My thoughts on the passing of Terry Pratchett.

Sir Terry Pratchett has died. I’m very sad about this – surprisingly sad.

Don’t get me wrong – I find death can be a very sad occasion but it is a necessary one and one that is a unique experience to none of us. I don’t know why I’m so saddened by this person’s death. I didn’t know him. I’ve never so much as met him in passing. I didn’t follow him particularly. I knew little about his life. My daily routine won’t be affected by the fact that he’s not around any more.

I do like his writing though. I did wonder if I’m just being selfish and sad because there will be no more Discworld books for me to read. The truth is that’s part of it. It was nice to know there could always be more and it is sad to know that now there will not be, although that had been off the cards for quite a while now.
Pratchett’s writings ushered me into adolescence and manhood and I still maintain that of all the fictional characters I’ve read, Terry’s collections of witches, trolls, wizards, werewolves, anthropomorphical entities, deities, and other creatures are the most human I’ve ever read. They are fantastical creatures flawed, half the time, in such boring ways that they just feel so real.

Growing up, I tried my hand at writing. In fact, I devoted huge swathes of my time to it. Most nights I sat up way past my bedtime hunched over my little Psion palmtop computer, under the duvet, typing away furtively by the light of its screen.
I have pages and paged of unfinished novels, short stories, and filling several notebooks with ideas for plots, characters, and scenarios from my teenaged mind and he was the kick. He was a spur and a goal post each time. He was very often consciously in my mind as I wrote and reading back through some of it, this is embarrassingly obvious.
His books shaped the way I think in some ways and are certainly present to some degree in the things I find funny. The Coggingtons may well not exist without seeds dropping from Terry's imagination and implanting and germinating within my own.

But I haven’t yet gotten round to reading half the books he has written so I’ve a wealth of reading to do before I need to worry about there being no more for me to read.

Maybe it’s because it had been reassuring to know the mind that gave life to this wonderful collection of people, fictional though they were, was still ticking over and giving them fresh breath.
But more than that, I think it just felt nice to know that mind was out there; one that seemed to understand what it was to be human so well, and was able to continually synthesise it into heartbreakingly hilarious prose. It felt like each new book might shed more light on life.

Terry just seemed to get it.

And now I’m not sure there’s anyone out there who does.

I'm sure he was bluffing it just like the rest of us, but it felt like he knew. Either way, he wrote about it well.

I’m feeling inspired to start huddling under my duvet with my laptop at night again, to see if I can’t at least have a bash at figuring it out.

‪#‎TerryPratchett‬

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Where's a Warrior Without Her Pride?

When I was a teenager, I wrote a lot. I started a lot of stories and finished very few of them. Some of them were awful. Just bad.

Some of them, however, I think had promise. I had big ideas for a series of novels that would all interlink at various points in time, space, and character and be part prose, part graphic novel. 

For some reason, I was reminded of this one the other day - one that was meant to start such a series that would have one story now, and then pick up the themes and maybe some characters or places much later.This is the start of a story that I started when I was 17 and I added to it periodically until I was about 19 and discovered going out and girls, and then university. I got as far in as writing about 50 A4 pages before I added no more, so as it stands, the story is incomplete but I thought I'd share the intro, the first 2 pages of it, here. 

This is about 12 years old, so please be gentle with it. I haven't altered so much as a punctuation mark from when this was last saved to my old laptop in 2002.What do you reckon? Should I pick this up again?

This is the beginning of, "Where's a Warrior Without Her Pride".

    There she stood, stripped to the waist, waiting. Silence pressed down, heavy as a wet pelt rug spread over the scene. The quick, tight pat of the drums had long faded and the chants had reached their high fevered climax moments ago giving way to the soft voice of the wind.
Crushing terror beat about her like an enormous winged thing, threatening to capture her, but she instead caught it and leashed it and brought it under her control until its only freedom was in the sweat that broke out over the girl’s tanned exposed skin.
The chattering of the crowd at her back dulled to a murmur as the shaman and Gaideon, the leader of the warriormages, stepped to behind her. Area tightened her grip on the stakes. A drop of blood appeared below her palm and hung for a moment before dropping into the dust. Swallowing despite her dry mouth and ever-present threat of vomit, she closed her eyes tightly, shutting out her town which rose before her. She concentrated on sensing nothing; not the sun searing her bare back, not the low murmurs of the watchers she could not see, not the agony that was now almost upon her. For long moments, silence reigned.
Making formal declarations in the Old Tongue that Area would have understood if she’d been concentrating on them, the two highly respected men took their positions, beside each other, directly behind the girl. Area heard the curt scuff of their footsteps coming to a stop on the dirt. The time had come. Her breathing became quick and shallow and the sweat ran down her body in glistening rivulets. She adjusted her weight on her feet a little and braced herself.
Still murmuring in the Old Tongue, both men linked hands then extended their free arms towards Area. There was a static hum, then suddenly, flashes of blue-white, buzzing energy issued forth from their hands like Lightning, as he impels his awesome chariot through the clouds. The blasts lashed into the girl’s shoulder blades, charring her skin. She stiffened her back as an instant response, arching in throes as the twin blasts streamed into her, burning her back, but she did not release her grip. The energy was not just burning her. Aside from the consuming agony, she could feel the crude energy coursing into her and through her, probing her. Testing her. She could feel it racing through her veins into every part of her and it made her shiver and sweat and it made her feel ill. The smell of her flesh burning drifted to her nostrils. Fixed at their source and fixed at their target, the intense bolts whipped and snapped, playfully interacting with each other, twining lustfully round each other in one instant and repelling each other with the violence of a lightning strike in the next. The assembled audience of townspeople could hear the buzz and crack but they could barely see anything; so blindingly bright was the light from the fitful energy streams.
As she grunted in pain, all thoughts paled into obscurity, then were seared from the girl’s mind; all except the purifying agent of those blasts of pain. Blue-white pain-flash was all she could see, all she could hear, all she could taste; sour and bitter on her tongue. Still she held her arms out and gripped the stakes. Now, she could not even think about her arms. She had overcome the initial urge to snap them down protectively but then any thought of moving them had been blown away and she could only tighten her grip ever more. Radiant pain grew ever more in her mind until its intense brilliance threatened to blind her consciousness and shatter her mind. She could feel every part of her part of her body resonating a scream of torment that grew louder like the wail of so many trapped spirits suffering in turmoil and it joined with the throbbing pulse in her ears, and it climaxed and it felt to the girl as if she were about to rip and release the horrible pain from her body and the blasts stopped.
Every person in the crowd remained squinting, transfixed. It was now to them as if they had come into a dark room after staring at the sun. Every single person could, however, feel the charge now in the air.
Silence.
Her jaw was clenched tight, the muscles bulging beneath her cheeks. Some moments later, Area’s raw and aching hands released the stakes. She barely winced as muscles rubbed beneath dual symbols newly burnt into her back.
Area stands motionless between the stakes for a long while, hanging like a ball thrown up at the peak of its ascent, in the instant just before it falls. She opens her eyes wide, takes a deep gasp of air, and slumps, but immediately catches herself on her knee and with weary determination, she stands.
The shaman and Gaideon come to her side. They do not help to support her. The shaman drapes a dark robe about her shoulders. Slowly, Area turns to face the audience. She is smiling.

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