That sounds like a Dresden plot and he has a habit of fighting more than one type of bad guy per book, some aren't really evil. One I'm thinking of would have said that even though they ended up throwing cars at each other.

Or it might be the bad guy was just trying to keep from fighting the hero you were talking about. Kinda like "I can bump you off but I don't want to" even though the bad guy isn't really sure he can win.

I said "opposing wizard" because this wizard isn't really a bad guy. In this place in the book, he was just trying to keep Harry from getting killed by what Harry was about to do... because it wasn't Harry's time to die.

I'm about done with the book. Just a handful of pages to go. But I did kind of go "Huh?" When thinking about the accused wizard that would be killed if he was caught and, more then likely, found guilty at this point in the book.

So I think the flaw, you mentioned originally, is more in Harry than in the writing.

The guy was incensed that anyone could think him so stupid. "Yes, yes, I know all that. I just want to know whether you and Captain Kirk went to Starfleet academy together."

The lesson is that a well-told story weaves a spell that transcends common sense and *cough* logic.

In many science fiction stories that involves interstellar travel and accepts special relativity as correct within its limits but transcended by some kind of workaround (e.g. wormholes), the story assumes a kind of universal time that is logically inconsistent with the premises. If it's a good story, I don't sweat the details; I just assume that there's a whole pile of other things I don't know about the universe that allows the story to be staged on an interstellar scale.

Fantasy writers have it both harder and easier. Easier, in the sense that they are staging a story in which not just the laws of physics, but the nature of causality is different. You can just say that the death perception only works on left handed people, or doesn't work on people who you are trying to kill yourself. Harder, in that you're bound to overlook some implication of the contrary-to-reality world you've posited. I'll bet just about every fantasy whose plot depends on some elaborate system of magic has got serious logical holes. You'd better hope that the reader is motivated to conjure his own fix to your oversights.

All kinds of writing are like a dance between the author and the reader's imagination. As author, you're leading, but that doesn't mean you take the reader on your shoulder and carry him around the dance floor. For the reader to feel like he's dancing too his imagination has got to make its own contributions. Leading a dance partner is not the same as driving a car; it's more like suggesting or pointing the way.

Another Star Trek story, if I may; I read an article by a writer in which he describes sitting next to a girl he was interested in at a party. When he discovered she was a trekkie, he was sure he was in because he'd been a staff writer on The Next Generation. But another guy who's also a trekkie sits down on the other side of her and he can't keep up with the conversation. Then he realizes with a start they are discussing a treaty *that he had invented* for one of his stories, and that they understood it better than him. He was under deadline pressure and needed a plot device; he'd never bothered to work out what the treaty implied about the political position of the Federation in the galaxy.

Grossman's character says,

"When we do magic we do not wish and we do not pray. We rely upon our will and our knowledge and our skill to make a specific change in the world.

This is not to say we understand magic, in the sense that physicists understand why subatomic particles do whatever it is that they do. Or perhaps they don't understand that yet, I can never remember. In any case, we do not and cannot understand what magic is, or where it comes from, and more than a carpenter understands why a tree grows. He doesn't have to. He works with what he has."

I think this is code for, "Hey reader! Magic is there to serve the plot. I'll try not to break your suspension of disbelief, if you try not to pay attention to the man behind the curtain. Deal?"

I can't recall that scene at the moment even though it sounds like either his mentor or the Gatekeeper. But I don't think the Gatekeeper was involved with any of that. And I'm probably wrong about who it sounded like since there was a fight.

I decided to check his list of books in case I'm getting books mixed up in my mind I found this:

"You still have a chance to ask Jim a question! BittenByBooks.com is hosting a special online Q&A event Monday, August 8th! Come by between noon and 6pm Central and ask Jim questions on the Bitten By Books blog, and heÕll do his best to answer them. TheyÕll also be giving away copies of Ghost Story to three lucky fans!"

And I checked down and found an interview with Butcher. Boy, someone was right he did cut his hair but I like his shirt "Go away I have a deadline".

A few years ago they had TV special on Gilligan's Island. They had most of the actors, the one who orginally played Ginger evidently wants nothing to do with it anymore because it was beneath her, and one or two had died. But they acted out real life situations that came from the show, Like the Skipper had to sneak out of a western movie he was doing to so he could audition and that the woman who played the wife had had breast cancer years before and she encouraged one other actress to get checked.

