- "Every once in a while, a piece of literature speaks to you so strongly you just have to answer it." —Michael Poore
- Lev Grossman talked a bit about his childhood experiences with the Narnia novels that heavily inspired the Magicians series:
- He talked about 'Becoming lost in another world... a world made of words, but more real than this one."
- He called reading The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe at a very young age 'the most important reading experience of his life'
- And then he brought up that part of the core idea that spawned The Magicians was wondering if it were possible to write a children's story, but for adults and containing all those things that adults like, like sex and alcohol and drugs.
- Lev mentioned that a third Magicians novel, tentatively titled The Magicians' Land is on the way, and he read a first draft of a chapter from a new point of view character, Eliot. He also mentioned that the first two books in the series were exactly two years apart, so we can probably expect the third on about August 8, 2013. Weird...
- Lev's early drafts are apparently much more littered with profanity than his already rather curse-laden final drafts, a characteristic for which he apologized profusely.
- Lev had a rather interesting explanation when someone asked him about the goal of the magic schools in his world and why none of the magicians ever use their power to cure cancer or anything else altruistic.
- 'The magicians who are altruistic, their stories tend to end fairly quickly. The interesting ones, we tend to focus on the losers, the morally crippled.'
- During Q&A I asked, prompted by Michael mentioning a movie that had served as inspiration for Up Jumps the Devil, about how the pros handle reference, citing the example of watching a bunch of westerns* before I wrote the first draft of "The Preacher and the Parasite", specifically regarding my paranoia that I'm going to blatantly rip something off. The answer essentially boiled down to something along the lines of 'Don't worry about it; absorb everything. Draw inspiration from unexpected sources (Lev drew a lot of inspiration in The Magicians series from the way the Bourne movies handled action),' and I mentally added 'you've got plenty of revisions to make the theft less blatant.'
- I don't remember the context for this quote, but it seemed like a good one from Michael: "I think that's one of the reasons we do write: To figure out what the heck we meant to write about."
- It was also interesting hearing Lev talk about, apparently he's a big story outliner, but there's a few characters that just refuse to be coralled by an outline. He cited Penny as an example of a character you just can't kill. Not for lack of trying, the poor guy, but he won't die; he's "like Rasputin." The character of Julia is also a major wild card for him. Apparently she was supposed to only be in the very beginning of The Magicians, but she's "a rogue agent of some agency in my brain that I don't have good communication with," and she just kept worming her way into greater and greater significance in the story.
- A neat little paraphrased quote from Lev when someone asked if his role as Time's book critic ever played a part in his writing. I wish I had managed to record a bit more of the context for this one; it could use some elaboration, kinda cryptic right now: 'in order to get anything written, you have to convince yourself of this bizarre delusion that this will actually be read by other people.'
*A better example, had I thought of it, might have been my staunch refusal to rewatch Firefly while writing "Waterbug" out of this same fear...
