The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret - Bonus: An Episode with Footnotes

Episode Date: October 10, 2022

The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret is a podcast in which your hosts, Joanna Hagan and Francine Carrel, usually read and recap every book from Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series in chronological order. This week, we briefly travel back to the real world to discuss the excellent new Pratchett biography from Rob Wilkins - Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes. Find us on the internet:Twitter: @MakeYeFretPodInstagram: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretFacebook: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretEmail: [e-mail]: www.patreon.com/thetruthshallmakeyefretWant to follow your hosts and their internet doings? Follow Joanna on twitter @joannahagan and follow Francine @francibambi Marc’s Stuff:Marc Burrows - Buy Books The Glom of Nit NewsletterTwitter (@20thCenturyMarc)  Other things we talked about:The Magic of Terry Pratchett (an interview with Marc Burrows) - TTSMYF The Salmon of Doubt - Hitchhikers FandomJoseph and his Unpleasantly Brown Jacket - Part 1 (Blood and Honey). Told by Tony Robinson - YouTube Terry Pratchett: Choosing To Die on Vimeo Music: Chris Collins, indiemusicbox.com

Hello listeners, a quick content note before today's episode. We're talking about Rob Wilkins' new book A Life with Footnotes in quite some depth, and so we do discuss Terry Pratchett's Battle with Alzheimer's and the documentary he filmed on euthanasia. Also, as Joanna will warn you at the top of the episode, we are slightly less spoiler-like than usual. Having just edited the episode, I can say we don't say anything, particularly discworld-shattering, but if you are a total spoiler purist,

this might not be the episode for you. And without further ado, let's make a podcast. Hello and welcome to The True Shall Make You Freight, a podcast in which we are usually reading and recapping every book from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series when I sign in chronological order. I'm Joanna Hagen. And I'm Francine Carroll. And with us today, we have...

Mark Burrows! Yay! Hi Mark. Surprise listeners. Hi, I have parachuted in with some much-needed testosterone, but not that much. A sipson. Yeah, I mean, not to question my own virility or anything, but...

As well that you don't go splashing it around for no reason. I mean, yeah, it's better to be that way round, as far as I'm concerned. This is a weird start. It is, yeah, no, we've launched right into it. It's good. We lowered the tone early, and from here it's only up. Yeah, we like to have a low bar to start with. We are here with our special guest today to talk about Rob Wilkins' new book,

A Life With Footnotes. Rob Wilkins, for anybody who may still be unaware, was Terry Pratchett's personal assistant for 15 years. That sound right? He was his business manager for the last couple of years of their relationship. He worked very closely with Terry Pratchett for 15 years. And before that, worked with Colin Smythe, so quite the seedy. That is an impressive one.

Note on spoilers. Before we crack on, we're a spoiler-like podcast. This episode will potentially contain spoilers for almost all of the Discworld, but we are still saving any and all discussion of the final Discworld novel, The Shepherd's Crown, until we get there so you dear listeners can come on the journey with us. It's really nice to see that being said live. I'm really glad I managed it first time. I listen to it so often.

Usually, I try and ad-lib a book-relevant one, but I can't think of anything appropriate. Even Rob Wilkins didn't spoil The Shepherd's Crown, though, I should say, so that's good. Yes, well done, him. And Mark Burroughs, we have as our special guest today, because he also wrote a biography of Terry Pratchett. And it's got the magic of Terry Pratchett. And it's very good.

Thank you. And if you haven't heard our special episode on that, well, it doesn't really matter if you listen to them in order, but after you listen to this, go back and listen to that. Do you speak to speaking of writing and stuff, actually, Mark? What have you been writing since we last saw you? Loads. Today, I wrote an article that was specifically designed to bait the worst half of the Internet.

I did see the headline. I did not read the article yet. I didn't choose the headline. I got a commission from the new statesman. They basically went, somebody was being snooty about how many young people identify as bisexual. Would you like to write a celebration of flexible sexual attitudes? And can it please annoy right-wing Twitter?

And now I'm a freelance writer who does this for a living. I can't really turn down commissions. So I said, yes. So that's what I did. And it's a London Film Festival at the minute, so I'm doing a lot of film reviews. But other than that, I've written another book, which is out soon in three weeks. What's that one?

It is called The London Boys. David Bowie, Mark Bowlin and the 60s teenage dream. It's about David Bowie and Mark Bowlin's relationship prior to becoming Glamrock superstars and their journey through the 1960s, which is just a stealth social history. And if you ask me how I went from Terry Pratchett to David Bowie, I can explain it, but I'll do it another time. Okay.

They're a power point. It sounds like a left turn, but actually I found crossover. Is that now available for pre-order and stuff? Can I have a link for the show notes? You can pre-order it from MarkBowrie's.co.uk or from all of the other places where books are available to be pre-ordered. Cool. So I guess we'd want to start with the obvious, which is

you wrote a book about Terry Pratchett as well. And Rob wrote a book about Terry Pratchett. How did it feel reading this book about Terry Pratchett? It was a massive relief. Yeah. Honestly, it was because I knew this book was coming. I always knew this was happening. So I deliberately pitched mine in a different direction.

I knew there were things that Rob would definitely be able to write that I just simply couldn't. He had better access. He had memories. He had Terry Pratchett's actual notes, because Terry started work on his autobiography. Like they were working on it together. And the first quarter of the book pretty much is based on Terry's notes.

So I knew I couldn't do that. So I went down roads that I knew he wouldn't do. So I went more into fandom, more into critical analysis of the books and Terry's place in culture and that sort of thing. So reading it. I mean, first of all, I enjoyed it. It was weird. So it genuinely was a bit weird because I'd already told this story.

