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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/books/jim-butcher-the-dresden-files.html>
"Three decades ago, Jim Butcher put pen to paper and invented a wildly popular
fictional universe. At the time, he was just trying to finish his homework.
Butcher, then a 25-year-old grad student at the University of Oklahoma, had
days earlier turned in an unfinished novel for a writing class. The book was
about a wisecracking Chicago gumshoe named Harry Dresden, a wizard whose
miserable love life was occasionally interrupted by a grisly supernatural
murder.
Butcher’s professor liked what she read. She told him to bring an outline for
“the rest of it” to their next session. “She meant the rest of the novel,”
Butcher recalled in an interview. “The next week, I rolled in with an outline
for a 20-book series.”
On sketch pads and now-obsolete WordPerfect software, he planned out ways to
put his poor hero through a gauntlet of indignities, poking his head out
occasionally to watch
Animal Planet with his son. Homemade posters in his
cramped writing alcove cheered him on. (“The only way you fail is if you quit,”
read one.)
That outline would lead to “The Dresden Files” series, which debuted with
“Storm Front” five years later, with heroes and villains from just about every
mythology — and some Butcher made up. Over the last 25 years, the series has
sold 14 million copies in the United States, according to his publisher. For
all the wizardry, the real magic in the books is the way that vampires,
werewolves and even a zombie T. Rex feel completely at home alongside mobsters,
attack helicopters and a reference to Regina George, the Queen Bee of “Mean
Girls.”"
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*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
