Tiffany Aching

Terry Pratchett interview in Times

31 January 2009 (12:44) 1 Comment

An interview with Terry Pratchett published January 25 on TimesOnline.co.uk discusses his experience with Alzheimer’s in the past year and his recently awarded knighthood. To quote the article:

Sir Terry Pratchett cannot help wondering why it was this year - after 30 years as a bestselling writer - that he was honoured with a knighthood: ‘All I know is that on the citation it says ‘for services to literature’, and it would be nice to think that that got me the knighthood - though it may have been for what I stood up for and what I’ve done for Alzheimer’s.’ All in all, Pratchett is treating his recent knighthood with modesty: ‘I am 60. I know exactly who I am,’ he says. ‘I am just me - which is why it’s slightly amusing to be addressed by the postman as ‘Sir Terry”….

When he describes living with Alzheimer’s as ‘a minor flaw in a good, though complicated, year - without it, it would have been a fairly anodyne one’, you can’t help feeling he is underselling his recent literary achievements. Nation, his new book, was an instant bestseller; his Discworld series celebrated its 25th anniversary; and he was at work on two new titles: Unseen Academicals and I Shall Wear Midnight….

“As a science-fiction writer, [knighthood] is an achievement. Despite its popularity, sci-fi is still a ghetto genre. So when a hand of welcome comes from the Establishment, you can do nothing but shake it.”

New Discworld miniatures of Death, Weatherwax, Vimes, Ogg, Rincewind

27 December 2008 (17:45) Comment!

Micro Art Studio is now issuing a series of Discworld miniatures. Miniatures of Death, Granny Weatherwax, Sam Vimes, Nanny Ogg, and Rincewind are already available.

Miniatures of Nobby Nobbs and the Luggage are planned.

The miniatures are based on the artwork of Paul Kidby. According to Micro Art Studio, the miniatures are “30 mm scale high quality metal cast” miniatures and are sold unpainted.

Retro News: Pratchett on Washington Post chat (01 Oct. 2008)

13 December 2008 (17:30) Comment!

Terry Pratchett chatted with Washington Post readers on Wednesday, Oct. 1st on Book World Live for a discussion about his most recent children’s book, Nation. To quote the full transcript:

Terry Pratchett: Hello, it’s Terry Pratchett, here to talk about my book Nation, and anything else. Except cookery, or mathematics. I’d like to start by thanking the Washington Post for the wonderful review in Book World. It’s nice when people spot the little twiddly bits. I was pleased to see that. The reviews have been very encouraging around the globe.

Houston, TX : How did you get the idea for Nation?

Terry Pratchett: I wish I knew, because if I did I would go back to the same place with a bucket. The initial idea and the image of Mau standing on the beach defying his gods came to me instantly, late in 2003, and it hung around for a long time…. what I originally had in mind was something like the explosion of Krakatoa, and the shipwreck of the Sweet Judy is very loosely based on a real event that happened after the volcano exploded.

Woodbridge, Va.: The Washington Post review of your book says that it deals with “fundamental questions about religious belief.” Are you a man of faith?

Terry Pratchett: Certainly I have no faith in Jehovah, although I think it quite likely that Jesus Christ, as a preacher and a wise man, did indeed exist. I think possibly the ending of Nation pretty much outlines what I think. Indeed, the whole of Nation outlines what I think, which is that if you do your best for your fellow man, then the issue of the gods is somewhat superfluous.

Falls Church, Va: … I have two questions: What is your favorite Discworld Book? More importantly, how young an adult is your “Young Adult Novel” appropriate for? My 12 year old son is a decent reader for a 7th grader. Do you think the book would be appropriate for him?

Terry Pratchett: I would say that I have done my best writing in the Tiffany Aching series, which are technically Discworld books, although they are meant for children.

Among the adult books, Nightwatch [sic] must be my favourite.

The question of age and suitability is a hot one here in the UK, where authors are banding together to stop publishers’ age-banding children’s/YA books. That is to say, they want to include advice like “suitable for a child of 7 1/2″ on the cover of the book. The reason this is a very hit-and-miss message is that it all depends on the child. I think I had read all the James Bond books that were available by the time I was 12, and you have to remember that a book like Pilgrim’s Progress was once considered a perfect Sunday afternoon for children of 7 or so. If a kid is bright and questioning, and really interested in the world, they will find a lot for them in Nation. Equally, I imagine there’s one or 2 adults that won’t get it!

