Dresden Files Reread - Storm Front Chapter 15

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I hate almost everything about this chapter. 

The cop that found Dresden sitting naked on the curb had been sent to collect him to take a look at the scene of Linda Randall's murder. She was killed the same way as Tommy Tom and Jennifer Stanton, although I notice that her heart wasn't torn out as forcefully - it was a foot away, on the bed, not splattered on the ceiling. This could be because of all the other magic Victor Sells did on the same night, or because no on involved in the casting had any particular beef with Linda, they just needed her out of the way. 

Dresden gets a minute to reflect on how sad it is that he and Linda never had a chance at a relationship, that they might have really understood each other. I agree, and this moment, prompted by a couple of pizza boxes in the kitchen trash, is basically the only good part of the chapter. (Although for me, it was the half-burned candles. That's how she made a space, a rental, where she probably couldn't paint or hang pictures, something that was hers. This was Linda's Small, Quiet Room.) 

Murphy has pretty much figured out that Harry knew Linda, and Harry does not want to talk to her about it. Even though Murphy's position is more correct (he should talk to her, and withholding information will make it harder for her to do her job), I honestly have more sympathy for Dresden. Murphy has repeatedly disincentivized open communication, including in this chapter, when she reacts to Dresden saying 'I think they're using the storms' with 'why didn't you tell me sooner' rather than like 'oh, good job, that's information I can use'. This is a classic case of Do Not Punish The Behavior You Want To See, and if there's a good reason for it, we never find out. Dresden, on the other hand, is absolutely being irrationally twitchy, but he's coming from a place of having spent his entire adult life being unfairly suspected by the White Council, including in these murders. (I mean, not that unfairly, but it feels unfair to Dresden, and it represents a monumental failure to recognize that he might have grown or changed at all since he was 16). So of course, he thinks Murphy will do the same thing. He expects to be treated as a suspect like, all the time, and Murphy isn't exactly going out of her way to allay those fears. She already threatened to put him in protective custody for admitting to investigating on his own, and now she's also prepared to consider him a suspect if he won't tell her how Linda got his business card. Dresden claims to be having a psychic premonition, so he can tell her what he knows without falling into either side of the catch-22 she's created, and of course she's angry about that too. 

On the other hand, Dresden also wants to keep secrets because he thinks that will protect Murphy from the murderer, and the Council, and even if that weren't patronizing as hell it would still pretty much be bullshit. In Dead Beat, Dresden tells Butters that pretty much anyone can make a magic circle, so he could teach Murphy how to do that, and it would almost certainly keep her safe, especially now that they know the time windows in which there's an actual risk (so she wouldn't have to be in a circle literally all the time, which would make it kind of hard to continue the investigation). I would also be interested to know where Dresden got this idea that the White Council will kill people for knowing that they exist. W never see any evidence that this is a real thing. 

The other interesting bit in this chapter is that we get out first mention of Marcone's role in the death of the Becketts' daughter. Apparently they sued him for wrongful death, and his lawyers blocked the case, but then he offered them money and they refused it, which is weird. Wrongful death isn't a criminal charge - money is all they would have gotten anyway. If Marcone wanted to avoid an admission of wrongdoing, he could have tried to settle out of court, without engaging in legal shenanigans. My best guess, actually, is that that's basically what did happen, but the Becketts refused because they wanted him to have to formally admit fault, so Marcone's lawyers shut the whole thing down, and now Murphy is presenting a skewed version of events ("He avoided the case, but then offered them blood money") because Crime Lord. 

I don't know, everyone is just being awful here, and I don't think Linda would have wanted that. Hopefully, the next chapter will be less upsetting. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things. 

Several Small Updates

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Normally, I try to stick logistical updates at the end of the other posts, but I somehow ended up having like four of these at once, so they're getting their own little post. 

