My night with Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett took one look at me and decided he needed a drink right away.

I’m assuming that this was a mere coincidence and that the phrase “send the ice water NOW” wasn’t code for “I need tequila immediately or I’m never going to get through this.”

On the other hand, I do tend to have that effect on men, so it could have been me. (Well, maybe her too.)

Confession time: I did not spend the whole evening in the company of Mr. Pratchett, neither were we alone very long. There were a couple hundred people packed into the book signing area at Powell’s that night. Mostly harmless. The woman next to me regaled me with talk of her very strange cat, who apparently has to spend most of his time on anti-depressants. (Yeah, I know, like you want to hear about that. Stop dithering, Mary.)
Pratchett came to Beaverton to promote his latest Discworld book, Making Money, but he also talked a lot about his latest children’s book, Wintersmith. In his opinion, this was the best book he’s ever written. (And considering he’s written over 50 books, that’s saying something.) He said he chose the heroine’s name Tiffany, because it was the “most non-magical name” he could think of. He said it sounded like a woman who was a pole dancer. Then he turned to a little girl in the first row and gravely said, “when you get home, be sure to ask your mummy what a pole dancer is.”

He seemed a lot more tired than from when I’d seen him last (it’s been a few years). He spoke about the death of his father, his mother’s illness, his own angioplasty, and how he’d kept writing throughout. It was as if a part of him were detached from all the things that were going wrong in his life, a part of him that stood back and wrote about what was happening.

From the part of the talk that he called “Questions and Lies,” here are some of the things that I remember:

• He said he read mostly non-fiction. To him, reading fiction was like a car maker looking at a car; you keep thinking about it in terms of how it was assembled. The fiction he read was George McDonald Fraser, Donald Westlake, Carl Hiassen. The non-fiction he was currently reading was A history of pigment, which sounds like the dullest book in the world, but has some fascinating (he said it) information about how we perceive color.
• He has no plans to write a final Discworld book; the stories have developed to the point where it would not be possible to wrap everything up in one book.
• A tall red-headed man in the audience asked if Carrot would ever claim the kingship of Ankh-Morpork. Pratchett said he thought not, but if Carrot did, there would instantly be a civil war, with Vimes on the opposing side.
• He writes by listening to two characters talk; he writes down what they say. Most of these conversations doesn’t necessarily appear in the book, but it tells him about the story.
• Someone asked if he would ever work with Neil Gaiman again on a book. Pratchett thought it would be good and bad to try another collaboration. It would be faster, certainly. In the old days, when they wrote Good Omens, they tried “modem-to-modem” communication, but it was slow and frustrating. In the end, they just ended up trading floppy disks back and forth. On the other hand, both he and Gaiman were a lot more time-crunched these days. “In the old days, he wasn’t ‘Neil Gaiman’ and I was barely ‘Terry Pratchett.’ Now, I’d have to clear six months from my schedule.” My own impression was that he had books he wanted to write, and collaboration wasn’t really high on the list of things he wanted right now.

Powell’s was so packed that they ran out of books (and they’d brought out quite a lot initially). I managed to get one of the last seats, because I was half an hour early, but people were thronged all around the seating area. I think Pratchett was, understandably, a bit intimidated by the thought of signing that many books. He told me to tell OH not to feel too bad about missing him in Kepler’s; apparently they’d run out of books even earlier than Powell’s.

Yes, I did get my picture taken with him, but the guy taking the picture had a lot of trouble with my camera. He kept telling me my batteries were dead, so by the time he actually managed to snap a photo, I had my eyes closed and Pratchett was inscribing a note in the book. Besides, we ain’t all photogenic like Jen-T. So you’ll have to use your imagination. Somehow, I don’t think this will be a problem.

97 comments September 29th, 2007