Gaithersburg, MD: How are you feeling?

Terry Pratchett: I’m feeling good.

I think I feel a question that no one is quite asking here.

Yes, I have PCA, which is a rare variant of Alzheimer’s. Right now, its main effect on me is to mess up my typing skills, and also to make my spelling inaccurate — I mean to the point where I might actually fail to remember how to spell a simple 5-letter word just as I am about to type it. these [sic] things are a nuisance, and certainly slow down my work rate. But to some extent, technology can help. There is no cure. PCA is a strange thing, and no one is taking any guesses about how long I shall be able to keep working like this. My personal view is that the sheer grind of writing will get me down long before there’s still plenty of room for me to enjoy things in life. Oddly enough, the ability to plot and invent dialogue and characters seems to be totally untouched. It is worth pointing out that Nation, in its entirety, was written by a guy with PCA. I did not know that I had it until the late fall of last year, but throughout that year I had been putting down the problems of typing, etc. to other things, senior moments and just general aging. To put it bluntly, you would have to know me very well, and possibly even be familiar with PCA, to suspect that I was anything other than an average 60-year old guy.

Wallace, N.C: You once wrote a short story about a female King Arthur (Queen Ursula) and Mervin (a geeky Merlin). Have you ever thought about returning to that particular story and finding out how the Table is different? (Speaking as a huge female fan of Arthurian legend, I have always wondered what would happen after Ursula pulled the sword out of the stone! She was a very impressive character.)

Terry Pratchett: Thank you! I was very pleased with that short story and had planned, which circumstances are likely to derail, to extend it into a novel. Since Merlin was a time traveller, I did wonder if we would end up with something like an Elizabethan age several centuries ahead of its time. There are so many ways it could have gone. Nevertheless, it was quite good fun doing it as a straight short story, just to introduce the idea.

Washington, D.C.: You hail from the nation that built a global colonial empire, but also wrote the Magna Carta and fought both Napoleon and Hitler. One theme that seems to run through many of your novels is the conception that good is relative but evil is the absolute inability to care about other living things, be they golems, people, or cats. Are there any specific religious beliefs, philosophical texts, or life events that shaped this conviction?

Terry Pratchett: See my earlier answer about being a reader. It was SF and fantasy that got me reading, and SF writers in particular have pack rat minds. They introduce all sorts of interesting themes and ideas into their books, and so for me it was a short leap to go from the F and SF genres to folklore, mythology, ancient history and philosophy. I did not read philosophy because I set out to become a philosopher; I read it because it looked interesting. All I am really promoting in the books is the Golden Rule, which I hope everybody knows to be “do as you would be done by.” It has one or 2 flaws, but it is a good soundbite. Evil starts when you treat other people as things. There are perhaps worse crimes, but they begin when you treat other people as things.

Manchester, UK: When I had the pleasure of meeting you at the DWCON in Birmingham this year, you said you were a little unsure of the book on the whole - you weren’t sure whether to tweak it somewhat, etc, and what the reaction from your fans was going to be with it being so completely unlike anything you’ve done before. After Nation was released and became a top seller (again!) and the reviews have been wonderful - Do you feel any differently towards it now?

Terry Pratchett: … Somebody once said that books are not finished, they just escape. I probably spent five months doing the final rewrites and edits of Nation. It was so long because I tend to be very “big brush” on the early drafts. I look at it now and see places where I could have improved it, but in reality, I would probably have had to put in 100% more work for 1% improvement.

Philadelphia, Pa.: Do you have a writing process? About how long do you think about your storyline before you put it down on paper? How much of writing is rewriting?

Terry Pratchett: Good one. Nation was written in a very strange way. I was doing draft 5 of the first few chapters when I was on draft 1 of the ending. In a sense, it was written in a way more suitable to painting; in effect I was working on the whole thing all the time.

Generally I start writing when I have even the smallest idea of how a book is going to go, because the physical process of writing itself keeps the mind active and focused on the job at hand. Usually I write in about 5 drafts, but that simply means there are 5 definite times when I go in a linear fashion from the beginning to the end of the book.

Terry Pratchett also talked about his Alzheimer’s and a book he is currently working on, which he says is set on the Discworld and follows an almost completely new suite of characters.