And especially the first quarter is really similar. And Rob and I have got a very similar tone, which I think probably because we're both channeling Terry basically. We're writing like literally the same thing. So there are paragraphs in his that are the different trials, a leg of time version of mine. Like on a different day, I would probably would have written it using those words instead of my words.

So that was weird just going through it. And then I couldn't help comparing and contrasting. I couldn't help linking things. But my main feeling was A, that I was really glad that Rob's book was great because it is. I really enjoyed it. And I was really pleased that he pulled it off. And then B, I was really pleased that my instincts had been right

and the two books complimented rather than. Competing with each other. Yeah, exactly. Which is exactly what I wanted. And then the third thought is the selfish one, which was I kind of went, I mean, it's good, but it's not that much better than mine. I was really nervous that it'd be so much better than mine.

And no one would need to pick mine up again. But I was I was actually like, oh, you know what? Mine, mine actually holds its own. Yeah, no, it's definitely useful to have both of them on hand, speaking as the very edge case of people who need to look up Terry Pratchett stuff all the time. Yeah, you're still very much wins for having an index. Yes.

Do I want to say salty about the lack of an index? They don't usually have them, Joe. I know, but they're really helpful to me specifically. My interpretation of it, of both books, is that mine is outgunned, but not outclassed, which is a nice place to be. So yeah, I enjoyed it a lot. It was a bit weird because I've already told the story

and I know where all those stories came from and I know the sources of them and stuff. I knew where it was going. But eventually I was just like, particularly once you get into the middle bit where the two books really deviate a lot. Once Rob becomes the main character of his book, because I would argue that there are points to that,

but where Rob is the main character, like almost more than Terry. And once you get to those bits, those are the bits I enjoyed the most because I think when I don't think Rob quite appreciates quite how much of his own voice is in it. And I loved it from those moments. Yeah, I mean, he says quite late on in the book,

doesn't he, when Terry Pratchett kind of turned to him and said, oh, I guess we share a brain now. It's one of those nice shifts in perspective as well. And it's nice, gradually, softly done. Yeah, I don't know whether it was a, it must have been conscious to an extent or... It'd be interesting to ask him about that because you do, one of the things that strikes me

about this book is how mean Terry is to Rob all the way through it. Oh my God. Like... Yeah, he sounds so terrifying to work with. Literally, I've got five different places in my notes where my notes are just, oh my God. I, if that two-man operation had a HR department,

but there's a sort of, I think there's a new sense, the kind of rising respects that Terry has for Rob as it goes along. Yeah. And like, if you've ever met Rob Wilkins, he's a very quietly spoken and patient person. And oh my God, I understand why. You'd have to be.

Yeah, that's a good point. You've gotten to know him since your book came out, haven't you? Or at least met him a few times. Yeah, I think, I think we're friends. It's hard, it's like, it's a weird thing to say, but no, no, Rob, like after a while, Rob reached out and congratulated me on my book and we got talking and we're actually, we have an awful lot in common.

Surprised, amazing. We're actually like, we're startlingly similar people. So we get on really, we get on really well. I was texting him earlier today, actually, because he's in New York and I was sending him something I was taking the piss out of him for. That's good to know. But yeah, we have a true sign of friendship.

Yeah, we've met a few times. We've hung out and we get on well and we have, we've compared notes a lot. We did an onstage at the Discworld Convention, which Joanna was there for. Ah, yes. Well, I, ostensibly, I interviewed Rob on stage, but it was more of a kind.

He wanted it to be more of a double act, but I kept trying to push it into me interviewing him. Well, he did go onstage with a journalist. I don't know what he wanted out of that. It was because there was stuff I wanted to ask him and stuff I knew I could, I could sort of poke him into saying. And frankly, his journey into writing that book is way more interesting than my journey to writing mine.

Like I wrote a biography of a famous author done by doing loads of research in libraries and talking to some people. Rob wrote what is basically almost a memoir of himself and an analysis of his best friend. And so that's a much more interesting story. So I was, I was constantly prodding him on that. And then also we, you know, it was interesting to compare notes

because we did do different approaches. There are bits in Rob's book that serve as like prompts for bits in my book and vice versa. You could literally go, we found bits where you could go, Rob says, what this happened. There's a bit where he says, Terry develops a barfly technique for getting people to buy him drinks at bar conventions.

And then I had in my book, I have what that technique is. So, you know, you can bounce, there's lots of points where they took the two bounce back and forth. I know there's an extra layer to your index. Holding up against Mark's book and finding all the bits where they match up. The thing about the journey he had in writing it is it's almost unique, isn't it?

Actually, how many, how many famous authors had somebody so reliably by their side every day for so long that they could write something like that? And authors with a personality like go practice you want to read a biography of. I'm sure there's lots of fantastic authors who just aren't very interesting day to day. I mean, there must be Chilly Cooper.

There must be Chilly Cooper. There must be other authors who had personal assistants who wrote memoirs or other famous people. I can't think of any. Listeners, send in your favourites. Well, I think a lot of the time memoirs, like that tends to be more kind of scathing tell-alls. This is what really happened.

Yeah, I was glad like right from the beginning that Rob was like, yeah, he did have a tendency to, shall we say, polish an anecdote. So I was like, oh, good. I can see why Mark never got called up to say it. Yeah, that's it. Well, Rob deals with that in a different way, though,

because every time I came up against one of those things, I was where I felt it looked too good to be true. I would research it and try and work out what the truth was and then give the reader two versions, Terry's version and the version based on research I've done and then let the reader chew for themselves. Like you did a lot of research into the shed he apparently worked in, didn't you?

