[alansplace]

Something to remember about Storm Front; it was a frustrated attempt at showing what Butcher believed would NOT work: From a 2004 interview with him "When I finally got tired of arguing with her and decided to write a novel as if I was some kind of formulaic, genre writing drone, just to prove to her how awful it would be, I wrote the first book of the Dresden Files." -- So, although it taught him something about what could sell, don't take it as indicitive of the rest of his works, or even the rest of the series.

“I knew she was wrong because I had a Bachelor's Degree in English Literature with an emphasis on creative writing, whereas she had merely published 40 novels.”

So he cobbled together a main character named Harry Dresden, with Sherlock's body and Spenser's wiseguy attitude. “I knew I wanted to write a wizard and a private eye,” he said. “I went back and looked at the most popular private eye characters and I looked at the most iconic wizard characters and tried to borrow traits from each of them to sort of build this character. At the time I thought I was building a really ridiculous Frankenstein character because that's what it felt like. ‘Let me rip this part off Sherlock and I'll take this from Gandalf and this from Merlin. Mua-ha-ha-ha, it's alive!'”

Butcher then set out to teach his teacher a lesson. "So I decided to do her little structure rules," he said, "and put things together in that kind of conscious way and build this Frankenstein horrible novel so that she'd see how awful it was and I wrote the first book of the Dresden Files, which showed her up." He sent a note of apology later, with permission to show it to her students whenever she liked.