The Illustrated Wee Free Men, coming this October

17 April 2008 (18:47) Comment!

An illustrated version of the first novel in the Tiffany Aching children’s series, Wee Free Men, is now available for pre-order on Amazon.co.uk. (There is also a page for this illustrated version of the novel on the American version of the site, although pre-ordering is not yet available there.) This new edition is to be titled The Illustrated Wee Free Men, and according to Amazon.co.uk, will number 256 pages. To quote the synopsis:

‘They can tak’ oour lives but they cannae tak’ oour trousers!’  When the Queen of Fairyland steals away Tiffany Aching’s young brother, Tiffany has to do something.  Helped by the Nac Mac Feegle–the thievin’, fightin’, stealin’ pictsies known as the Wee Free Men–she steps through into another world…. This is a terrific adventure set on the Discworld, filled with Terry Pratchett’s inimitable wit, style and invention–and this new gift edition includes extra new material to give real added value for fans.

The U.K. publishing date is set for October 6, 2008, while the American publishing date is set for October 28.

National Book Festival webcast online

23 November 2007 (14:08) Comment!

Terry Pratchett’s appearance at the National Book Festival in September has been released online as a webcast on the Library of Congress website. In the half-hour speech and question-answer session, Pratchett talks about his coming books:
• Nation is “the book I’m working on now and don’t propose to tell you anything about,” a large part of which is written already. Interestingly, Pratchett describes the image that inspired the plot of the book: A boy, standing on a rainy beach, looking out to sea.
• I Shall Wear Midnight, the 4th Tiffany Aching book, is in the planning stage. Pratchett tells the audience, tongue-in-cheek, that Tiffany Aching will murder someone in the book.
• He’s interested in writing more children’s books after I Shall Wear Midnight, which will be the last Tiffany Aching children’s book.
He makes some general observations about writing:
• “Adult books give you money, children’s books give you prestige.”
• “The writing is some kind of big stainless steel bulldozer of some sort which just keeps going, and it drags me with it, usually banging my head on stones and things like that. Curiously enough, it’s a lot of fun.”
• “The way to describe a character is not with two pages about that character. The way to describe a character is to give them mannerisms, ways of talking and acting. Because we human beings have a lot in common about the way we judge people, remember people, [and] think about people, I put in the little triggers which will make you think subconsciously, ‘ah, that kind of guy.’ So the back-story tends to happen of its own accord.”
And he comments on the live-action adaptations of Hogfather and The Colour of Magic:
• “I loved the movie of Hogfather. What I really liked about it was the car chase. There wasn’t one…. [Hogfather] was true to the book. It was true to the soul of the book.”
• A scene in The Colour of Magic, where Rincewind and Twoflower escape from Death’s own dimension, pursued by Death on Binky, has been filmed.

Colour of Magic film info, another book to feature Moist?

2 November 2007 (11:18) 2 Comments

Terry Pratchett made a recent appearance at Barnes & Noble in Union Square as part of his Making Money promotional tour. You can see his speech on the Barnes & Noble site as a webcast. Terry Pratchett (wearing one black glove!) explains how he had a stroke but never noticed, how writing has helped him through hard times, and how “plots work much better when you run them backwards.” There are lots of other tidbits which we have here.

The Colour of Magic film:
• Sean Astin plays Twoflower “absolutely wonderfully.”
• The actor who plays the Patrician will not be announced until the release of the film.
• David Bradley is “absolutely magnificent” as Cohen the barbarian.
• The fire at the Broken Drum has been filmed.
Other films:
• Michelle Dockery played Susan “superlatively well” in Hogfather.
• “The Wee Free Men movie might happen.” The script needs work, but the three-and-a-half hour conference with Sam Raimi “means something.”
• “Mort is stirring in the mud.”
Writing:
• I Shall Wear Midnight will be the next, and probably last, Tiffany Aching book.
• Another book featuring Moist von Lipwig, called Raising Taxes, is beginning to form, though Pratchett hasn’t started writing it yet.
• The Folklore of Discworld is in the works.
• Terry Pratchett considers Wintersmith the best book he’s ever written.
• He doesn’t want to write any more time travel stories.
• Revisiting older characters like Rincewind or the witches is “always possible,” but we will probably not see the Silver Horde again.

For more detail and some well-told anecdotes, please watch the webcast; it’s well worth your hour.

Wintersmith wins 2007 Locus Award

26 June 2007 (10:06) Comment!

As we reported earlier, the winners of the 2007 Locus Awards were announced June 16, in Seattle. Locus magazine readers, we’re proud to say, voted Wintersmith (third in the Tiffany Aching series) the best Young Adult Book. This is Terry Pratchett’s third award in the same category, as both of Wintersmith’s prequels received the same honor. Pratchett beat out two other well-known children’s fantasy authors, Garth Nix and Ursula K. Le Guin, for the award.

