Over the years I’ve been told that my job is a cool and/or exciting job to have. I can not lie, yes it is. What is my job? I’m entertainment recorder.
Ha, ok, not a real title, but I like the sound of it.
My job is in entertainment, I take photos, I do video, and I write about the different things in the entertainment world that I come across. Another way of saying it is, I get to share my fun experiences with the world in either visuals or with words, and that is exciting and fun.
It’s still work though, fun and exciting, yes, but still work. With fun and excitement there must also come rules and regulations.
I will use the interview I had with Jim Butcher while at Dragon Con as my example to what I mean by rules and regulations.
Jim Butcher is the author of many books, the more popular series of his is the Dresden Files that began in 2000 as well as being adapted into a television show, and he is also a cosplayer. When I learned that I was going to get to interview him I was very excited and I was letting everyone I knew that I would be getting this opportunity. Everyone was excited and happy for me telling me how cool this was going to be, I was excited and happy for myself and knew how cool this was, but I also knew it was now going to be a job.
When I’m there as a con goer/fanboy, I can go up to someone and make a fool of myself and no worries. Well, aside from the memory I will have of making a fool of myself, but that’s OK, that’s just for me. When I’m there in my working guise, then I have to remember to not make a fool of myself because I’m now representing a company as well as myself in a different capacity. I want to be professional while also being a fan.
This is where the real difference comes in when getting to talk to a person I like as a fan and as a job. There is the surface things like, what will I ask in this interview, will I try to come across as someone who is a fan trying to get the questions I have answered or will I be trying to ask the serious questions that everyone wants to know but then there’s the other things. Things like, I have an early time slot so that means I need to get up which means I need to go to bed early. Sounds easy right? It’s not when you are at Dragon Con.
Still, it is a cool and exciting job that I get to do, work or not, and I was very pleased with getting the opportunity to interview Jim Butcher while at Dragon Con.
When I got to the room for the interview, I was nervous and still wondering what I would be asking Mr. Butcher from the list of questions that I had created. My mind was busy with what would I ask first, should I make this a casual Q&A, or should I make this all about what I would want to know about the Dresden books? Like I said, mind was busy with what’s and hows about this interview, which didn’t help my nerves any but when Mr. Butcher strolled in, casual and easy going, my nervousness was put at ease and was able to get to work.
Even though I keep calling this was an interview and it was an interview, it felt more like a conversation between the two of us. It was causal and easy going where the two of us sat side by side in the seats to talk to each other. How we were sitting set the tone for our interview because now we were sitting next to each other in the same way friends and other fans do while sitting in some chairs talking to each other. Typically, the sitting arrangement is set up where the talent sits in a chair/seat at the front of the room, facing the people who will interview them. This format creates a separation between them and the press/media, and because of this we all know this is a job, this is not a moment to get all fanboy/fangirl with the talent.
By Mr. Butcher sitting there, next to me in the seats meant for the media/press, instead of him sitting in the talent chair at the front of the room, this interview was instantly changed into a conversation between us. Well, here is that conversation I had with the author Jim Butcher while at Dragon Con 2025.
Lee Roberts – “What made you choose Spider-Man out of all the other characters in Marvel to write about?”
Jim Butcher – “Well, I mean, it wasn’t like I could pick at that time. I wrote that Spider-Man book when, I think book seven of the Dresden Files had just come out, maybe book eight. I wasn’t a big name as yet. But my original editor, the first one who had bought Dresden, had moved on and was working at Pocket. And at Pocket, she was put in charge of media tie-in projects. So one of the projects she was in charge of was Spider-Man novels. So she came to me actually here at Dragon Con, and we were out at dinner, and said, well, I’ve been put in charge of these Spider-Man novels, and I was wondering if you’d like to write. And I said, yes. I said, were you going to ask me to write a Spider-Man novel? She said, yeah, that was the plan. I said, yes, I want to do that. Because I’ve always been a Spider-Man fan as well. Peter Parker was always my boy in Marvel.”
“When I was a kid, I worked at a summer camp. I was a wrangler, and so we worked with horses all day. You’d round up the horses and take care of them in the morning, and then get them all saddled up. And then after lunch, the kids would come out, and you’d take the kids on trail rides on the horses. And I made $10 a week. And I would take that and immediately go to Wizards comic book shop in downtown Kansas City and buy every Marvel title I could afford. And between me and my friend, I had a friend who was with me, and between the two of us, we could get every Marvel title that wasn’t just a plain toy tie-in. It wasn’t like G.I. Joe and Transformers. But all the superheroes, we’d buy all those. And then we’d go to Burger King, where they had those five burgers, five fries, and five small drinks for $5 at the time. And we would take $5 and buy that dinner, and just be eating burgers and fries and reading comic books. And we’d do that every Saturday afternoon, and that was a lot of fun.”