1. Once we have a confirmed release date for the Wheel of Time TV show, I'm going to start a chapter-by-chapter series like I'm doing right now for Dresden Files. The emphasis is going to be a little different - Wheel of Time is a complete series, and its handful of unanswered questions are likely to remain so. Thus, rather than searching out clues to the ongoing mysteries of the plot, we will, with the full benefit of the hindsight, be looking at the social, economic, cultural, and ecological landscape of the world itself, and the technical execution of the series's moral arguments and immensely complicated character arcs. And the food. I'm gonna get really detailed about the food. 

2. Until we have a release date, I'm going to try to increase the frequency of the Dresden Files posts to twice a week, Wednesday and Saturday. There are a lot of books in the series, and they're all at least 30 chapters, running to upwards of 50, so posting more than once a week is kind of necessary to finishing in any reasonable timeframe. 

3. The experiments with timed fiction writing sprints are now underway, so I should have results to report in about a month. I'm doing one set of tests with random - but known - durations between 5 and 30 minutes, and another using a random/secret timer app, because apparently such a thing does exist, to see if not knowing the exact time actually helps. Before I found it, I was intending to use the wait time between rounds in the Pokemon TCG online "on demand" tournaments, so the unknown-time set are still officially "tournament trials" in my notes, even though they no longer have anything to do with tournaments. 

4. Sometime in the next week or so, this blog is going to start having ads. I'll try to keep them unobtrusive, but I'd like to get a little extra monetization going, and I don't expect anyone's Patreon budget is gonna increase very soon. I will at some point set a threshold over on the Patreon goals past which I can take them back down. Also, if you see any ads here for Bad Things, like particularly scammy vanity presses and the like, please let me know. I don't know the exact process for doing something about that sort of thing, but I do know that there is one. 

The next Dresden Files post will be tomorrow/the day after tomorrow depending on whether you're reading this now (functionally still Monday night) or Tuesday morning. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things. 

Dresden Files Reread - Storm Front Chapter 14

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We immediately pick back up with Susan trying very hard to have sex with Harry, something which would definitely get them both killed, since the magic circle in which they're taking shelter is only about 3 feet across. Falling down, or lying down, would break the circle and let the toad demon either hit them with acid or attack more directly. This is definitely not a love potion, it's a lust potion. And I don't just mean in the sense that a potion probably can't create "genuine" love or whatever. Love absolutely has a metaphysical dimension, and while in the context of The Dresden Files there is no compelling established reason that a potion should not be able to affect is, it is generally accepted in fantasy that this is Something Magic Cannot Do, so fine, let's assume that's the case here. Love is also a biochemical process like any other emotional or relational state, and there's no early reason a potion shouldn't be able to replicate that. (In Fool Moon we see a potion that can complexly affect the emotions of people who didn't even drink it, just by proximity). And inappropriately trying to have sex with someone while a literal demon is watching you and trying to figure out how to kill you and the object of your affections is giving you an unambiguous 'no', is not generally characteristic of that state. The first thing could be understandable, oxytocin is a hell of a drug, and one of the big things is does is create a sense of safety, so it's not unreasonable to think that magically ramping that up, or simulating its effects, could interfere with a person's ability to assess danger, and by extension whether it is an appropriate time to relax and indulge ones urges. But this does not account for her utter disregard for Dresden's consent here. There are emotional states that can contribute to that, but love is not any of them, although it absolutely can influence how, for example, aggression or entitlement manifest in behavior. 

I see five reasonable possibilities for what went wrong here. 