Exactly, yeah. Oh, they're holding on the roof. The completely imaginary shed that Terry claims that he worked on on the roof of the Bath Evening Chronicle where he worked alone according to his notes. And no one he worked with remembers that shed. Is it a bit gratifying that even Rob couldn't, because he looked like Rob tried to find that one

and couldn't either. Yeah, I think so. It's such a mad thing to have made up that you worked in a shed on the roof. That's the roof of the workplace. That's such a strange, that's such a mad thing. But Rob's version of dealing with that is what he calls too good to check.

Where Rob would rather live in the world where the anecdote is true, because they're more fun and more interesting. And also I think he doesn't want to destroy some of the mystery. He doesn't want to, he keeps the party line alive. So his version is this is too good to check. My version is I'm going to check this. Again, it's kind of a show you some complimentary thing of it.

Because yours is like not like an investigation because that sounds a bit interrogative. But it's a... Mine's more journalistic. Yeah, it's journalistic. It's references. And Rob's personal anecdote. I like that it overlaps without directly contradicting as well.

Well, me too. Because otherwise, I was constantly worried that this would render mine totally obsolete. And that mine would be the only thing that would possibly get like keep mine in print was being cheaper. Although Rob pointed out, he worked out the cost per word, depending on the recommended retail price of the books

and the word count of both books. And his is actually better value than mine to the tune of two Twix's. I really love that you put the effing into that, Matt. Oh yeah, but how long ago was that? Because I think they're about twice the price than they were the summer. That's true.

Yeah, that is true. We'll get on the inflation calculator he used for the royalty. But you got some corrections from the Pratchett estate as well, didn't you? You had some stuff they asked you to change slightly. Yeah, I did, which I doubt Rob got. That was quite interesting. So I approached the Terry Pratchett estate

to let them know I was writing the book and didn't hear anything back. And then about six weeks later, I got an extremely strongly worded letter from their lawyers that basically said, we'd really rather you didn't write this. We do not endorse it. If you do insist on writing it,

we're going to need to see it. So we sent it to them when it was finished, because as a courtesy, because actually they didn't need to see it. Like you can write a book on somebody comfortably. There's no legal reason. As long as you don't libel them or infringe their copyright. They've got good lawyers.

Yeah, but they have it. According to Rob, the same lawyers as the Queen. Oh, yes. But anyway, so we sent them the thing and they came back with a list of corrections. And I'm really grateful they did, because those corrections fell into two camps. One was things I couldn't possibly have known

that has been corrected. So like actual factual bit, interesting factual tidbits that I couldn't have known. So those were useful. And secondly, there was lots of kind of, we'd rather you didn't say this about him because we don't think it's true. I knew that those things were true.

So rather than taking them out, I made them more generalistically rigorous. I added supporting information. I made them undeniable. One of those things was the thing about Terry polishing his anecdotes. The thing about him making up stories. Like it says it in my introduction that he did that. And the note I got from the lawyers,

there's something on the lines of, Terry was a natural storyteller, but he would never embellish his own anecdotes. And it's just patently untrue. I don't think if they'd read to the end of the book, they wouldn't have made that note. But I think they made that note as they read it and they didn't go back and change it

because that becomes a theme through the whole book. I read that out on stage to Rob and asked him to respond to it. He was actually quite baffled that they'd said that. We also don't know who did the read through from the prejudice date. Because Rob assumed that Colin Smythe had done it. But Colin assumed that Rob had done it. And it certainly wouldn't have been Rihanna.

So we don't know. Colin actually did a fact check read for me. And he would have brought up those things in that. So I don't know. We don't know. It's a mystery. I can feel like I can tell by Colin Smythe's website that he's extremely into indexing facts properly.

Oh, really? Very much so. Yes. Which is why I was very pleased and surprised by the description of his office. With the teetering pile of... Yeah. I thought Rob was very good on that sort of thing.

He's very good at time and place and descriptions. Yeah, he sets the scene really well. Yeah. The description of Colin Smythe's dribbly dog. And the teetering pile of papers. Which I can... Although Colin is very fastidious, I can sort of...

Having met him, I can sort of imagine it. That's what his office would look like. He's got kind of an absent-minded professor sort of vibe. Yeah, he's got that sort of permanently destructive gentleman. So fastidious in his work, not necessarily in his admin. Yes, exactly. Nice.

Which I... We can all relate. Yes, we can. Very much so. It's made me rather less money than it's made Colin Smythe. So far. So far. All you've got to do is find an aspiring sci-fi author

who happens to be the world's next genius. Yeah, all I need to do is get 20% of the royalties of a genius level that gets selling author a life. And then I will be doing that well. The lesson has to be if a journalist on a local newspaper wants to come and interview you, you have to say yes. Just in case that Terry Pratchett... Or the reincarnation of...

That would be weird if it was, yeah. Yeah. Another kind of similarity between your book and Rob's is the obvious influence that Pratchett's had on both of your writing styles. I think it's fair to say there's clear like Pratchett influences. I mean, in Rob's case, that I think is completely unavoidable.

One of the things I was really surprised about, one of the things I genuinely... You genuinely learn in Rob's book. We're doing spoilers for Rob's book, right? Yeah, yeah, all the way through, yeah. One of my favorite things you learn is because I like... It was common knowledge that Terry dictated towards the end of his career,

because he wasn't able of typing anymore. One of the things you've learned in the book that I didn't realize was that he'd actually been dictating to Rob for years since Nightwatch, which is what, 2001, that game out? So almost from the beginning of Rob's time working for him, he was actually having the work... He was the one doing the typing, whilst Terry paced around and spoke.

