Question 1: Will Tomas appear in any of the upcoming Cassie books?
I usually ignore questions that specifically ask for spoilers, but since I’ve already answered this question in interviews, I don’t suppose it will hurt to repeat it here. Yes, you will be seeing Tomas again.
Question 2: What is that blood-covered, Giger-esque thing doing on your website?
Hanging out, having a few beers with his buddies, torturing a few lost souls… You know, the usual.
Actually, what happened was that I needed a website. I was a new author with a book coming out, and it’s almost expected these days that you’ll have some kind of web presence. But I’m not a web designer and I had little money to hire one, so it was a bit of an issue. I finally found a very nice artist who was willing to do it for what I could afford to pay. I told her I wanted Dante’s casino, because even though it had a very small presence in TTD, I knew it was going to play an important role in the series. But I don’t think she quite understood what I was talking about (go ahead, try to explain it to someone who hasn’t read the books.) I also don’t think she was entirely clear on who this “Dante” guy was, because Big Red there was her version. Anyway, beggars can’t be choosers, and since I loved most of it, I just…left Big Red alone. I don’t bother him, he doesn’t bother me and we get along okay. But don’t piss him off.
Question 3: In both the Dory stories and the Cassie stories, Faery is depicted as what reminds me of medieval times…swords, taverns, horses, public flogging, magic. Why haven’t the Fae evolved into something more modern? Do they like horse droppings all over the place?
The reason our world doesn’t look the same way was the development of technology. Before the Industrial Revolution, the way we lived was substantially agrarian, and did include many of the things you list above. But then factories showed up. And suddenly, we needed huge cities to house a big enough workforce to staff the factories. We needed polluting energy sources like coal and oil to run the machines in the factories. We needed railroads, and later superhighways, to get the produce of the factories to market. And we needed to live on a set schedule to get to our shifts on time (nobody had wristwatches before the Industrial Revolution because they didn’t need to know exactly what time it was).
Now, assume a society has magic. They don’t need technology, since magic, in a real sense of the word, is their technology. Why build superhighways when you can take a portal and be there instantly? Why dig up the earth and pollute the water searching for energy sources when you already have one? Why live in dangerous, overcrowded, noisy cities when you don’t have to for your job? My point is that, if we had magic, our world would likely look substantially different than it does today. The Fey have always had it, and the way their world looks reflects that.
Question 4: Since most of the magical community was watching the coronation and accompanying snogging between Cassie and Pritkin after Cassie aged the dragon to ash, did the community also see Pritkin disappear?
By the time Pritkin left, the Senate, Circle and their invited guests had descended on the scene, and the resulting chaos made it highly unlikely that anybody noticed much of anything. Besides, even if someone had, there were ley lines in the area—that’s how Pritkin got there so quickly—and they would have just assumed that he stepped into one of them.