Focus on a planet revolving in space:

Focus in on a small country in the northern hemisphere – Great Britain.

Closer, closer… and on the western edge of London you can see the county of Buckinghamshire. Small villages and winding country roads.

And if you could go back in time to the mid 1960s, you might spot a young lad on a motorbike coming down one such lane, notebook and pen in his jacket pocket.

10th APRIL-SALISBURY- : Terry Pratchett. ( Photo by Graeme Robertson ) Photograph: Graeme Robertson

This is me. A junior reporter for the Bucks Free Press, sent out to cover stories on local events. If I was lucky, I would be going to something like a village fair – you know the kind of thing: men putting weasels down their trousers, people bobbing for frogs in a bucket, the odd cheese rolling too fast down a hill…

It was a lot of fun back then. And somewhere in the middle of it I taught myself how to write by reading as many books as I could carry home from the library. So then I began writing stories of my own – stories for young readers that were published every week in the newspaper.

The stories in this collection are a selection of those. There are dragons and wizards, councillors and mayors, an adventurous tortoise and a monster in a lake, along with plenty of pointy hats and a few magic spells (a few of which actually do what they are supposed to). Some of these early stories even spawned into my first novel, The Carpet People.

So, turn the page and read the stories that I wrote as a teenager, mostly as they were first printed, although the grown-up me has tinkered just a little with a few fine details – the odd tweak here, a pinch there, and a little note at the bottom where needed and all because the younger me wasn't as clever back then as he turned out to be.

But that naive young lad on the motorbike, and the grown-up me with my black hat and beard are the same person – and all we both ever wanted to do was write for people who are old enough to understand.

And to imagine…

Terry Pratchett, Wiltshire, 2014