So it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that stylistically that's soaked in. Of course it did. He was the conduit for all those incredible words. So how could they... Any Pratchett fan knows that the weight of words has an impact on the vessel, that knowledge equals power and et cetera, et cetera.

So I think almost like Brother in Small Gods, I think, having all of those words in his head, had... Yeah. But also, you can't help but write about Terry and not write a little bit like Terry. Yeah, I mean, you're quoting him throughout as well, and there's...

You made judicious use of footnotes, which... Yeah, the thing is, I've always written with footnotes. It wasn't just for this book. I kind of let myself go crazy with them for this book, but everything I've ever written has had footnotes. And that's because I'm massively influenced by Terry Pratchett. So if you go back to read the... I edited this book for The Guardian and Faber and Faber,

like, I don't know, 10 years ago now, that was a collection of funny Guardian comments that were very middle-class and classic Guardianista. I think I might have that. It's called, I think I can see where you're going wrong. I got it with my dad. I'm sorry, yes. That was me. But that's full of footnotes and all the footnotes are jokes,

because that's how I write. So my new book is full of footnotes. In fact, my favorite bits in my new book are footnotes. So it went without saying I was always going to use footnotes, because it was an actual... Because in this case, it's an actual... It's homage, if you like. Homage, homage.

Yeah, homage. Homage. Omega. That's the one. Hey, Matt. I'll edit the right one in. Yeah, whereas then Rob was always going to do that, because the book's called A Life with Footnotes.

Yeah. Which interestingly, he said this on stage. It was originally called Terry Pratchett, A Life Fantastic. And then he kind of realized that most... And the same conclusion that I came to when I was writing about Terry's life is that lots of it weren't really that fantastic. Lots of it were a man sitting at home writing books.

And actually, that title, A Life Fantastic, was kind of inappropriate, because it implies much more adventuring than really happened. That's the life of Sir Edmund Hillary, or someone like that. It wasn't the life of somebody who spent most of their time sat in front of a computer for their own books. And so I think A Life with Footnotes is a much better title.

I think that's a perfect title. It's definitely that the man was the fantastic thing, rather than the... The life thing, yeah. And he generated that life. He generated the fantastic elements of it. It wasn't him being an adventurer. He didn't have a life of a rock star,

of fabulous parties and all that kind of thing. Although there was some of that, but... Well, I feel like everything had kind of a touch of the almost children's book to it, with the bee key for outfit and the goats and the... But it was more whimsy than fantastical. Yeah, exactly. I mean, there is kind of a fantasy element to Terry's life.

But like a cottagecore fantasy. Yeah, but yeah, cottagecore. He invented cottagecore years ago, except from his point of view. Yeah, from his point of view, cottagecore was just dressing bad. I do like that Rob kind of drew a comparison between their life at Raybrow Cottage and The Good Life.

Less middle class. Oh, I love The Good Life. Sorry. Of course you do. It's your favourite character, Margot. Yes. Probably. Yeah, it's been a...

You know, I say I love it. I haven't watched it since I was a child, but there were reruns in the evening and I used to love it very much. Joanna is straight in there with the yes, though. Is she the neighbour? Obviously, it's Margot. Yes, she's the posh neighbour.

Yeah, I did like it. The slightly saucy posh neighbour. Yes. And a lot of respect for her. Sorry, that's off topic. We're talking about Terry Pratchett. Yes, we were. But it was like very The Good Life.

He didn't keep bees, all that stuff. I'd say in my book that his cottage in Roeboro, Gaze, G-A-Z-E, Gaze Cottage, which is a mistake I definitely made, G-A-Z-E, is basically Granny Weather Axis Cottage. It's a fictionalised fantasy version. Granny's Cottage is a fantasy version of where Terry really lived.

There was the bees, there was the goats, there was... It was in the countryside and they did go out walking and it feels like he was kind of romanticising and fantasising. And particularly when he wrote Equal Rights, because Equal Rights was about living in a rickety old cottage and raising a small child.

That's raising a little girl and that's exactly what he was doing at the time. Yeah, I like that the file was just called Girl for a bit. That was a lovely discovery. But yeah, there's nice moments later on as well, like if you're looking at the overlaps between his life and the actual books, like deciding to actually acquire the shepherd's hut,

which ends up obviously being a big plot point later on. For sure. Yeah, some of its life influencing out and some of its definitely are influencing life. Yeah, and I'm not sure where the line is with Terry. Because yeah, I think he created... Like the Tiffany Anking books are a really good example. I know your spoiler light.

So I will pull back a little bit on it. But Tiffany Anking books are set on the chalk and the chalk is essentially wheelchair. It's where Terry was living. He literally lived in a village called Broad Chalk. And the grounds around his house match up exactly to his description of the grounds around Home Farm where Tiffany lives.

And the shepherd's hut and the sheep and the brooks and the bridges and the turf and everything. It all sort of matches. That's the landscape. He looked out of his window and he saw the chalk and he saw the disc world. And so you can see those two things influencing each other. He brought his life closer to the fantasy landscape

whilst bringing the fantasy landscape closer to him. Yeah, and it's definitely one of those series that couldn't have been written by someone who hadn't spent a long time in the English countryside. He was a country boy. And I think one of the things that you get out of Rob's book is that they know how many times do they talk about going to literary events in London.

