Love Hurts is a short story from my new Dresden Files anthology Side Jobs (originally in Songs of Love and Death, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois). It takes place between Turn Coat and Changes.

Gardner Dozois has a bunch of awards for his anthologies because he’s good at them, and I leapt at his invitation to contribute to the anthology he was working on with George R. R. Martin, originally titled Star-Crossed Lovers. Despite my enthusiasm, finding a starting point for a Dresden story was sort of a puzzler for me, since Harry Dresden might be in the top three Star-Influence-Free lovers in the whole contemporary-fantasy genre. How was I going to bring him into a story with a theme like that?

Answer: Get him into the thick of things next to Murphy when seemingly random love spells are running amok through the city. After that, all I had to do was apply his usual streak of luck and cackle madly to myself while typing. The title of the anthology changed to Songs of Love and Death after I had written the story, which is probably a good thing. Otherwise, I may have tried to find a way to fit a death-metal battle of the bands into the margins somewhere. No one deserves that.