#i always say that little house was the bedrock of my interest in fantasy

[fictionadventurer]

The Little House books are actually great inspiration for worldbuilding, because their working class perspective reminds you to think about all the work that goes into getting the resources needed for daily life.

Where does the food come from? Who cooks it? Where does the fabric for clothes come from? Who spins it, weaves it, sews it? What do you use for heat? Light? Transportation? Can you get these resources yourself from the local landscape or do you buy them from somewhere else? What happens if something breaks or runs out?

Not all those details are needed for every story, but these books show how useful it can be to consider those details. And remind you that, if you tell it well enough, sometimes those details can be the story.

[aimlessarchery]

TOA Anniversary Munday!

Celebrating TOA and the people who contribute to make our group what it is.

Repost, don't reblog. Only fill in what you feel comfortable sharing!

Happy anniversary, TOA! Here's to many more years spent together.

tagging: anybody/everybody!

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Name: Maddie

Pronouns: they/she

Birthday (no year): January 12

Where are you from? What is your time zone? US East Coast, EST

Roleplay experience: probably about ~10 years on-and-off between forums, chat rp, and tumblr

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Got any pets? two dogs! Seamus is an Australian Shepherd, and Keegan is a rescue mutt. I love them both very dearly

Favorite time of year: Fall

Some interests and things you like: drawing/painting, RPGS, video game music (listening to, finding notation of + transcribing for piano)

Some funfacts & trivia about you: i'm left-handed and an eldest sibling, which means i accidentally taught my younger sister how to play guitar hero backwards

What non-Fire Emblem games do you play? oh man. childhood favorites that stick with me are Pokemon, Kingdom Hearts, and Final Fantasy. I've dipped into Tales of, though the only one I've completed is Vesperia (beloved game). Octopath Traveler 1 and 2 are both amazing. Splatoon is my favorite shooter. I've gotten lost in Pillars of Eternity for hundreds of hours. I think my fav Elder Scrolls game has become Oblivion for some reason. Sometimes I dive into sim games like Planet Zoo or Two Point Hospital for a bit. I like video games!!

Favorite Pokemon type & Pokemon: hard to pick a type, but some of my favs are Ampharos, Ivysaur, and Furret!

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How did you get into Fire Emblem? downloaded the Awakening demo and played it like 10 times in a row. decided that buying myself the game was going to be my first "treat yourself" purchase when i moved out for college

What Fire Emblem games have you played? completed: Sacred Stones, Path of Radiance, Radiant Dawn, Awakening, Shadows of Valentia, Three Houses (VW, CF, most of AM) actively in progress: Blazing Blade, Three Hopes, Silver Snow route of 3H started, but only barely: Gaiden, Genealogy, Shadow Dragon (DS), New Mystery of the Emblem

First Fire Emblem game: Awakening

Favorite Fire Emblem game: Tellius Duology (hard to separate them for me haha), with SOV as a strong contender as well

Any Fire Emblem crushes? ...and if I was also a little aquiver with python from lukas's performance in the SOV DLC what of it

If you’ve played the following games, who was your first S support? - Awakening: Stahl - Fates: Azama - Three Houses: Shamir

Favorite Fire Emblem class: hmm...archers and mages, maybe. it's always satisfying when the chip damage is enough to save a front liner from retaliation, and even more satisfying when a crit or adept procs and the ranged unit is like "nah dw i got this"

If you were a Fire Emblem character, what would be your class? my gut says wind mage. idk why tho besides the lack of athleticism needed for a physical class lol

If you were a Three Houses character, what would be your affiliation? Golden Deer!

If you were an Engage character, which Emblem would you Engage with? I have not played engage but i want a ghost ike to be my bestie...

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How did you find TOA? Lucius was over at my house and pitched it to me one night while we were reminiscing about FERP on tumblr. pulled up the rank chart on my computer to explain it to me and everything lmao

Current TOA muses: Python and Caspar

Who was your first TOA muse? If you don’t have them anymore, could you see yourself picking them up again? Python was my first! He's definitely the one I'm most confident in, and I see him as kind of my "bedrock muse" for now.

Have you had any other TOA muses? I had Reyson for a short-ish time!

Do you think you have a type of character you gravitate towards? I think I'm still feeling out the difference between "types of characters i gravitate toward liking" and "types of characters I gravitate toward writing". I do think I feel most comfortable writing supporting characters with enough backstory for me to tease out and build up from there!

