A Slip of the Keyboard (10 page)

I am pleased to tell you that my heart is holding out very well, but I now intend to write only one book a year. The trouble is that would give me spare time. My wife pointed out recently that the last time we went on holiday I wrote a quarter of a book in two weeks. Well, it was in Australia. It was great. You’d get up early, the birds were singing, there was a fridge full of cold beer, it was 6 a.m., the sun was out, so I sat and wrote, it was great fun. The place we go to in Australia is a little lodge up in the rain forest, but close to the sea. There are no kids and no dogs. Why not? Because the sharks eat them. If the sharks don’t get you, the saltwater crocodiles will have a go. And if the saltwater crocodiles don’t find you, the box jellyfish will. Come on in, the water’s heaving! We like the place. What we particularly like about it is the tennis court and golf course, because it doesn’t have them.

And I remember our first walk in the rain forest there. You go around the corner and there is a spider the size of the palm of your hand, bouncing in its web going
woingggg
. And what do you do? Well, you creep round, a long way round, like half a mile round if necessary. And we were climbing up this cliff, holding on to a rope, and it was starting to rain, and I was looking where I put my feet … and there was this big snake strangling a goanna. So I called down to the guide and said, “There’s a snake!” And he said, “What sort?” And I cried out, “I’m halfway up a cliff, it’s raining hard, I’m holding on to a rope, I’m beginning to slip, and I’m not going to play ‘What’s My Snake!’ but I think it’s a kind of python.” “Why do you think it’s a kind of python?” “Because the iguana’s eyes are going out like this … 
mwaa
.” And so he came up and said, “That’s all right, yeah, no worries, kick it into the bushes.” So we prodded it gently into the bushes. And that was my first walk in the Australian rain forest. And from that,
The Last Continent
came.

I remember the first time I went to Australia, flying over the Pacific in the middle of the night. The Pacific has these ultracumulus clouds
that grope for the sky—by moonlight they look like Marge Simpson’s hairstyle. I watched them for a while, sipping a brandy (this wasn’t the coach cabin, you understand) and all was quiet. Then I trotted along to clean my teeth before settling down and I caught sight of myself in the mirror and said: “What happened? Why should you be here? Thank goodness there’s no justice in the world!”

I feel like that right now.

Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.

Discworld Convention programme, 2004, titled “A Word from Terry on being 21”

So … here we are then. Twenty-one years. It’s been a good ride, no small children were hurt, and there wasn’t much screaming.

I’m not sure
why
twenty-one. We could have made a big fuss about the twenty-fifth book,
The Truth
, which had the advantage of being a bigger number, or maybe everyone could have waited another handful of years for the 50,000,000th sale, or ten years or so in case I manage the big golden Fiftieth Discworld book.

That’s a chilling thought. Already there are hulking great fans who got started by reading their parents’ Discworld collection. A couple of years ago I did a talk at a school where the
headmaster
recalled, as a student, queuing at a Discworld signing. That was unnerving. There are
families
of Discworld readers. Stay alive long enough, and the years just fall over.

But we’re stuck with this magic twenty-one, a legacy of the days when you had to wear short trousers until you had been shaving for five years. Twenty-one, then, and the best part of three million words.

The trouble is, I can’t remember a lot of it. I’m told I had fun. What I can remember is looking around the posh cabin of a 747 high over the Pacific, in the summer of 1990. People were sleeping. Outside there were huge towering clouds in the moonlight. Some hours ahead was my first Australasian tour. There was an orchid in a vase in the toilet. I looked at myself in the mirror and thought: This isn’t real, is it? Not really …

That general state of amazement has never left me. It’s followed me into Buckingham Palace, the halls of various universities, behind the scenes of the Library of Congress, and into innumerable bookshops: oh yes. At least a year and a half of those twenty-one years was spent sitting in bookshops. It followed me to Alice Springs and upriver in a rain forest in Borneo, where I did a small impromptu signing at a camp that rehabilitates orphaned orangutans back to the wild. (None of them joined in, but I signed three books for the British kids who’d just arrived there to work on various “green” projects; the baby orangs had better things to do, like pillage the carelessly
fastened knapsacks in the dormitories for anything edible, such as, e.g., toothpaste and vitamin pills.) My name’s been given to an extinct species of turtle, and various characters are commemorated in the Latin names of small plants and, I think, insects.

And all the time there’s been this slight feeling that it was happening to someone else.

I never took writing seriously. In fact, that’s not entirely true. I took writing very seriously, which was probably the right thing to do at the time. I read books that explained how hard it was to make any money from writing, and, seriously, journalism looked a much better bet. I wrote as a hobby and made some early sales, but the thought of trying to make a living from it never crossed my mind. (I was probably sensible. Then, as now, writing for most authors was buttressed by a
real
job that could be relied upon to pay the bills.)