1. Bob was deliberately fucking with Dresden, saying it was a "love potion" while knowing full well that it was not. 
2. Du to a combination of bad romance novels and working for at least 3 different evil wizards, Bob's sense of what love is supposed to look like is wildly skewed. (Textual source of "at least 3". In Proven Guilty, Bob says of Little Chicago, that "none of the evil geniuses I've worked for could have done this". "None", not "neither". This would not necessarily have been significant, but in the previous book, Bob identifies his two most recent previous owners as Justin DuMorne and Heinrich Kemmler, both of whom could very reasonably be described as "evil geniuses", although I that that label applies somewhat better to Kemmler than two DuMorne. If those two were the only evil wizards for whom Bob had worked, it would have been both natural and...tidy to say "neither". The only reason to say 'none' is if he had worked for more than two evil geniuses). 
3. Bob was doing his best with the recipe, but magic responds to the personality and intent of the caster, and Harry, who hasn't had a bilaterally loving relationship with another human since he was 16, and is at this point in the series still pretty sketch, may not be emotionally capable of creating an actual love potion. This would echo some things from elsewhere in the series, like Molly's anger at Nelson contaminating the fear spell she uses on him and Rosie, the impossibility of folding up sunshine in a handkerchief when you're not actually happy, and Dresden's assertion that he's "bad about" projecting his own thoughts and feeling when trying to do object reading. 
4. The ingredient substitutions created a hornier, sleazier potion than would otherwise have occurred. We don't know what the romance novel page said, but we know the ones Bob likes include things like women's dresses getting ripped off, which doesn't bode well for the consent level. And I don't know to what extent potions retain the physical and chemical properties of their ingredients, but if the answer "at all" we're also dealing with at least 10 fluid ounces of tequila, minus whatever cooked off while it was on the burner. 
5. Bob was fine, Harry was fine, the potion was, in and of itself, fine, but Susan is already sort of horrible, already doesn't respect Dresden's consent or autonomy, and already views her potential relationship with him almost exclusively through the lens of its being an opportunity for her to have an exciting adventure and get a good story of it. ("Have you ever thought that you'd like to die while making love? I've thought that many times", an actual thing she says with her real talky parts, barely has anything to do with Dresden as a fellow participant, much less a person). The carelessness and entitlement were already there; the potion just reacted badly with them. 

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Whatever went wrong, the situation is drastically untenable, and Dresden asks Bob to throw him the
bottle with the escape potion. Bob, however, has decided to be a pain in the butt. I sort of don't understand why, given that the acid spitting toad demon seems pretty likely to just keep wreaking havoc and quite possibly dissolve the skull which is his only refuge against the dawn, but as we've discussed, Harry in the early books is sketchy and horny, and I guess the opportunity to ogle co-eds is worth maybe dying for. He's not getting off his incorporeal ass and helping unless Harry gives him a 24 hour pass. 

This also suggests that while Bob needs permission from the owner of the skull to leave it, and parameters can be placed on that permission (24 hours, or he can't leave the lab, or whatever), and while Bob generally has to obey the orders of whomever he's currently bound to, he cannot actually be ordered to leave the skill. This is a very reasonable failsafe against the current owner ding something like ordering him to leave the skull while outside during daylight, and thereby destroying him. And that in turn, is consistent with what Luccio says in Small Favor about his intended function being very similar to that of the Archive, albeit on a smaller scale. Bob may not be quite as apocalypse-proof as the Archive, but he is by design a very durable little depository of magical knowledge. (He survived the destruction of at least two previous owner's labs). Both the existence of those safety features and the way Luccio talks about Bob also imply that he was a purpose-made thing. We know he's a spirit of intellect, and we know spirits of intellect can be created by accident, when mortal have brain sex with spiritual entities. That's how you get a spirit of intellect. Which means that Bob (like Harry?!) was conceived for a specific purpose. Sometime circa the founding of the White Council, either a human decided to get brain-pregnant and then places these "rules" on Bob either before or immediately after he was "born", or a spiritual entity of some kind, a ghost, the shadow of a fallen angel, a demon (maybe), or gods only know what else, decided to have brain sex with a moral for this purpose, in which case they may have been able to build those parameters in at conception. This would be a really clever application of bloodline magic, especially if the initiative were on the part of a human practitioner. Bob is better able to look after himself, harder to destroy, and far longer lasting than an enchanted object, and his continued existence feels less like a consent violation, and is less subject to awkward clashes of personality, than generational magic like the Archive or the curse on Harley MacFinn. One wonders if he might have been an early draft of the Archive, or even an attempt by an ancient Archive to replace her own function so she can stop. If I have my timeline straight, which I very well might not, at the time Bob was created, Archives were still routinely suffering mental health issues. Alternatively, he may have been an attempt by someone like Nicodemus to create a resource akin to the Archive, but able to be kept under the control of the side of evil. In which context, it seems conceivable that his kidnapping of the Archive (again, in Small Favor, which is also the first book in which Bonea exists, even if neither Dresden nor the reader knows it yet) may have been a second attempt at the same idea. Revisiting old schemes centuries later is way is classic Nicodemus, so. I will reexamine this later, when I'm looking at the relevant sections of Small Favor. 