What do you believe you enjoy writing the most? I love character connection. Whether it's spoken aloud or not, I like little moments where I can have my muse compare a character to someone else they know, or see each other in a different way. I also love when characters have conflicting views and motivations and have to deal with that in one way or another!

Favorite TOA-related memory: KKE Team Guard coming together for that crazy rapid-fire chat that Ree sprung on us for the finale is definitely a strong one! It was so fun seeing different characters shine throughout the conversations, and on my own end I loved having an opportunity to let Python lose his cool for once >:3

How do you pronounce TOA? each letter pronounced individually: tee-oh-ay

Got any delusions that didn’t see the light of day in TOA that you’d like to share? I've only got fleeting thoughts that I would have to let simmer longer, especially when I would have to let someone go to fill the slot (I have accepted that 2 is my personal limit). That said, I've got a few guys hidden behind my back on the off-chance that I feel like it's time for a change ;0

[kylesvariouslistsandstuff]

We're about a month away from the release of WISH...

Walt Disney Animation Studios, and by extension the whole dang company built on this cartoon bedrock, celebrated their 100th year yesterday... ABC aired ENCANTO, in addition to the world premiere of the short film ONCE UPON A STUDIO (which apparently has now been chopped off of WISH and will debut elsewhere), and an edited version of the WISH trailer... Nothing pertaining to the future was unveiled...

(By the by, I don't have cable, so... I didn't get to see ONCE UPON A STUDIO. Sadface.)

You'd think, for the company's 100th anniversary... That there'd be *some* word on what was coming up next from Walt Disney Animation Studios?

Their new movie is in theaters next month, and we don't know what the November 27, 2024 release from them is...

By now, we usually know what's next... For example:

WISH was first unveiled in September 2022 at the D23 Expo, which was a little over a year before the movie's target release date.

STRANGE WORLD, by contrast, was announced a little under a year before its release. That film was revealed to the public via the trades and Disney themselves on their socials.

ENCANTO was revealed in December 2020 during the company's Investors Day event, that less than a year before it came out.

RAYA AND THE LAST DRAGON was another D23 reveal, the August 2019 one to be exact. At the time, RAYA was set to be a Thanksgiving 2020 release until COVID-19 complications pushed it to March 2021.

This, of course, does not count the rumors and scoops. Sometimes, various sites get news on Disney animated movies before Disney themselves say anything. For example, long before Disney announced RAYA in August 2019 to the public, scooper sites were revealing info like "WDAS' next movie is DRAGON EMPIRE". I sometimes heard stuff from the trenches, which was always fun. I remember little snips of what ENCANTO was going to be maybe a year or two before announcement? STRANGE WORLD is interesting because not only were scoopers saying a movie called "Searcher Clade" was coming, but the Venture - the airship the Clade family and the explorers use to reach Avalonia's insides - was Easter Egged in the ENCANTO credits. ENCANTO debuted just a few weeks before the announcement, not even...

So yeah, I thought I'd look at the patterns of their recent releases. We're definitely well beyond the days where you'd hear about things 2-3 years in advance. Remember how ZOOTOPIA, a March 2016 release, was first unveiled at the 2013 D23 Expo? Fun times.

I'm guessing we'll hear about this new WDAS movie, reportedly an original fantasy story set in the Middle East (is this Suzi Yoonessi's film?), either right before WISH comes out... Or maybe a little after. Maybe current world events pertaining to the setting would make an imminent announcement seem a little insensitive?

After this movie, all we know about on the horizon are undated FROZEN and ZOOTOPIA sequels, with next to no info on who's attached.

There's also still the Disney+ shows that are in the works. We got none this year, despite earlier reports indicating otherwise. IWAJU, MOANA: The Series, and TIANA remain without firm release dates, but are all aiming for next year. IWAJU's absence is especially unusual, it's pretty far long as far as I know. Last year's D23, again - in September, gave us an image. Maybe it's been pulled back? Retooled? Maybe because it was outsourced to Cinesite and kinda resembles a Disney Junior show... Maybe it's been dropped as a WDAS project and is now a Disney TV Animation production? It's only speculation on my end, because that show is a collaboration with upstart Nigerian house Kugali, and that would be a partnership squandered if WDAS passed on the show.

