Below is the archive of fan provided transcripts from 2017 & 2018
2018 ECCC Q&A
Excerpts transcribed by redditor u/rhett115
The [beta] readers constantly will pick up on something where I’ll go, “Oh. No. This situation can’t be happening. Now I have to rethink this entire scene.”
I’ve actually had to do that a bunch on this book, because I’m tying together a bunch of stuff from earlier books. And being able to keep everything straight is just a nightmare! I’ve never written a fifteen book series before. I wish there was more people to talk to about it. There’s not very many of them! I think it kills them. Am I in danger? I don’t know!
About Marcone. Starts at roughly 1:23:11.
The thing about Marcone is, him doing his job as an Outfit boss, he would be considered kind of a very ideal leader, for much of world history, at least much of Western history. An Outfit boss and a medieval baron, there’s a very close correlation between those two guys’ jobs.
Marcone is a real fun character to write, because the problem with Marcone is that he’s too intelligent. Once you stop to think about things for a while, and really stop to analyze things, I think most people realize that the smart thing to do, at least in the long term, in almost every situation is also the morally right thing to do. Because in the long term, it benefits you more to do the morally right thing than to do the selfish thing. Almost every time. And it’s folks that are too short-sighted to understand that who you see running around doing a lot of the selfish stuff. And Marcone, unfortunately, he’s smart enough to realize, “The smartest thing for me to do is be an upstanding citizen. (Jim mimes looking around and sighing.) Here’s my criminal empire. I guess it’s a little late for that. And somebody has to run the crime. So I guess that’s me.”
So Marcone is an interesting character in my head, but he’s born in the wrong time. If he’d been born five hundred years earlier, he’d be an ideal leadership-type. They’d have pegged him for officer school, five hundred years before.
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