Hardly any. There are a few there. There's the time he meets Douglas Adams at a party and the time he meets JK rolling at a party. And there are surprisingly few parties for the best selling author in the English language at that point. He didn't move.

He never lived in London. Most famous authors will at some point keep a flat in London or something. And he never did. He lived out in what is basically the middle of nowhere. It's surrounded by fields. Like it's the only house within a five minute drive. It's got a river running through it.

And yeah, that was the lifestyle he wanted because, and actually you totally see that, but he was always a country boy. The them in Good Omens is Terry's youth. That's the entire, the way he talks about his own childhood and Rob covers this really well, but he was covering it based on Terry's notes in the first third of the book

when he's talking about Terry's youth. Like it's the them's life in Good Omens. That's how they, that kind of just William lifestyle was actually how it was falling out of trees. Yeah, there's a really nice line early on in Roseburg about like the sort of crowd of scabby need things that all ran home if someone's mother called for dinner. It is all very jumpers for goalposts.

I like that short hand. Older listeners will recognise that as a reference to the fast show. Ask your mum and dad. Jack loves the fast show to the point where some of the references, I kind of thought were his jokes until I finally watched a few episodes. But there's a lot of lines from Red Dwarf

that I didn't know were from that show and thought were just from jokes that your husband made a lot. I think that was probably one of the few things he had in common with Terry Pratchett. That's good. Falling that into the work. The only person Terry Nick jokes from was himself.

And that's only because he'd forgotten he'd done that before. Yeah. I really like the description of the pit as this kind of place where half written paragraphs go to language until he can pull them out for something. I've got a scraps file, which were obviously not too quite the same effect. It does work for that quite well.

Yeah, we were talking about scraps files and folders on the podcast a couple of weeks ago, weren't we? That's such a wonderful idea, though, isn't it? The idea that there are these massive paragraphs, sometimes going into 10,000 words of stuff that was never used and could be lifted, plonked into another book and rewritten. Wonderful. The example Rob used was the megapode sequence

from the beginning of Unseen Academicals, which is just a great thing to have lying around for when you might need a megapode hunting sequence. Oh, no, I think I've got one of those in the cupboard. I love that bit. Hold the megapode. I love that bit. Another one is the gnarly ground sequence in Carpe Giaculum

was originally from the Seen Little Fishes. It makes me pleased that some of those scenes, especially the gnarly ground one, actually, were kind of lifted and stitched in like that because there are some practice scenes that have stayed with me so vividly, but have none of the context surrounding them in my head. So I couldn't have told you till we got there on the podcast

which which is the gnarly ground. I just remembered that bit. It's really wonderful. And just the idea that there are all of these, which continually makes it all the more kind of frustrating that that stuff has been destroyed because the pit is no more. The pit was inside of the turtle. I would have paid such good money

to just read the pit exactly as it is. And I understand why he wouldn't have discussed it. Absolutely. If nothing else, you can't waste an opportunity to do that. Even if you even if you didn't care that much for anyone read it, just the narrative satisfaction of knowing that it's all getting steamrolled after your death. Like, absolutely.

I mean, I want my hard drive steamrolled, but for very different reasons. I told you not to save that. Your honor. But yeah, I like just the idea that there would be these huge passages because there were books like what was there? There was an unfinished story about an old people's home called Twilight Canyons.

Yeah. And Terry read a big chunk of that out at a Dispute Convention once. Did he now? So there are people who there are, you know, there are. How long ago? Who had it on a phone camera? It must be somewhere. I think it was around 2010-ish.

I don't know quite me on that. Dodgy Ground on the old recording front then, yeah. There are people who there are five or six or seven hundred people who have heard, you know, 20,000 words of that book or whatever. Well, probably less than that. Thinking about it, that would be a very long reading. But, you know, they've been so good just to have those bits. The Neil Gaiman has gone on record as saying that he wished that they'd done

what they did with Douglas Adams and the Salmon of Doubts and just have an Odds and Sods collection. Yeah. Yeah. Have those bits. But. Yeah. Well, I guess, yeah, Douglas Adams didn't get the chance to say he wanted his

shot in space or whatever. I'm sure he would have done. Yeah, exactly. Well, Douglas Adams' bit would be empty. Yes. There was probably, I mean, that's not true because it literally wasn't. There literally is a book that exists. Yeah.

But I don't imagine he, but he was famously unprolific. So I don't think I was, but I imagine the Terries would have, would have, like, ran to pages and pages and pages. It would be a Silmarillion length book, but much, much, much more interesting. Sorry. I shouldn't do Silmarillion slander on the podcast. I reread the Silmarillion this year. Did you now?

I read this last month as an audiobook. I'm sorry to hear that. How was it? And I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. It was the, it was the most I've ever enjoyed reading the Silmarillion in the six or seven times. I've read it in the last 25 years.

So you reckon all the way back to the way to go? Yeah. I just reminded me a lot of a TV show from years gone by called Blood and Honey, which was, which was Tony Robinson walking around the Israeli desert and the deserts of Palestine and Israel, telling stories from the old, from the Old Testament, just, just to a kid, to camera. No illustrations, no actors. The whole show was, was Tony Robinson telling Old Testament stories to camera

whilst walking around the desert. He's such an interesting performer. Who would agree to do that for Tony Robinson? I imagine it was his idea. Yeah. And it's never been re-released. It's never been re-shown. I don't, you can imagine that, but that was the late 80s, early 90s.

You couldn't imagine that being made. Now I love that show. No, Blood and Honey, you say. Yeah. And I'm not, I'm not religious. I'm not religious in the slightest, but they're good stories. Oh yeah. The Old Testament stories are great.