Anyways, with Pixar... We got WIN OR LOSE around the corner, and next year ELIO and INSIDE OUT 2 have firm release dates. Both of those, by the way, officially revealed at the September 2022 D23 Expo. Pixar usually rolls 'em well before release, WDAS cuts it a lot closer these days for some reason. Like, are we gonna know what the summer 2025 Pixar movie is *before* the fall 2024 WDAS movie? (I'm being facetious here, haha.)

I'll keep trying to be patient, but I'm like burning to know... What is *this* movie?

Worth noting that a while back, Disney Animation CCO Jennifer Lee stated that Suzi Yoonessi, Josie Trinidad, and Marc Smith had movies in the works. At the time, Carlos Lopez Estrada had a movie in the works as well, but then he was pulled off of it (reportedly called FOSTER) to take over RAYA... and then he left Disney altogether not too long after RAYA came out. He was also set to direct a live-action/CGI ROBIN HOOD remake for the enterprise... So that leaves Yoonessi (whose Instagram bio still says "Director - Disney Animation"), Trinidad (who recently directed episodes of ZOOTOPIA+), and Smith (who was recently revealed to have come up with the idea for FROZEN III, he's probably directing that if Chris Buck is unavailable).

So yeah... This information, along with two sequels...

I said it before, but I don't think either ZOOTOPIA 2 or FROZEN III are next year's movie. If they were, I think we'd know who is directing/writing/etc. FROZEN III, given that Marc Smith came up with the idea, might be closer to us than ZOOTOPIA 2 is. Or not. FROZEN II came out 4 years ago, ZOOTOPIA is over 7 years old, one would think ZOOTOPIA 2 comes first. They're just very mum on who is involved. I'd like to think ZOOTOPIA 2 isn't being directed by Byron Howard, who is likely pursuing another original movie after ENCANTO, but maybe not? ZOOTOPIA 2 might reincorporate the whole movies' worth of ideas that were thrown out during its development (I particularly like that more James Bond-like story set on an island that it could've been), or maybe it'll go for an all-new story and idea. I have no idea where FROZEN III could go, I'm not as invested in those movies.

While WDAS usually does one-a-year, always settling for Thanksgiving, it'd be cool if they take a year where Pixar doesn't have two new movies, and release two movies that year. If they FEASIBLY CAN, that is. We don't want CRUNCH, now... But in the scenario that they could... Pixar has two for 2024, and two for 2026... Who's to say... WDAS can't slot in, maybe, ZOOTOPIA 2 in the spring of 2025, and have an original out for Thanksgiving? Just spitballing, here. ZOOTOPIA and MOANA both came out in 2016, so why the heck not?

Anyways, hope to know more soon about what's up with the studio that's literally why this whole damn company even exists in the first place.

[passerby-boy-archive]

Interview from The Furthest Station paperback - properly this time!

So, uh, several months ago I said that at some point I was going to type up the full interview from the back of the paperback edition of The Furthest Station because I find a lot of it super interesting and it kills me they didn’t put it anywhere more accessible. So this is that, finally! Below the cut because damn, is this thing long.

INTERVIEWER: Hello, I’m Paul Stark from Orion’s audio team and I’m delighted to be joined today by Ben Aaronovitch, author of the bestselling Rivers of London PC Peter Grant series, available in hardback, paperback, ebook and audio narrated by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith. Ben, welcome, we’re here to talk about London and magic today. How are you doing?

BEN AARONOVITCH: I’m fine, thank you. Very nice to be here.

I: Fantastic. Well, on to a simple question to start with: What drew you to write about London?

BA: I always find this a very strange question. I’m from London. Should I write about Birmingham, you know? I write about London because it’s my home town, and I’m lazy and don’t like to go outside the M25. It’s what I know. I’d love to see more books - urban fantasy books - set in places like Birmingham - especially Birmingham, which I think is a very neglected city - and places like that and learn about those places.But all the people from those places seem to come to London and write books about London. So perhaps maybe the question you should ask is ‘why do you write?’ I write about London for a very simple reason: I’m a Londoner. I’m not sure why Neil Gaiman and David Carey and everyone writes about London, except for they’ve moved here and now they write about it.

I: And it’s an amazing city. Lots of history, wonderful characters and myth that kind of provides a bedrock for fiction. What prompted you to add magic?

