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.
*1 [later] And thus it happened—but not in the way I’d expected.
DISCWORLD TURNS 21
Discworld Convention programme, 2004, titled “A Word from Terry on being 21”
It rumbles along, the whole business. Once a book is finished it isn’t mine anymore; I stop thinking about it. But sometimes I look back.
Ten years have passed since I wrote this, and Granny is still going. Moist von Lipwig, who made his first appearance in Going Postal, has now been found in various places, and I think I shall shortly need someone who is not him. I really like Moist—he grew, just like Commander Vimes grew, although that was because Vimes had a child. Once there are children, you have different people. And so now, again, I’m looking at the old characters and wondering which new ones are going to strut onto the stage. Discworld changes, but it changes in its own way.
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.