So it was just written, they were written for children, to be palatable for children. So I imagine, I mean, I don't, I don't remember Sodom and Gomorrah coming up. Anyway, there's a couple of bits you can skip over. So I can't think of a good segue into this, but the next question I definitely want to get to that Joanna's rundown is we talked way back when about not wanting to meet our heroes, or wanting to, but maybe being half glad we didn't, or whatever. Has Rob's book kind of changed your position on that? That's a really interesting question.

I'm glad I never worked for Terry Pratchett. Put it that way. Yeah. Well, you see, I say, actually, I say that, but actually, I'm sure as Rob did, Rob weathered those storms and has done fine. And actually, it's, I think if you can, if you can do it. But yeah, I'm, I don't, I don't think that side of Terry that you get that feels a bit like there are, because there are bits in the book that are harsh.

Yeah. There are bits where the way he talks to Rob, Rob talks about some other things that, like the time he casually tells a better person that they're going to stop, stop doing the models. And this just offhand basically tells them his livelihood will be coming to an end. Because they, because that's what he was doing for a living at that point and just mentioned it offhand. Like, I think having a business relationship with Terry would have been,

yeah, would have been stressful. I mean, everyone who works with him, who knew him really well, it has a lot of affection for him. I never spoke to anyone who said he was a cantankerous old bugger or anything. People would say, oh, he didn't suffer fools, which is one of the reasons I'm glad I didn't get to work with him because I am definitely a fool. But I think I'd still like to, because if you've read my book, that's a bit the beginning about how I missed having a night, a night in the pub with Terry and Rob.

And I still massively regret that because I think in that, in those circumstances, in the setting the world, the world to rights till closing time with a beer, I still think that would have been an incredible night to have had. That cantankerous side of him is one of the things that I think I'm really pleased Rob did because it makes his book real. It makes it more, it's not a hagiography, which is, I guess is the worry when you're writing about your friend, when you're writing about somebody you know so well, that it could,

he was a complicated person. That was some, but actually that's a phrase I got a few times when I interviewed people. He was a complicated person. Robert Rankin said that. Wow. And coming from Robert Rankin. Yeah, exactly. So I, no, I don't think, I don't, I haven't changed my view.

I'd still like to have men in the right circumstances. Actually, if I'd been in Rob's place, I'm not sure I'm, I'm affable enough to have weathered the storms that Rob weathered. Yeah. I probably would have cried a lot more than I think. Oh mate, I would have cried so much. I would have cried immediately on probably the second day when the trench digging started. And like the, um, oh yeah, like the confidence to go back after you've been fired.

Yeah, exactly. Just like being able to read the room enough to know that it's probably fine. I don't think I've ever managed that. No, exactly. Don't take rejection well me. Especially if it's Terry Fratschit. Imagine pissing off Terry Fratschit that badly. Oh my God, I'd die.

He was a fan already. I'm terrible at rejection and I'm terrible at confrontation. So I don't think I would have, although I don't think Terry handled confrontation very well, unless he had time to calm down afterwards. Was the, the bit about where he calls his editor the next day and says, I've had to think about your suggestion. I've decided you're not an interfering old trout after all. Yeah.

No, it's not. It's like you might not be an interfering old trout after all or old bag possibly. But like, yeah, old bats. Old bats. You're right. It's old bats. I had a little list of these moments highlighted. The student journalist bit was the other one.

Oh, that was awful. Yeah. I used to be a student journalist. There, but by the grace of God, I could have lost that lottery and had Terry Fratschit bringing me up and saying, I'll do the interview now and then never calling back. Yeah. I think I'd have tried to get through it, but I think I would have been berated.

Yeah. So not remembering the six Bible defenses, five whatever it is. See, immediately I'm panicking. But this is it though. I didn't know those things when I was a student journalist. I wasn't a journalism student. I was a sociology student who worked for the student magazine. So now I know media a little, but I didn't know that.

And so I would have, so yeah, he would have, I'm bound to have asked him some awful questions. Oh, but can you do the shorthand? No, I can't. I've never been able to do shorthand. I tried to teach myself once, but it's the thing is, you don't need to anymore. You can kind of do shorthand. No, I've got to learn.

I want to get my qualifications. I've just got bad handwriting and it's not the same thing. Yeah, mine might pass for shorthand, but it takes considerably longer than Thai fingers. So that's no good at all. Some of the other things about like his personality that surprised me, I don't want to call it weaknesses. I tried to write it down a few times.

Like I was surprised Rob was so happy pointing out his, I guess, complicated would be a good one. Personality traits. The panic attacks he had, the panic attack in the newsroom and the nuclear thing. The CEGB when there was an actual full-on alert happening and he was taken to the hospital with what they thought was a heart attack. And I think those are the most revealing things.

Like Terry's notes got up to the CEGB. Yeah. That's where his notes finished. So I guess he must have been taking his cue from what Terry was happy to include. Yes. Because all of that stuff is in that section. The bit about Eric Price, the editor of the Western Daily Press, who is the monstrous editor who made Terry faint.

It's really interesting because I described that bit in my book. Because I got a first hand from an eye witness, Tony Bush, who was lovely, really, really, really nice man who did a really long interview with me and had lots to say. And sadly died since I spoke to him. And so I'm really glad I got to get those memories and I got to have that time. But he described that incident to me about Terry screwing himself up to give his editor a piece of his mind and then fainting cold on the spot.