BA: It never occurred to me not to add a magic. This is another one of those questions that’s rather like saying to a man that has set out on a long walk ‘What prompted you to use your feet?’ What prompted me to use my feet - I thought: I want to do magic cops. That was the first thing that came into my head. So, really, the magic is built in. Magic cops implies magic right from the start. So, really, the rest of that was kind of detail. So, we’re going to start with the idea that we’re going to have policemen who do magic and then everything else was a question of who they are and what they are doing. Police who do magic in London was the starting point of the series and so I wasn’t prompted to put magic into it, it was there right from the start. There were several things built in right from the start.

I: Given that you’ve also told us you should ‘write what you know’, is this your way of telling us that you can actually do magic?

BA: No, I am, in fact, a total sceptic. However, magic is a lot of fun to write about. So I can’t do magic. Honest.

I: What made you go beyond the magic cops? To make the rivers one of the key bases? Was that something you knew about, something you were passionate about?

BA: No, I didn’t actually know that much about the rivers. I came up with the idea of Mama Thames for a different project and then I incorporated elements of another project in the initial idea and then for the book. And once you have Mama Thames and look at a map of all the tributaries, you just go ‘ooh they must all be stroppy women’. So that’s where they came from. And if you just look at them you can see their personalities; a lot of them you can just see their personalities from looking where their courses are. So, you know Fleet, you know Tyburn, you know what they’re going to be doing.

I: Are there any that you feel you haven’t written yet that you’re really keen to?

BA: Oh, there are tons! There’s the River Rom, who is the goddess of illegal street racing. There’s the Wandle, who, for historical reasons,is the goddess of used clothes shops and schmutter. Basically the goddess of schmutter. That’s the Wandle.

I: Any beer connection? You’ve got a lot of breweries along the Wandle.

BA: Possibly, possibly. The Wandle was a very popular river for industry so you have the Romantics all setting up their factories down there. What are they called? I’ve forgotten their names. That’s terrible. You know the people who believed in fabric for the masses and beautiful - you see this is the trouble. I do all this research and it goes in one ear and out the other. People expect me to remember little details of Fleet’s course, ‘Does the Fleet’s course-?’ I don’t know! I’ve got to look at my map to know these things. ‘Where does Wandle…?’ Anyway, there’s a ton. There’s a place called Black Ditch and I haven’t really worked out where she fits in, and there’s Hackney Brook and there’s all the history of the Lea - a very complicated river as anyone who has ever looked at a map will tell you. And so there’s tons of people. You know I’m going to be writing for millions of years before I get to the end of the rivers and that’s not even counting going upstream and the Ash and all those. So…

I: Lots of scope.

BA: Lots of scope.

I: You mentioned earlier one of the prospects of writing on Birmingham. Now, I realise I’m asking a very geeky question here, but would each canal have an individual spirit?

BA: I don’t know. I’d have to go to Birmingham and find out. I don’t know, I’m trying to avoid the idea that everywhere has a spirit, a genius loci. Really the question is: would it be fun if it had a genius loci? So, Grand Union Canal has a genius loci. I didn’t mean it to have a genius loci and had no plans for it to be a genius loci and then I wrote a short story and it ended up having an orangutan for a genius loci, and it was like, ‘I didn’t plan that!’,but you know…

I: Stories have a life of their own.

BA: They often just go places I’m not expecting. So, yeah, I wouldn’t like to say what would happen if I went to Birmingham because you’re shaped by the environment you’re writing in and therefore you go somewhere and you find things. That’s the whole point of going somewhere is you find interesting things. There’s no point in saying ‘I’m going to do this’ and then you go somewhere and do it, or, at least, there’s no point for me to do that. It’s much more fun to go somewhere and then have a look around and go ‘ah’ - you’ve got to smell the place, really. I always say that you’ve got to smell the streets before you can write about them.

I: Fantastic, fantastic.

BA: Except the countryside, which always just smells the same.

I: There’s a bit of a different smell depending on what the local livestock is, but yes.

BA: Yes, unless you go downwind of a pig farm in which case it smells like ‘Get the f--- out of here’.

I: So, back on to your magic cops. Peter himself isn’t that great at magic, certainly he’s been slow on the uptake somewhat. Do you find--

BA: I love this notion that Peter is slow on the uptake.

I: Well he’s not slow on the uptake in general, but he certainly has perhaps been slower to develop magic.

BA: Than who?

I: Than certainly Lesley, I’d say.

BA: Are you sure about that?