“But yeah, we would buy whatever titles Marvel had out that week. For a long time, I picked up every title Marvel had, all the superhero titles. So at that time, they were big on Spider-Man. He had four different titles that were running, and X-Men were pretty big. There were a number of different X-Men titles. And that was in the mid to late 80s. But that was where I started learning the love of comic books.”
LR – “Are you a collector, do you have collectibles?”
JB – “I used to have a whole bunch of comics. I had the whole original run of Secret Wars and so on, and when I went to college, my mom threw them away. But other than that, when I was a kid, I did Star Wars figurines and so on, but I haven’t been as big on collecting since then. I’ve got a few things. I’ve got a couple Spider-Man figurines at home. And I get issues of the Dresden file stuff. As for myself, I’m not a huge collector, except for books.”
LR – “What is your most prized, favorite book you have in your library?”
JB – “I’d say it’s probably, I’ve got a paperback copy of… “Memory”, by Lois Bujold (published 1996), who is one of my favorite writers. And I met her at a convention, got her to sign it, and I’m very pleased about that. When I’m a grown-up writer, I want to be able to write as well as Lois Bujold. Lois McMaster Bujold, she writes a series called the Vorkosigan series, science fiction. Brilliant series, and she’s an amazing writer, just one of the best. You look at other writers and you say, okay, well, here’s their plot, here’s their world-building, here’s their character stuff. And with her writing, it all blends in so seamlessly that you can’t tell where one starts and the other stops. And as a professional, I look at that and go, wow, that’s really amazing. I want to be able to do that one day.“
LR – “Do you think it’s true that you have to read the worst and really bad books to be able to write a good book?”
JB – “I don’t know how true that is. When they’re training folks at the Treasury, when they’re training folks to recognize counterfeit bills, they don’t train them by having them study counterfeit bills. They train them by having them study the real thing so that they can immediately look and say, okay, this is not the real thing because here’s this small difference that’s not there. Perhaps good writing is the same way, although I do think you have to read a lot of writing. Sometimes writing that you don’t think is good, because if you don’t think it’s good, it’s obviously because the thought behind it is very different than the way you do your thought. And being able to learn how other people see things and how other people approach things in writing, even when they’re not. It’s not something that you immediately look at and go, oh, this is amazing. If you look at it and go, well, this isn’t so good, but it’s also very popular, so why is it very popular? Why is it reaching a lot of people?”
“The reason that you do that is so that you can learn things that you don’t know intuitively. A lot of storytelling is based on intuition, yet we have all these different kinds of styles, all these different kinds of writers with all different kinds of audiences. If your job is to be a professional writer, then part of your job is to understand, how do I get my stuff to reach more people? How do I get more people to find it accessible? And to do that, you can’t study people who are like you. You’ve got to study people who are different than you.”
LR – “You’ve been writing for awhile and have published a lot of books, what inspires you for your stories and is difficult to create the new stories?”
JB – “It’s not creating the story that’s the hard part. That part’s kind of easy. That’s the spark that’s in all artists. You’ve got something and it makes you feel good. You look at it and it makes you feel emotions. So when you start to tell your story, you start bringing your favorite elements in, the things that you think are cool and important. Getting the idea is not the hard bit. The hard bit is figuring out how you’re going to execute it in a way that will be interesting for the reader. And that is such a subjective choice for anybody. You’ve pretty much just got to focus on, OK, how am I going to do this? And you focus on your basic crafting. I still focus on my basic writing craft. This is how you set up a scene. Here’s the character’s goal. Here’s the antagonist that’s getting in the way. Now we have a conflict. And that’s the kind of thing that you’ve got to focus on day after day after day.”
“So for a lot of it, for me, a lot of the times I’m just trusting the craft that I was taught 30 years ago at the University of Oklahoma. And the professional writing department there was being taught by Debbie Chester, who she had published 40 novels herself. So it’s not like she was doing just sort of theoretical stuff in a classroom. She was somebody who was selling books to New York on a regular basis. She taught you very practical lessons. Here’s how you set up a scene. Here’s how you make characters sympathetic. Here’s how you design a protagonist, how you design an antagonist. It’s very much craft-based stuff as opposed to art-based stuff. I like to think of writers, a lot of times people think of writers as artists, and I kind of think of this more as carpenters. Carpenters basically build boxes over and over again. then it gets more complicated because you’ve got to get into what you’re doing.”
“So whether you’re building a house or cabinets or whatever it is you’re building, you’re essentially building boxes. And you have to know how to build those boring boxes first before you can start doing the cool artistic stuff that you get to add on top of it that will tickle people’s fancy and draw them in to what you’re writing.”