When I found I
could
make a living—oh, that wonderful Saturday morning when I looked at the figures and realized that if I played my cards right I might never have to do an honest day’s work ever again—I never thought I’d get
rich
.

See? Life is what happens while you’re making other plans.

Maybe it’s time to make some plans now. Two books a year as a reliable thing? That is stopping, not gradually, but as from now. There isn’t the
time
anymore. The U.S. market has opened up. Everyone wants me to tour and, bluntly, two books a year get in one another’s way. They don’t get the review coverage because, well, Pratchett books are always
there
, a kind of biographical constant, and twice a year there’s a month of high stress when three books are happening all at once. One’s being started, one’s being proofed and edited (in two countries at once, now), and one’s due to be toured. It’s a juggling act. If anything goes wrong, it’s a train wreck. It’s dawned on me that I don’t need to do it, not every year. Within a few days of a book the readers, god bless ’em, ask: “What’s next in the pipeline?” There is no pipeline. It’s just me.

The children’s books will continue. They take as much time as the adult books, but they work, and a change is nearly as good as a rest. Nearly. Two more Tiffany Aching books are planned.

As for Discworld, it will carry on. One reason I started the children’s Discworld series was to give me a different area to play in, because “adult” Discworld is filling up. Granny Weatherwax may have a crotchety but lengthy life expectancy (magic seems to extend life and there’s no evidence that her own grandmother is dead) but Vimes is feeling the cold mornings these days. How much of a major overhaul would readers tolerate? Blow them, how much could I tolerate? Someone else running Ankh-Morpork? Or the Watch? Or Unseen University? I suspect there’s a few ghosts that won’t go away.

Fortunately, Discworld time moves slower than ours. But
Going Postal
will contain all-new major characters, because that’s what the plot requires. Next year’s book, which just has a working title right now (and that is not being divulged to anyone lest Amazon begin taking orders for it next week) is Watch-based and looking rather good. After that, I’m pleased to say, the future is a mysterious fog that might contain anything at all.

And then there’s been the fans, who write me letters and invite me to their weddings and without whose constant interest and advice I wouldn’t have a clue where I was going wrong. They know when to take the joke seriously and let it become more than a joke.

But what is a typical fan? Can you spot them? Some can. Those of you who standeth upon the face of the earth in queues, watch carefully next time as the local newspaper photographer enters the bookshop. Yes, he’s looking for the legendary Typical Terry Pratchett fan! Watch him pace up and down, past the people in suits, the people who look like someone’s mum or dad, the people who look like they have a job and are on their lunch hour. What’s this? Three hundred people in the queue and not one of them with the decency to wear a pointy hat?

Or, as one puzzled security man said, after watching a queue that had amiably refrained from doing the expected but curiously weird things for three hours, “They’re all so … so normal!”

To which I replied, “Oh, no, they’re not that bad.…”

It’s been fun. It is fun. Long may it be fun.

Thank you.

The Author
,
Winter 1993

My wife christened them Kevins. It’s quite unfair. It was just that … well … one day the post included three letters all from boys called Kevin, and she wrote “Kevins” on the small folder and somehow the name stuck.

So now, once a week or whenever I’m feeling guilty, I write replies to the Kevins. Many of them are female. Some of them are grandmothers. I’ve never really counted them. All I know is that I write almost 200,000 words, about two novels’ worth, of letters every year. Most of them are letters to Kevins.

They never tell you about this in those How to Write books. Make some time to write every day … 
yes
. Use one side of the paper only … 
yes
. But do they tell you how to deal with almost
thirty identical letters from Form 5A? No. Do they tell you how to reply to the man who accuses you of stealing his ideas by laser beam before he had time to write them down? Unaccountably not. Nor do they tell you that you might have to buy a guide to New Zealand to help identify badly written return addresses (you can make a reasonable stab at U.K. names like Newsquiggle-upon-Tyne, but almost anywhere in New Zealand that isn’t called Auckland or Wellington is called Rangiwangi … or at least looks as if it is).

I suppose all this comes under the heading of fan mail. As a genre author, I am probably perceived by my readers as “belonging” to them in a rather more direct way than, say, Martin Amis belongs to
his
readers—I effect, according to one reviewer, “a snug mindfit of opinion between reader and writer” (he meant it nastily—he was a
Sunday Times
man, after all).

So they don’t hesitate to ask for new titles featuring favourite characters. (“Dear Sir Arthur, Why not bring Sherlock Holmes back to track down Jack the Ripper …?”) Or for autographs. Or signed photographs. (This beats me. I mean who cares what an author looks like? You finish a book, perhaps the gripping narrative has left white-hot images snugly mindfitting into the brain—and then you turn to the back flap and there’s this short bald guy with a pipe.…)