Hey everyone, thanks again for these questions - really high-caliber stuff. And they say never to read the comments!

PS awesome username - I am sad I'm unable to steal it.

Re Russell's return to Black Arts - it wasn't a PR stunt because, basically Russell doesn't have that knack for PR that Darren and Simon did - he just didn't have rockstar gene. Plus, Darren/Lisa/Don are a little ambivalent about having him back - they were the ones who built Black Arts, while Russell was off…

(just noticed io9 is doing The Shining Girls next - go Mulholland Books! We are on a streak)

Cool - you can message me on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/austin.grossma…

It's always tricky for me deciding what character to play in a video game - a weird combo on my mood and the game mechanics on offer. I always have his feeling that in fantasy RPG's the Thief feels like an extra class, an afterthought, not given fun game mechanics. If I were a fantasy RPG thief (and I'm not saying…

The first round of drafts were done by Dan Weiss - who is now famous as the co-creator of Game of Thrones (go Dan!). He did a lot of the necessary re-shaping of the story to fit the 2 hour format, and I took it from there.

Awesome question!

Hi and yes, you are spot on.

The climactic moment in-game was more explicit in a previous draft...I pulled back...a reader observed that I like the phrase "Decapitation Vacation" maybe a little to much. But perhaps I went too far? Maybe I'm too much a fan of ambiguity.

(ps Ice Station Impossible is just the name of my old blog...and I stole it - it's really the name of an episode of Venture Bros...)

Great question! First off, I will cop to having played a hell of a lot of Skyrim in the course of writing YOU.

Hey there and no apologies necessary!

I agree about Gabby - she deserved more time onstage, but the book was simply too long - I was aiming for 90,000 words and ended up with 110,000, so a bunch of chapters were cut.

So in the tournament, Russell is knocked out by Simon - Simon has Mournblade by that point but no one's seen him use it yet - he stealths in and kills Russel's leader, but it happens too fast for Russel to catch.

The best answer is probably the middle of Chapter 8 - first age childhood (primal, high magic), second age high school (conflict and heroic deeds), third age college (assessing the damage in a world shaped by prior conflicts) . And fourth age everything else - a magic-less world of mundane, unglamorous civilization. …

(More as the typing continues - I'll bang these out amidst the other answers. Thanks for jumping in on this)

Tackling these as I go - the time jumps were tricky, I admit. It's a writing tic that I play with time a lot. I will say - the revelations about hacking came out the same day as the Simon/Darren fight, and yes, Simon was preemptively stopping Darren from handing Lisa the blame. I decided, pretty much by fiat, that…

Thanks Emilio. It was a tricky move, kicking that stuff off without clearly signalling a shift into a different level of fiction. Messing with levels of reality is just flat-out fun and followed the subject matter of the book. I trusted readers to take it in a playful spirit, roll with it, and by and large they did.

Hello all - just telling you I'm on the board and tackling questions! Typing away...