And so I deliver it as a punchline. That's it. It comes across so differently, doesn't it? Because that's how I was told the story and it is a good punchline. But in Rob's telling, it becomes a lot less funny. It becomes something, it feels a lot more serious, a lot more real. But yeah, I assumed that Rob knew Terry was happy to share that sort of stuff because it was in the parts that he was telling.

Along those lines, actually, later in the book, where we get to the really quite upsetting descriptions of Terry's deterioration with his Alzheimer's, it crossed my mind to wonder how much of it was Rob knowing him well enough to know he'd wanted all out there. As he said earlier in the book, Terry wanted an honest portrait of Alzheimer's to be out there and how much of it was they'd gone over it beforehand or whatever. It was very uncomfortable to read it about someone I massively lionized. That's not to say I don't think it should have been in there, but it was difficult to read

in a way that I was not expecting. I was expecting it to be sad, but the details about him throwing his arms up in the cab when he thought he was being attacked by lasers or whatever. That's really upsetting. I think it's in the spirit of Terry's own handling of those issues. He was very clear that he wanted to document his own descent. He wanted to show what this disease was really like. He wanted to normalize it, have it talked about, and have it confronted.

So, you know, that whole thing about to slay the demon, you have to say its name. And I think, so I think those descriptions are in the spirit of that intention. And truth. It is the story. It is what happened. And as I said, I don't think it's wrong to put them in there. And now you've said about the kind of spirit of it. I mean, it did.

It made me uncomfortable. And that's a good thing. If people who read it, who can have some influence on policy toward funding for Alzheimer's, read it, and it makes them very uncomfortable, that would be very helpful. It's that kind of thing. But yeah, it's a much more stark version of it kind of being grimmer than I thought it would be. The first example of that was from having the panic attacks.

There are also parts of it that feel like it feels very intrusive to read into Rob's life and reading his emotional reaction to everything. I almost wanted to sort of go, it's fine. I don't have to read this if you want to keep this private. And that's what I was saying earlier. I'm not sure Rob is as or anything. I mean, I pointed this out literally to him. I don't think when he wrote it, Rob was aware of how much

of himself he was putting into that book. And it's my favorite thing about the book is that it's Rob Wilkins' book about Terry Pratchett. It's not just a book about Terry Pratchett. Mine is a book about Terry Pratchett. I am not a character in my book, apart from as the occasional smart ass voice delivering comedy footnotes. But Rob is at the heart of it. He stood behind him or to the side of him or slightly out of arm's reach of him

when he was feeling feisty. He's reporting it faithfully and his reactions to those things. Maybe it's something that on some level he needed to write. It did feel like it with the cathartic bits of writing at points, as the bit in New York especially. I felt like it was very raw getting it out on paper kind of writing. And I suspect that that time that encounter in New York where Terry has the so heart attack was a low blood pressure something.

I've forgotten the proper name for it, but it looked a lot like a heart attack. Yeah. In the back of a cab, like, you know, having to administer CPR to your friend is one of the most sure. I've never had to do that, but surely it wasn't one of the most harrowing things you could ever have to do. Terrifying and to have the strength to do it. And I guess he would have had to mention that because it's out there in the world.

It's in my book. And actually it was one of the corrections I got from my original line and CPR had to be administered or something because I didn't know who administered CPR. And the correction came back by Rob Wilkins. So, you know, it's out there. So maybe he felt like he was doing a disservice to the story by not talking about it. But yeah, I definitely feel like, for Rob, that was that personal stuff. And the stuff about Peter Smedley as well, the man who dies in Switzerland.

What's the place called? Dignitas. Dignitas, thank you. Which if you've ever seen the documentary, Rob is not happy about being there. Rob is a character in those documentaries as well. And Rob is not happy about being there. He's not comfortable with watching a man die in front of him. And he's not comfortable with talking to a man and making friends with a man who he's

going to die the next day. There's a really heartbreaking bit in those documentaries where Rob is going, well, if the guy's going, oh, I love Zurich. It's so beautiful. And Rob's going, well, don't do it then. Let's go to the Large Hadron Collider tomorrow. Like, let's go to the city. You don't have to do this.

And the guy is like, no, I do. There's not going to be another chance for me to do this. So, I mean, that's a hard thing to go through. That's a hard thing to lift it. While it did, I think, strengthen the documentary because you had the back and force. It's not just somebody strengthening the documentary. It's he's not an editorial tool. He's a person who had real lasting feelings about that.

Especially is because, you know, it was the point they were making was it might pertain to his friend very soon. And yeah, I must go. Exactly. And that force is confronting. There's a great bit of book about the documentary before the previous documentary, which is Living Without Simons. In the documentary, they're in the office of the specialist.

And Rob says the question I'd like to ask is how long and Terry shoots him down and says, I don't want to know. And it's a really powerful bit in the documentary. But it's an even more powerful bit in the book where we learn that Rob didn't want to ask that question. The director indicated they should ask that question. And Terry didn't know that's what was happening. And that was the filmmaker editorializing it and making creating a piece of drama,

creating an interesting insight into the subject. But Paul Rob is the one that had to be in that position of almost asking. And Rob knows, Rob knows how that question is going to go down. Yeah. Yeah. Imagine having a hell of an assistant, right? Imagine going into this job off the back of being really good at digitizing stuff from being, you know, just a good PA and ending up in this absolutely insane position and being so good at it.

Yeah. Yeah. That's just it. He goes from like Rob Wilkins life. It's fascinating because he goes from he goes from organizing Colin Smyth filing system. Yeah. To digging a trench in Terry's garden. To being in the room whilst a person goes through a voluntary death procedure, a clinic.