The first was "Rescue From Gilligan's Island," where the castaways were picked up at last, and after a series of problems with readapting to civilization, wind up stranded on the island again.

The second was "The Castaways on Gilligan's Island," where the castaways get rescued again, and this time decide to open a luxury hotel on the island. (This was the era of "The Love Boat" and "Fantasy Island;" it was intended as a prospective pilot, but wasn't picked up.)

The third was "The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island," of which, perhaps, the less said the better. Maybe more inventive than the other two, but lesser in other ways.

Tina Louise ("Ginger") absented herself from the movies; two different actresses played the part. And in the third, Jim Backus ("Thurston Howell the Third") was too ill to do more than make brief appearances.

Also the [recently] late Sherwood Schwartz, the creator, talked of other projects, like a movie where the castaways think they're the last survivors of civilization after a nuclear war, or the one where they get rescued and then track down and murder each and every person who visited the island and left them stranded. Also there was talk of a "reboot," a big-screen version with new actors, as was done with "The Brady Bunch" (also created by Schwartz).

*****

Not that it has much to do with finding flaws in published works---though there are lots of details in "Gilligan's Island" that can be picked to pieces.

But with all this talk about finding flaws in Butcher's writing it hit me today that I recently found what could be a flaw. I think it could be. But it took me long enough to remember it especially since it hasn't been that long.

I will try to not do a spoiler so I hope it all makes sense.

Anyway, something huge happens in "Changes". Right after that huge thing Dresden thinks about what happens next; what other forces move in and the cost to innocents, but even though it seems like he's skipping months, right after explaining these changes he gets right back to the present. So it's like "this happens and then stuff happens and another group comes along... one of my buddies comes over to me and reminds me we need to leave, I see that so and so has left already, No one but someone got hurt." A very non-spoiler, total paraphrase there.

A lot of what passes for plot flaws amounts to the writer trying to keep the story going past that point...if in Crystal Stevens's first example, the wizard did tell the hero when he would die, date-and-time, it would just about stop the story in its tracks.

I remember in, I think, The Sword of Shannara, where one character kept telling the hero that he couldn't tell him something extremely important---I forget what, having not reread the thing since it came out---scenes that seem to exist to "bulk out" the novel, make it long.

Also I remember a John Varley novel series (I forget the names, but they were one-word titles), where, at the climactic end of the first novel, the tormented hero takes a job with the villain / tormentor / sentient L-5 colony and forgives all---so dissatisfying was that that I never picked up the other novels.

And this brings up another point. There are several times I've read books that if the hero (or the villian for that matter) had paid attention and done (or not done) something early on in the story, everything would've been solved, end of story. Of course, if this happened, there would be no story .

quote:

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...books that if the hero (or the villian for that matter) had paid attention and done (or not done) something early on in the story, everything would've been solved, end of story.

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These are often called "idiot plots" because the hero or villain should have known better or decided not to pay attention for no good reason (except to provide a plot for the atory).

The books by Lauren Kate, for example (Fallen, Torment, Passion). *SPOILER ALERT* In "Torment," the MC gets all heartbroken like they do in the second books of YA fantasy/romance, chops off her long, black hair, and bleaches it.
At her school there is another girl with an uncanny resemblance to the MC's original appearance. Important, because she gets attacked when the enemy mistakes her for the MC. The gaping hole? These enemies (a certain type of fallen angel) are blind; the 'see' by seeing your soul, which is notoriously unaffected by hair color and length. It made me want to bang my head repeatedly on something hard.

Sorry, that's a rant. I've had it bottled up for a while. And if you still want to read the books, that didn't really give away anything important. It happens somewhere towards the middle, I think.

Today I reminded myself of a what could be a mistake in the writing of a certain author. C. E. Murphy. I love her work and her writing but during the conclusion in her last book it's almost like she forgot a major character. Two people enter a cave while searching for a killer. One person is the MC and the other is one of half dozen or so major characters.

They get separated almost immediately, but that's okay the MC is the one who would do the actual fighting. But that's the last you hear of that character until the end of the conclusion. Of course it's First Person and the MC doesn't know where the other character is but that hasn't stopped her before thinking about what he might be doing or saying that she found out later that he was doing this and that. This time nothing until after the big fight where she captures the bad guy. She goes to set free some captives but they are already gone, that is when she thinks of the other guy.

[---had to edit---looked so damned awkward---]