Reminder: Wintersmith’s possible Locus win

15 June 2007 (21:18) Comment!

Soon we will find out how Wintersmith (third in the Tiffany Aching series, by Terry Pratchett) fared in the 2007 Locus Awards, at the awards ceremony (to be held June 16 in Seattle). Readers should be reminded that the award was a voters’ choice award, though voting is closed and the winners in each category are already determined, though unannounced. The possible winners in the Young Adult Book category (for which Wintersmith is competing) include Sir Thursday (Garth Nix) and Voices (Ursula K. Le Guin).

Wintersmith: 2007 Mythopeic Award finalist

10 June 2007 (17:18) Comment!

The Mythopeic Society has released the list of finalists for the 2007 Mythopeic Awards. Wintersmith (third in the Tiffany Aching series) has a place on the Mythopeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature finalist list, along with Diana Wynne Jones’s The Pinhoe Egg and others. According to the site, the Children’s Literature award is given to books for younger readers “in the tradition of The Hobbit or The Chronicles of Narnia.” The winners this year will be announced during MythCon XXXVIII (Aug. 3-6, 2007, in Berkeley, California). Good luck to Wintersmith in the final selection process!

A Hat Full of Sky: Boy book

25 May 2007 (21:27) Comment!

As part of an effort to encourage reading in teenage boys, Education Secretary Alan Johnson of the UK released a list of the top books for boys to read May 16. Secondary schools have the chance to choose 20 books free from the 160-book list. At 103 on the list is Terry Pratchett’s A Hat Full of Sky, second in the Tiffany Aching series.

Wintersmith: Locus Awards finalist

22 April 2007 (12:40) Comment!

Locus Online has released the lists of top five contenders in each category in the 2007 Locus Awards. In the Young Adult Book category, Wintersmith (third in the Tiffany Aching series) is one of the contenders, along with Sir Thursday by Garth Nix and Voices, by Ursula K. Le Guin. Voting is closed, and the winner has already been decided (though unannounced). The winners will be announced June 16, in Seattle at the Locus Awards Ceremony.

Wintersmith loses Nibbies

1 April 2007 (11:29) Comment!

Wintersmith unfortunately lost the best children’s book of the year British Book Award to Ricky Gervais. The Awards will be broadcast on Friday, channel 4, at 8 p.m. in the UK.

Wintersmith: Nibbies contender

28 March 2007 (11:19) Comment!

The Galaxy British Book Awards this year has shortlisted Terry Pratchett’s third Tiffany Aching book, Wintersmith for best children’s book of the year. Wintersmith’s contenders this year include Flanimals in the Deep, a book by television comedian Ricky Gervais. Though voting is now closed, the winner will be announced on the Galaxy British Book Awards (also known as the Nibbies) site later tonight. The Awards will also be broadcast on Friday, channel 4, at 8 p.m. in the UK.

Terry Pratchett and Discworld

24 March 2007 (10:58) Comment!

Adelaide Now released a new article on Terry Pratchett and his books, with several insights into Terry Pratchett’s “gentle satire” and his attitude toward Australia. The article also puts an interesting new perspective on Ankh-Morpork, calling it a parody of “Oliver Twist’s London.” To quote the article:

The city, which is a sort of parody of Oliver Twist’s London with the addition of trolls, dwarfs, zombies, werewolves, scientific wizards, an orang-utan and Death, gives the humanist social observer in Pratchett the room to roam and to comment on modern life without actually pointing a finger or causing offence.

“If you can accept the fact that the trolls and dwarfs and fairies and all the other creatures of mythology are actually real and are, along with the people, in a sort of Dickens’ London, all grubbing away trying to make a dollar, then you can understand Discworld,” he says of his creation. And although the characters and situations in his books might not exactly be the everyday type, the resolutions are always well considered and, well, human.

“While it sounds like a huge heap of undirected fantasy, you can do so many things with it,” he says. “Like, you can look at race relations, but because it’s between trolls and dwarfs you can have that bit of distance - it draws the sting. However, the logic has to work.

“None of that, ‘Ho, landlord, a pint of your finest ale!’ ” he mimics, raising his own bottle to emphasise the point.

The article also includes a small tidbit of Wintersmith for those fans who haven’t read it yet.