I: I feel like I’m being lead down a blind alley.

BA: No, I mean this is where you get this weird idea from fanon, where fanon says that Peter is slow at magic, slow at picking up magic. I haven’t said if Peter is slow at picking up magic because aside from anything else Nightingale is a terrible teacher that way, with telling people how they’re doing. No, Peter is as good as you would expect him to be - someone who has only been doing it for four or five years you know, under the conditions like that he’s got two jobs. Remember he’s also a police officer also doing all these cases, occasionally having buildings dropped on him, so he’s not devoting his full time to it. So I think he’s doing all right.

I: So, did you always envision that Peter would be a student, but dealing with Nightingale who is a phenomenally adept magician, but is terrible at teaching as you say? Was that always how you saw the dynamic?

BA: Ah, well, Nightingale is very limited. I wanted to avoid Dumbledore. I wanted to avoid Gandalf. So, whatever Nightingale is, he’s not Gandalf and he’s not Dumbledore. He’s not a teacher. He’s not a mentor character. He is not, as by his nature, a mentor. He’s not the wise man who tells you what to do. He’s basically Bulldog Drummond with magic. He’s like a magical Bulldog Drummond, he’s possibly the most powerful wizard that the Folly has ever produced in terms of being able to do stuff but ask him how it works and he’s like ‘Uh… you know, I don’t know how it works. I just do it. I learn the formulas and am just good at it and can do these spells that no one else can do.’ And he can do them quietly and he can do them fast and silently and all sorts of things. It’s like he was good at sports except the sports was magic. He’s basically that, he’s one of those. I always imagine him in his cricket whites at Casterbrook: ‘Argh, play the game!’ or playing rugby, or the equivalent of rugby, and just charging through, you know, like ‘rraaaawwgh’ and snoozing through the academic part of the curriculum . So, you see, he’s that guy and part of the reason he has to look things up to teach Peter is he can’t remember what he was taught and he has to go back. But he is very very good. He is excellently good, but in some ways this is almost a story about the limitations of power. So there’s a limit to what you can do. If he got shot in the head from a distance he’s buggered. You know, as he said, ‘Shoot me. If you want to stop someone with my skills, just shoot me from a distance with a rifle.’ There is a limitation. I didn’t want - he can rip up a house by its roots and fling it over a garden fence, but he’s not Superman. He’s not a superhero. He has these limitations and magic has these inherent limitations. It does obey the rules of thermodynamics though it does bend them quite severely occasionally. Ultimately, the power has to come from somewhere and it can get dangerous if you overdo it.

I: Is that one of the reasons you’ve kept the top end of Nightingale’s abilities somewhat under wraps? Ultimately, he needs to be careful how much he exerts himself, how much he keeps from the public.

BA: Well, there is that. There’s also that he hasn’t needed to. And also, the more difficult spells and subtle ones like actually putting Toby to sleep in the first book - that was one of the most powerful spells he’s ever done in front of us, so to speak, in front of us in the book. Actually that’s a very difficult spell. Peter’s not going to learn that spell for like five years. Putting a dog to sleep. And Nightingale could probably put a person to sleep although he’d have to concentrate. You see, that sort of thing is very very hard. I’ve just written a passage in Lies Sleeping which discusses this, where Nightingale is doing something incredibly hard and Peter is astonished and it totally is a very simple thing. It’s not complicated at all. See, in a way smashing things is easier.

I: It’s almost like it’s that much more difficult to accomplish good sleight-of-hand right in front of someone sitting with you than perform a big stage illusion.

BA: Well, it’s also that most of the subtle magic involves affecting people and people are very resistant to being affected. If you want to have a fight with someone you tend to just throw something at them, or you knock them down, or you pick them up and you throw them away. But human beings - in the way my magic is constructed - are very resistant. You can’t reach into them and stop their heart. Magic is very bad at that. So, things like the glamour when you affect someone’s mind - those are all really difficult to do. To make someone pick something up, to take control of their hand - that’s really difficult to do.

I: The other side of that is that you've made magic and technology really incompatible as well. Why did you decide to do that?

BA: Well, you have to explain why no one’s recorded it on their mobile phones, don’t you? Otherwise why aren’t we looking at people, why is there no footage of Covent Garden, why is there no footage of half the things that have happened? Because it melts the chips. That’s the reason I did it. Because you’ve got to explain why it’s secret, otherwise it wouldn’t be secret.

