| This page is where I will post information about coming/new books, interviews, events,
etc (basically whatever is of interest that people send me). Hope you find it useful. --Current info courtesy of Wiley Saichek, Promotion Manager for AuthorsOnTheWeb.com--
Interview with Terry Pratchett about The Amazing Maurice 1. What did you read when you were in your teens? I started out, as so many do, by reading all the sf I could get my hands on. And (as also happens a lot, although it's seldom acknowledge) the interest in reading that sf had awakened let me to read my way through the whole of the local public library. The one thing I didn't read in my teens was books for teens. 2. What first put the idea into your head that you would rewrite the story of the Pied Piper? I came up with the book title a long time ago, and it became just a one-line gag in an adult Discworld book. Then one day I just sat down and thought had about it and, being me, got hold of every book about rats I could find. I thought it was going to be a simple little fun story that'd take me a couple of months to write. Boy, was I wrong... 3. Discworld plots are fast, furious and knotty! When you begin writing, do you know where your going, or do you have to let Discworld take control and see where it takes you? I'm not sure about the 'furious and knotty'! And the answer deserves with one sentence or an essay. I'll try to summarise it like this: writing, for me, is a little like wood carving. You find the lump of tree (the big central theme that gets you started) and you start cutting the shape that you think you want it to be. But you find, if you do it right, that the wood has a grain of its own (characters develop and present new insights, concentrated thinking about the story opens new avenues) and if you're sensible you work with the grain and, if you come across a knot hole, you incorporate that into the design. A lot of things in Maurice 'weren't there' when I started; it'd be more true to say, though, that they were there, inherent in the basic story outline, and emerged as I worked through draft Zero, the one I write for myself to tell me how the story goes. This is not the same as 'making it up as you go along'; it's a very careful process of control. 4. "There's no subtext, no social commentary," complains Malicia about "Mr Bunnsy." Fantasy is often thought of as escapism, but is it escapism with a firm root in reality? Well, Malicia is a very knowing girl. She reads a lot. She's aware of the things we try to foist on kids via their reading. Fantasy IS escapism, but wait...why is this wrong? What are you escaping from, and where are you escaping to? Is the story opening windows or slamming doors? The British author G K Chesterton summarised the role of fantasy very well. He said its purpose was to take the everyday, commonplace world and lift it up and turn it around and show it to us from a different perspective, so that *once again* we see it for the first time and realise how marvellous it is. Sure, there's a lot of rubbish produced for kids, usually in order to get them to buy the merchandising, but fantasy per se -- the ability to envisage this world in many different ways -- is one of the skills that makes us human. 5. As a writer, do you spend too much time in Discworld to really enjoy other writers' fantasy worlds, or are there other favorite worlds that you enjoy escaping to? To paraphrase Captain James T. Kirk: no, I live in this world, I only *work* in Discworld! I do read enough to keep up with the genre but, in truth, a great deal of my reading these days if either non-fiction or right outside the genre, which is as it should be. 6. 'Maurice' is set in Discworld, which has already seen 26 adult books, yet it's aimed at a younger market. Why? In truth, it's aimed in theory at older children but in reality I'm quire sure that a lot of the adult readers will buy it. I already have quite a lot of cross-over readers, and I have written seven independent childrens/YA titles. A lot of authors who have created a successful series tend, eventually, to franchise it. I've franchise DW, but to myself: I've decided to try new things with it. 'Maurice' is 'canonical' with the adult series -- it's clearly in the same world -- but writing it specifically for children offers me new challenges and opportunities. One of them was to work harder on a book than I've ever worked before!
THE WEE FREE MEN - An interview with Terry Pratchett - 1. When you’re writing a new novel, do you "listen with your eyes" at the world about you, or does a character, or a voice come into your head? What happens to get you to sit down your desk and write the opening words of a new novel "I’m not sure. I start with a handful of semi-formed ideas and play around with them until they seem to make some sense. Actually typing is important to me – it kind of tricks my brain into gear. I’ve got a packrat mind, like most writers, and once I starting thinking hard about a new project all kinds of odd facts and recollections shuffle forward to get a place on the bus." 2. When you were writing The Amazing Maurice, you did a good deal of research into rats and admitted that "I think I have read, in the past few months, more about rats than is good for me." Now, can you tell us a little about researching those Wee Free Men … and did you have to get "a wee bittie sloshed" to do it? "Well, ‘no’ to that last question – I actually put some thought into giving the Feegles a language that sounded right, and you need to be sober for that! This time around I didn’t need to do a lot of primary research. It’d be more accurate to say I spent some time checking up to be absolutely certain about things that I remembered from my general reading over many years, like the Yan Tan Tethera (the shepherd’s counting system) and one or two old customs of the Chalk country. The Feegles were easy. They practically created themselves! I can’t stress this enough – the best research is probably the research you’re doing when you don’t think you’re doing research." 3. "[Tiffany] could put up with monsters. But she didn’t want to face mad boots." Do you have any particular – or peculiar - fears? "When I was a kid I was scared rigid of skeletons. So maybe you don’t have to have taken Psychology 101 to see why, in the adult Discworld series, I’ve made the skeletal Death almost a gentle figure." 4. In The Wee Free Men, Tiffany comments that where she lives there are "a lot of people with a lot to do. There wasn’t enough time for silence." Would this be as fair a comment from you about life for us all today as it is for Tiffany in the Chalk? "More so, I think. We’ve banished silence from our lives. We seem to fear it. We fill the world with noise. I’m sure it makes us ill. "The silence up on the Chalk that I mention in the book—well, we get that where I live. It doesn’t mean no sound at all, though. You hear the buzzards and the wind in the hedgerows and tractor sounds a long way off, and all of this gives the silence a kind of texture, makes it richer somehow." 5. When you won the Carnegie Medal last year, you commented that "It’s nice to see humor taken seriously." (Actually, you probably commented that "It’s nice to see humour taken seriously" but …) Is writing YA novels something we can look forward to you continuing, and might we meet Tiffany, or any other characters again in future books? "I’m playing with ideas for a sequel to TWFM, that’s certain. And that means the Feegles will be in it along with Tiffany. I’d like to follow her life for a while. But there are so many other things I want to do, too." 6. We note with admiration that in a UK national poll conducted by the BBC you have five titles in the list of 100 all-time ‘best loved’ books, the same number as Charles Dickens. Does that make you feel proud? "A bit. And puzzled, too. It’s only 4.5 titles, though, since one is Good Omens and as far as I know Charles Dickens has never worked with Neil Gaiman. But P.G. Wodehouse isn’t in there, which is strange. Still it was a poll of people’s personal favorites, not the books they objectively considered ‘the best’, so if you don’t like the answer, maybe it’s because you’ve asked the wrong question. "It’s interesting to try to work out what was going through the voters’ minds, though."
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