well, yeah, they do that too. At home, there’s more stuff like things getting knocked down and lots of falling over. I do a lot of sputtering in my humor at home.
No man is a hero to his valet.
(laughing): Something like that.
You’ve had some rather unusual jobs in your development as a writer.
Well there are some jobs that you just can’t be very proud of. I was actually a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman for a while, and I’m not proud of that. You know, I thought they were great vacuum cleaners, but even when I sold one, I wasn’t proud.
We were one of those companies where they would call people up and say, “You’ve won either a car or a European vacation or a new grill! All you have to do is let us come talk about vacuum cleaners.” And the grill would be so small, you couldn’t have cooked a hamburger on it. One of these little tiny things that maybe you could put a couple of briquettes in.
Then you would try to sell them a vacuum. The company had all these tests that were designed to make people who were compulsively cleanly just freak out and buy the vacuum out of desperation. So I had to stop that one.
Also, when I was a teenager, I was a wrangler at a summer ranch. I would ride along with the campers and make sure they didn’t get killed.
I almost got killled myself once trying to save a camper from getting killed. But fortunately I had a friend there who helped me out. The poor camper’s horse panicked, and she had one foot through the stirrup and was bouncing around wildly, and she couldn’t possibly stay on the horse as she’d never ridden one before. So I went riding after her.
Now I was very small and wiry when I was younger. I got a growth spurt late, but up until then I was just this short little person with this shock of hair. And I went riding after her and caught up to her and was hanging on to her, and she was slowly dragging me down. Finally, one of my buddies rode up and caught the horse from the other side and stopped the horse. And I got into trouble because the camper fell off the horse into some cactus.
But that led to another job where I was doing stunt riding with a rodeo company. They were a production company called Rodeo Kids, and we did stunt riding and drill riding and exhibition riding. I was doing stuff like bouncing off horses, and I would like hop off and do a cartwheel and hang on to a bit of the saddle and come flying back on.
We did competition racing, where we did pick-up racing. We’d have three or four people in a line. Your partners would charge you with horses, and you’d swing up behind them. Then you’d have to race around and there’d be one person eliminated every time.
They liked me for that, ’cause I wasn’t good at it. But it was interesting. I remember once, at Kemper Arena in Kansas City, I was with my partner, who was a girl who was bigger and stronger than me. I got pulled up onto the horse and went too far. And I was falling over this way and my nose was like right up against the plexiglass. I was like, “Aaaaaargh!” And everybody was going “Whooo!” But the girl was a vastly good rider and had a fast horse, so I survived.
But another time we were doing the same race, and I was falling, and I knew I was going to be killed, so I grabbed at whatever I could. And I grabbed the girl’s shirt. She was wearing a western button-up shirt and I ripped her shirt off in front of 15,000 visiting African students and businessmen. Which was popular, but not, of course, with her. She didn’t forgive me for the longest time, but she was a decent person and let me live. Eventually she even quit knocking me down
Some of this stuff sounds like it was training for your new series.
Um, well yeah. I got strep throat when I was in first grade. I was like eight years old and I was in bed for three days and my parents got me the boxed set of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. And after that it was hobbit, hobbit, dwarf, dwarf, Gandalf, wizards, rangers — and nobody else knew a thing about it.
Eventually because of my love of fantasy and epic fantasy, I got into horses. In epic fantasy you always have a horse. So I fell in love with horses and I wound up getting involved in horses because of that. And then later on, because I love fantasy so much, I got involved in martial arts and into fencing and into doing all sorts of other ridiculous things.
Walking on tightropes, how did that happen?
That happened on a bet between a fencing buddy and me. A guy who was actually a very, very good fencer was trying to teach me. I was getting a crash course one summer in learning how to defend myself. And one of the things we did was to learn walking on tightropes.
We worked on walking on tightropes until we were actually walking on slack ropes which is much harder. At one point, as part of a game, when we were going across the ropes course, I looked at one of those ropes and said, “I bet I can walk that.”
Somebody said, “No, you can’t.”
And I said, “Oh, sure I can.”
This is the same sort of thing that had me falling off my fence, hurting my wrist, and slamming my head on the ground a couple of weeks ago. Kind of the same attitude. At that point I was young enough to get away with it. So I got to hop up on the rope and walk a twenty-foot tightrope. Just for fun. With people who were in game production panicking, because they were sure I was going to fall and brain myself and sue them horribly.
Did you ever think of doing Renaissance fairs? You certainly seem to have most of the skills.
Actually, I tried out for a Renn Faire, but didn’t make it. I eventually acquired the skills, but it took a really long time for them to actually congeal into one place. By that time I enjoyed going to the Renn Faire just for fun.
I think, also, at one of the early Renn Faires I went to, they were doing a jousting demonstration, and I saw a guy take a lance that went right through his armor and right out his back.
He comes flying off the horse, and he’s lying there on the ground. I’m sitting there looking and there’s blood on the lance and over everything and then all the court ladies come out and spread their skirts in front of him, smiling. And I’m going: “I’m going to throw up.”
Okay, I can draw the line at lancing. I might have been fool enough to actually go riding into that at one time, but now I’m like, “Hmmm. Maybe not.”
Is there anything else you’d like to talk about?
You don’t want to ask a question that open ended do you?
(smiling evilly): We do.
Oh my gosh.
Piers Anthony gave us nearly six pages. Go for it.
Really? Wow. Piers Anthony was one of the guys I read. He’s one of the guys my son has picked up and has really gotten my son interested in reading fantasy. So bless you, Piers Anthony, for the early Xanth books, I love ’em. I don’t know.
I’m really enjoying getting out and meeting people. It’s somewhat startling. People come up and they’re so friendly and nice, and I’ve never met them before and they think I’m cool. Which is weird, cause like I said, I was cool enough to skip class, but too much of a geek to be anywhere else but the library.
Click here to learn more about Jim Butcher.
Click here to read Teri Smith’s review of Grave Peril.
Teri Smith
Raising hell for fifty years from Alaska to the Azores and all points in between, Teri Smith (nee Dohmen) was an Air Force brat who never stopped traveling. She was also a mother, a grandmother (of ten!), a help desk wizard, a financial assistant, acquisitions editor for Samhain Publishing and, most importantly, the Queen Nag of the Known Universe. A multi-published short story writer, her first novel, With Nine You Get Vanyr, written with Jean Marie Ward, was published in 2007. Contrary to common belief, she never stopped living.