I: Once you’d made that decision and written that in had you thought about taking it further? What would happen if someone tried to do a spell on a flight for example?

BA: You wouldn’t. That would be a very bad thing to do. Unless it’s a DC-3 you don’t want to be doing spells on a plane. I’ve considered doing a scene where you have some of the most powerful wizards assembled and none of them can actually use any magic because they’d all kill themselves if they did. Nightingale probably could. Nightingale is so controlled that he could probably get away with it. But most things about the technology - it’s the chips, not the technology. Microprocessors are particularly vulnerable to magic. So, you’re all right if you’re running valves and stuff. Nineteen-fifties Russian technology would be fine. You could launch a Vostok and you wouldn’t have to worry about doing magic with that, but not anything with a microprocessor, which is everything: your washing machine, your toaster, your cooker. And there’s nothing mystical about it. There’s good, solid world-building reasons why this happens, but we may never find out what that is because the point is Nightingale doesn’t know and I think Abigail, with forty years of study, might be able to explain it to you, although you wouldn’t understand the mathematics of why it affects microprocessors. And I did that on purpose so that I would never have to explain it.

I:  We’ve already touched on Birmingham, but are there any other cultures and their particular brand of magic that you’d like to explore?

BA: I’d like to explore all of them! That’s my big problem in life: that you cannot just do that. It's not really a question of cultural appropriation, which is what you essentially do when you're ignorant or you're knowledgeable but don't care. If you're honest, you can show what a culture is like: What are the Chinese like at magic tied up with Daoism  and stuff like that? But I just don't know enough Daoism to do that. It was quite hard to construct a magic system that was consistent with Anglo-Saxon and post-Norman, Roman Britain let alone one that’s consistent with more than five thousand years of Chinese, of continuous Chinese history, or Indian history for that matter. You have thousands of years of culture in places like Africa and you have to say ‘Can they do magic?’ Everyone does magic, right? What Newton did in my world is he systemised it and created a system that Postmartin calls - ah, I can't remember what he calls it now, but he's got a fancy word for it: syncretism or something like that. He basically took it and systemised it and made it repeatable. He made it a science, basically. He took the things that people were coming up with by accident and he made it a science, because that was what Newton was like, that's basically what Newton did and why I chose him for the guy who did this: because he was interested. We know that. He wrote more about alchemy than he did gravity. We know he was as interested as anyone. As someone once said: if anyone was going to find out if magic was real it was going to be Isaac Newton so I figured, right, he did. That's the whole point. There is a reason why it’s kept secret as well, but I can't talk about that.

I: Something to look forward to in a future book or interview!

BA: Yes, possibly.

I: You said you'd like to explore more. Is there anywhere outside London and the UK that you're currently researching with a view to writing?

BA: Yes, I'm going to do a novella set in Germany. I don't think it's even going to be a Peter Grant book. Because this novella you’re reading now was successful they want another one.  and I thought that if I can't experiment with the novellas what could I experiment with? So rather than taking a risk with a whole novel, I would like to write about Tobi Winter who is essentially Peter's counterpart in Germany.  I don't know why but he kind of turned up and started knocking on the door, like all my characters. I came up with this guy and I like him because he's slightly more lugubrious, he's more laid-back than Peter in some ways. He's kind of fun and also he's German so I've had to do quite a lot of research into how German magic works and all that stuff. And I've tried to stay away from recent history, stay away from the Nazis. Not because I feel like letting the Germans off the hook or anything, but I feel you can ram into the ground a bit. It's a bit like the occult Nazis have been done to death and with ignoring the history and stuff, like the Thirty Years War. Germany is a fascinating place, especially pre-unification Germany, when it's like a collection of states and you sit there going they're all Germans, but they don't think they're all Germans. It’s a lot of fun so I'm looking into that for this story, which is going to be the next novella.

I: And will you be basing it around the rivers again? Will be be seeing the Rhine or the Rhone?

