It’s late here. There was a time where 11pm was when my evening would just be getting started, but those days are long gone. Those days are also the reason I know time travel will not be invented within my lifetime, as future me hasn’t gone back in time to punch past me in the beanbag.

I’ll let you know if that ever happens.

Some of the best writing I’ve done has been late at night when everyone else is asleep, also some of the worst.

I’ve been thinking a lot about writing and what it means to me in the context of my longer fiction, the stuff I write here and the things I wrote for my day job. I’ve been thinking about it since Sir Terry Pratchett died. I can say with some certainty that if it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t have started writing genre fiction, I wouldn’t have found out about Lovecraft and this comic might not exist.

Or maybe it would. Life works out weird a lot of the time.

Maybe it’s more accurate to say that reading Terry Pratchett’s work made me not only appreciate his wit, wisdom and turn of phrase but it made me appreciate all other writing more as well. I’d enjoyed books before I read my first Discworld novel (Interesting Times for those who want to know), but Pratchett was the first time I’d really been floored by how much I loved a book, by how much the world drew me in and how well the author treated me while I was there. He made me appreciate footnotes*.

When I started to dig into the The Annotated Pratchett I found a whole new level of appreciation for the things he did and how he did them. I was even lucky enough to meet him once, whereupon he asked what I’d done**.

A lot of people have contributed to my love of books, from my parents to my wife, but Terry Pratchett did as much as anyone. I owe him an incalculable debt.

I’ll leave this post with a quote from one of Sir Terry’s books and a link to an interesting project:

“A man is not dead while his name is still spoken.”

– Going Postal, Chapter 4 prologue

Goodbye Sir Terry. Your name is still spoken.

– Andrew

* I hadn’t even considered them before reading the Discworld novels. I don’t always put them into the things I write, but I always at least think about it.

** I was carrying flowers and chocolates for my then girlfriend/now wife and was buying her the Wee Free Men as a present. I hadn’t done anything wrong, but it never hurts to buy your significant other a book. Normally I’d put up a link to the Wee Free Men, but it doesn’t seem right this time. I have faith that you’ll be able to find it if you want to.