Eventually, Harry agrees to the 24 hour pass, and Bob throws him the bottle with the escape potion. Dresden tells Susan to split it with him, saying that he thinks he can "cover [them] both in the focus department". Given that what you need to focus on to use the potion is "being away from here" (per Dresden's instructions to Susan in the previous chapter), this serves to underscore the he does not want Susan to be trying to have sex with him. He wants to be Away From Here, and that include's Susan's amorous advances. If he kind of wanted to stay and see where this went, toad demons notwithstanding, he wouldn't have the clarity of purpose necessary to get them both out of there in one piece. If the first-person description of becoming the wind is anything to go by, this is not a straightforward bit of magic, and the risks of distractions or internal conflict about which way to go when temporarily transformed from a solid state to a fluid should be as apparent as they are unpleasant. 

But they make it, out of the apartment and into the pouring rain. This leaves me with so many questions about how potions in this setting actually work. A properly made potion can do things the caster could not otherwise accomplish. Whatever it does to turn you into the wind, you can apparently still pass through an active circle and keep the effect going. Same goes for running water; even when you are in a gaseous form, with all the surface area that implies, heavy rain, which can disrupt most evocations if you're standing in it, and complicate the hell out of thaumaturgy. Literally. What. Are. Potions?

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Of course, "outside" doesn't mean "safe". Dresden plans to get to a flooded street a few blocks away, on
the other side of which they should be safe from the demon because running water, but they're slowed down by Susan's recovering from the unpleasant effects of mixing potions. She's not hitting on him anymore, but now she's throwing up. Before the demon can get to them, though, a spooky, shadowy figure appears and starts telling Dresden how doomed he is. It is, of course, Victor Sells, although Dresden doesn't know that yet, but he does make it clear that the whole demon attack thing is his doing.  We don't see anyone else use this specific type sending anywhere else in the series. There are a few kind of similar workings, like the communication stones Harry and Ebenezer use in Changes, and the communion spell between Harry and Elaine. It can't possibly be a question of the Third Law, because literally every other version of long-range magical communication we see, including the mass telepathy spell that the freaking Merlin uses in Turn Coat, skirts closer to that line than this. My best guess is that it's actually just really hard, and that in addition to using the storms, which most wizards wouldn't risk, Victor may actually have some natural talent for long-distance magic. Of course, it's unlikely to matter unless one of the Sells kids resurfaces. 

Dresden delivers a sort of magical slap through the sending, which startles and upsets Victor enough that he cuts the villain monologue short and calls his demon to continue the attack. Dresden catches part of its name, but not enough to seize control of it. Lacking other survivable options, he uses the storm himself, calling lighting down through his own body and channeling it back out at the demon, which kills it pretty good, or at least as good as one can kill something for which a physical body is a temporary convenience. And so of course that's the part Warden Morgan saw. At this point, I'm kind of wondering what exactly Morgan's job even is. He's the White Council's official executioner, and he was apprenticed to Luccio, who at least as of Dead Beat is the Captain of the Wardens (I don't know whether she already had the job as of Storm Front). That would lead one to expect that he's kind of a big deal, but his primary responsibility, apparently since Dresden left Ebenezer's farm, so for roughly the past 7 years, is just hanging out in Chicago following Harry around. Is this a specialized high risk assignment, because Scary Warlock Dresden (or because Starborn)? Is it a punishment for challenging or annoying someone higher up on the Council? Is the relative safety and tedium of mostly watching Harry not get paid to sit in his office and read bad paperbacks supposed to be some kind of light duty assignment while he recovers from...something? He doesn't seem to have any close supervision, which could really be supporting evidence for either a position of particular trust or a deliberately dead-end assignment. 