BA: I don't know. Rivers of London is one thing, but I'm not sure you want to constantly go there. It's a bit predictable. ‘Oh, look there's a river. Is someone in it? Oh, yes they are. Oh, it's a Rhine Maiden.’ We've established that the Rhine Maidens come visit the Thames for tips, so we know there are Rhine Maidens. It's not going to be the Rhine anyway, because it's going to be Trier. It's not the Rhine, but I'm going for a research visit soon, so I'll ask. Ask the river who she is, or it might be him. You never know in Germany. Could be a guy. It's right on the border; I like it because it's right on the border with Luxembourg, so it's very liminal. It's one of those German cities that’s changed hands quite a lot of times. It's also one of the oldest cities in Germany because it was established by the Romans and there aren't that many Roman cities in Germany. And wine. It's basically about wine. It's basically an excuse - I don't even like wine, but I can't resist this. I've basically just found a way of making it a claimable expense to get a wine tour of the vineyards of Trier.

I: That sounds like fun. I have a feeling I can predict your answer this one because you touched on it earlier, but is magic purely fictional or do you think there are some elements of magic, or specifically your magic system that could be real?

BA: You know what? I was born sceptical. I'm one of those people who didn’t believe in Father Christmas when he was three and my parents tried, god bless ‘em.But I make no claims of superiority. I've just got that kind of brain; I don't believe in any of it. I believe in coincidences. I believe that things happen by accident. A lot. I don't look down on people much who believe in stuff, but I just don't believe in any of it. I'm just really sceptical. Sorry.

I: Do you think that makes it easier to write magic?

BA: Oh, god, yes! It's much easier to write because I'm not worried about whether it's accurate. I only have to worry about whether it's consistent, which is the classic thing in science fiction and fantasy. It's making what you do consistent. Unless - and this is very important - you deliberately don't. If you look at Jack Vance: He doesn't bother with consistency in his writing at all because he likes his magic wild and  mad. I like consistency because I essentially I'm a science fiction writer writing fantasy. I don't know how I ended up in this position, but it's how I ended up. But I do like a bit of wild magic, which is why I have the rivers. The rivers are my little bits of wild magic and they do wild things and strange things happen in the boundary of things. The fae are there and they're good for weird things happening on the boundary of things, but as for actual magic, no, I don't believe in any of it. I don't believe in any superstitions at all. I just never have. It's not a considered intellectual position. I just never have believed in any of it.

I: How about the more human magic? Do you enjoy watching magicians work in sleight-of-hand and things like that?

BA: Not particularly. I enjoy watching the work, if they're good, but I don't think to myself: ‘Yay, magician’. I like Jonathan Creek. Does that count? I like the early two or three seasons.

I: As Tim Minchin said, Jonathan Creek is a bit like Scooby Doo because no matter how outlandish things get there's always an explanation for everything that makes sense.

BA: Yes, that's part of the fun. It's much better. It's not doing it as old man Granger did it: In a mask, with glowy paint making glowing light.

I: And to go back to London for a little bit for one final question. We've touched a bit already on London's amazing history and the myths that have built up around the city. Is there any particular legend or historical landmark or historical story that you're looking forward to building into a future Peter Grant mystery?

BA: St. Paul's. St. Paul's is featuring very heavily in the book so far. I didn't mean it to, but in the same way the Royal Opera House became more and more important while I was writing the first one, St. Paul's has become more and more important while I'm writing the eighth one - oh god, I’ve lost track, seventh - it's the seventh. Lies Sleeping, anyway. The one after The Hanging Tree. And suddenly St. Paul's. I thought the climax was going to be in one place and now it's going to be somewhere else. And I thought it was going to be about one thing and now it's about something else and I'm sitting there going, ‘Will you make up your mind!?’ Which, of course is futile. I'm arguing with myself. It's very schizophrenic, arguing with yourself. So, yes, I think that St. Paul's is going to get an airing. But there's so much. You know... I haven't even done the Tower of London! It sits there like a big chunky block of history, just there. The Tower of bloody London waiting for me. There's everything from the Bazalgette sewer system - given that it’s about the rivers of London, I didn't even scrape the barrel, the side of a wall, when I did Whispers Under Ground. I did a whole book about the underground and I barely touched on Bazalgette. There's all that kind of stuff. There's so much history. So much stuff, from the Romans to the continuing debate about whether people actually occupied the inside of the city or they didn't. I met a Romanist and they said, ‘No, no. Of course people lived inside the city, we just haven't found the remains yet.’

I: Because we built on top of it.

BA: Yes, we continuously built on it for the last two thousand years and so it's hard to tell. I don't know... when Deloittes or someone needs a new headquarters no doubt we'll find out.

I: Well, Ben, thank you so much for your time today.

BA: That’s all right. It was my pleasure.