Regardless of how he ended up with this job, he makes some noises about suspecting Dresden of summoning the toad demon, but mostly he's there to let Dresden know that he's asked the Council to convene the day after tomorrow, to hold a hearing on whether or not Dresden is behind the murders. He's fairly certain that they will decide he is, and expresses a truly distressing level of enthusiasm for the possibility of getting to chop Harry's head off. Harry agrees about the likely outcome of the hearing, although not about how much fun his decapitation will be. Morgan stalks off into the rain, to be almost immediately replaced by the fourth, and least threatening, intrusion of the night - the cops. It's okay though. Susan is sure this will make a great story for the paper. 

Dresden Files Reread - Storm Front Chapter 13

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Dresden wakes up in the middle of a thunderstorm, and finally begins to suspect that the killed could be
using the storms, although he's skeptical, since the precise use of that kind of power is apparently pretty difficult. We also get a really detailed description of what the storm feels like to Dresden's magical senses, which is just cool. 

Dresden still hasn't remembered the Susan was supposed to come pick him up for their date, so he's rather caught off guard when she shows up at 8:30. He's also expecting Linda to arrive at 9. I actually went back and checked, and Linda was supposed to get there at 8. If Dresden had remembered this, he might have realized something was wrong, but instead he worries about how "catty" the confrontation is likely to be if she gets there while Susan is waiting for him to get out of the shower. Apparently it doesn't occur to him that Linda is supposed to be giving him information about the murders, not having sex with him (however likely it is that she would have opted to do both), and if he just let that conversation be on the record, all would probably be forgiven. (I mean, it also doesn't occur to him that a reasonable person would accept 'sorry, I made this appointment when I was semiconscious from a traumatic brain injury. Susan is preemptively jealous at the mere possibility that Dresden is expecting someone else to come over, because this relationship is Just The Worst). 

Then a toad demon shows up, and distracts the hell out of everyone. This is actually one of the only times in the series that we encounter a demon as-such. Technically, the White Court vampires contain demons, and the Red Court are demons, but that sort of takes a backseat to the fact that they're, y'know, vampires. It's not clear whether the skinwalker in Turn Coat or the Ick in Changes are demons in the conventional sense. The skinwalker seems to be more closely comparable to the Fallen, despite its being corporeal, and judging by the Ick's likely source material, it seems likely that it's actually a semidivine being in the same general category as Mouse. Outsiders are sometimes called demons, but they're their whole own thing - demons come from the NeverNever, and Outsiders come from somewhere else, wholly outside our reality. The only other times we meet demons are Chauncey in...Grave Peril?, Nicodemus's horrible cat things in Death Masks, the flying monkeys in Blood Rites and the eusocial things in the gray suits that Binder uses in Turn Coat and Skin Game. 

The fight is really, really detailed, with practically every bullet and step accounted for, although we don't know exactly when during the conflict Dresden loses his towel. Describing the chunk the toad demon dissolves out of the couch as "heart sized" is a nice touch. Dresden recently spent a bunch of hours doing research that must have included getting real familiar with the dimensions of the human heart, so of course that's where his head goes. In general, though, this combat tells us more about the author than the characters. The painstaking level of detail is typical of a first-time author, and if I didn't already know Jim Butcher played tapletop role-playing games, this would pretty much tell me, because of how easy it actually is to follow, and especially to keep track of everyone's position relative to each other and tactically important things like the couch, the front door, and the trapdoor down to the lab. 

Then Susan drinks the love potion rather than the escape potion, because of course she does - if this had been any more heavily foreshadowed, it would have just been a notification. What's interesting is that the level of foreshadowing also means that this, one of the stupidest things in the book, does not involve anyone acting carelessly or making bad decisions. Dresden labeled the bottles clearly, in an effort to avoid specifically this. Susan couldn't see the labels, because the lab doesn't have electric lights, and she has neither magic with which to light the candles nor the knowledge of the (cluttered, disorganized) lab's layout necessary to locate matches, and the candles themselves, in almost total darkness. I suppose one could blame Bob for insisting Dresden make the love potion in the first place, but there's no reasonable way he could have seen this coming. Dresden almost never allows other people in the lab. (Which is also why it's not unreasonable that it's a total mess and the matches aren't anywhere obvious). 

The chapter ends with Dresden and Susan trying to squish into a magic circle, as the love potion beings to take effect...

Apparently at some point I did two chapters in one post, because I could have sworn the last one was Chapter 11 and this is Chapter 13. I will go back and add the double chapter to the appropriate post title so there won't be any confusion. I'm hoping we're actually back on schedule now, and we should have another Dresden reread post on Saturday and then keep ticking along normally from there, but I try not to make promises I'm not sure I can keep. Until next time - be gay, do crimes, and real All The Things. 

Some Actual Insights For Once (NaNo Follow-Up)

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This year fell somewhere between the qualified success of 2018 and the unmitigated disaster of 2019. Actually, now that I'm doing the math, it's almost exactly between them. I hit about 75% of my 2018 goal (48 out of 50 pages), and about 25% of 2019 (13 out of 50). This year, I managed 20 out of 40, which is dead on 50%. It's also 4171 words, which feels like a decent accomplishment, at least in light of my word count goal for the year. 

What I'm discovering is that, for the kind of high volume drafting I'm going for in November, not having enough time to write is not, as such, a problem. The most I've gotten done for NaNo so far, in 2018, most of the actual fiction drafting I got done was in 15 second to 2 minute snippets while things were loading or printing at my Government Office Job. I also including written worldbuilding and other notes in my page count, and worked on that at my breaks. Even with the worldbuilding pages though, I'm still fairly sure that was the year I got the most actual fiction drafted during NaNo. When I have longer stretched of time to work, I have a tendency to start thinking about the implications of what I'm writing, whether it makes sense, where I'm supposed to go from there. This is not a bad thing - it produces cleaner, more coherent drafts, scenes that are more likely to more or less work as-is, and even in the order they started in. But writing sessions too short to start worrying about what I'm doing are better for the 'Eh, we'll fix it in post' high speed drafting that any version of NaNo requires. 

I haven't read anything that I can recall about these kinds of micro-sessions. I've heard of 5 minute sprints, but nothing shorter than that, so I might someways be going against conventional wisdom here. But the 'slowing down to think it through during long stretches of unstructured writing time' phenomenon is a Known Thing. I'm going to be experimenting more with short sprints going forward, to see if I can harness this in a more structured way. I feel like the uncertainty of writing while waiting for things, not knowing how long it is, just that it's short, may actually be part of what worked about that, so maybe I can find a timer with a little bit of randomness built in. 

I do need that time to plan and worldbuild and make decisions though. Like, it's important. Short sprints notwithstanding, I'm not really a pantser, and I need to know what I'm writing, what a given scene or chapter is trying to do, or I will stall out eventually. I'm not a perfectionist, but I have a hard time moving forward without a plan. When I do have a lot of open time to write, and I'm unable or disinclined to do sprints (the impact of which, as I said, I am still in the process of examining), that planning, whether it involves a little bit of outlining or conversation with a beta reader or writing partner to work through the next set of decisions I have to make, needs to have already happened for me to make good use of the time. Making arbitrary or semi-arbitrary decisions, the kind you need to make about a zillion of in the writing process, especially in the first act of a novel, when you're still setting everything up, introducing everyone, and, in speculative fiction, establishing the world, is inexplicably draining for me, and I'm godawful slow at it sometimes. I have to leave myself enough time to make those decisions at a pace I can actually manage, even, perhaps especially, when I'm trying to get a lot done in a few weeks. This was, I think, the other thing that worked about 2018. When I had longer periods in which to write, I was using them to make worldbuilding notes, write character profiles, and generally get out ahead of all that decision making. Without a regular work day, I will need to consider how to work in time for this part of the process. 

So, that's what I got. Dresden Files reread posts will resume later this week, and I've got two book reviews in the planning stages. Until then -  be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things.