Yeah. To being on the set of Good Omens and being a and being like being the executive producer of a hit TV show. Yeah. I think that's like that's a strange career path. And I really like said and I'd actually like to know more of that sort of thing. I'd really like to know more about where that more about how Rob felt about that sort of stuff and the position that he found himself in now as the guy who runs the business.

I find that whole thing really fascinating. I find that I find Rob's journey really, really fascinating. And I really like the fact that he's still a very kind of humble, gentle, privately quite bitchy. But he's very funny. But it's, you know, he's very humble and he's like he takes his job really seriously. And you see it in the book and you see in the documentaries. I'm so glad he wrote this. I'm so glad it was him that wrote it.

And I'm sure if Rihanna had written it, it would be an also an amazing book, but it'd be a different book. And one day I hope she writes her own memoir about her own life. And we get to see how she saw her father. And then all the other fascinating and amazing things about Rihanna Pratchett's life as the brilliant Rihanna Pratchett as opposed to as Rihanna Pratchett daughter of Terry. I think the person who had the business relationship. Because and also because Terry always had this private persona that we never really saw.

And we see glimpses of it glimpses of it in the book. We see glimpses of him, but it's still the professional person. It's still Terry Pratchett, the author being a bit snidey with his assistant or a bit cantankerous with his publisher or whatever. We're still not seeing Terry Pratchett, the husband, the father, the friend. And that's deliberate. We never saw that. He kept this the whole thing with the hat and the jacket and the skull cane and everything. That was that was to create that version of Terry Pratchett, the version that we got to see.

And that's still the version that Rob's writing about. There's still a layer there that we don't get to go underneath. And I don't think we ever will. I don't think and I think even if that's right. Yeah, I don't think we need to or should. And I think even if Terry was writing his own memoir, which was the plan, that was the original plan, I still don't think we would. In fact, Rob said on stage when we were talking about it,

that the original plan for the for this memoir, even after Terry died, was that the first part would be entirely based on Terry's notes. It would just be Terry's notes. He would just do what he'd done done a hundred times and take Terry's notes and tidy them up and rewrite them. But he said when they did that, when they edit it all together and they look back at the prose version of Terry's notes, the version of it that was autobiography rather than just biography,

it didn't have Terry's voice. He basically he said it wasn't. It didn't have that kind of zip that his work had when he was writing fiction. When he was writing about something, it actually was a bit dry. And they didn't and they basically just didn't think it was good enough. And the decision was made that it was going to be much more interesting for Rob to tell the story using quotes from Terry, which I think supports the idea that he created a version of himself

that he wouldn't that that was the public version. And even then he was when he was telling his own story, he was telling the public version of his own story. Yeah. And for Rob, at least he's one of the few people who's read that full version that obviously felt inauthentic. And that's I find that really interesting. I think he did a really good job as well of hinting at the last layer of fracture,

if that makes sense. So the next layer down the kind of the depths of his personal warmth, a few times saying it became the most married man you'll ever know. The tip bit about him being frightened of losing that memory of driving home after Rihanna was born, which did you have that in your burgers? Yeah, I did. Yes, you did. I thought I'd read that before.

I was like, yeah, that must be Mark. Because Terry said it in an interview. Ah, there we go. Which is how it is. So it's in my book in the bit about Rihanna's birth. I described that based on stuff that Terry had said and based on stuff that Rihanna had said and then based on stuff that Rihanna put in Tomb Raider. You put her own birth in Tomb Raider.

Lara Croft finds a note from her father describing her birth and it's Rihanna's birth. And I end that by going, Terry would later say that this was the memory he would least like to lose. Yeah. So like one of his fun, insensitive bits was at least it wasn't me. Whenever he heard of somebody dying. And then I thought in an almost kind of Pratchettian way, when he got his diagnosis, it was at least it wasn't Lynn.

I just thought that was... I hadn't picked that up. And I don't know if it was on purpose or just a lovely bit of accidental symmetry, but that's just how it fells in it for me. But the way, yeah, the way the deliberate echo there. Yeah. But yeah, that's like, yeah, he was flippant about it until, until, you know, shit got real.

Yeah. And then... It fit hit the shan. Yeah. And then suddenly it's... And then suddenly it's, you know, that's probably the most human he is in the entire book. Yeah. That's almost everything that is that Rob reports Terry saying is kind of glib or...

Well, he talks about Terry telling him his mother are passed away by walking in the room and saying, stand up all those who still have a mother, who don't have a mother. Which I found hilarious because I would have done that. Me too. But then, you know, he is glib and most of the quotes, the direct quotes we get from Terry are funny. They're polished or they're aside. He was a really funny person off the cuff.

He was really funny and he was especially funny when he got to then take that comment and polish it and make it better. And that was one of the moments where it was... And I think that's why the vulnerable moments are the ones that jump out. That moment is a real human moment. And then the moments of fallibility and vulnerability. But because those are the bits we never saw. There's very little of that in my book because my book was entirely based on

things he told other people and things he allowed professional equations to see. So there was always a barrier that I was never going to be able to get past. And I assumed Rob would. And it was really nice to see those bits. To see those bits of where you see him as a real vulnerable person. Because the only other... The only two real emotions we get from Terry through a lot of it is glib-asides and anger. And we all know mostly because Neil pointed it out.

But it's there in the book anyway. And Neil's incredible forward to the slip of the keyboard. But it's there in his books anyway that Terry was angry. And that his fury and justice is what powered his work. So we kind of knew that already. But that was really the only genuinely human thing. Apart from a sense of human that we kind of got. And that was the only thing that we were allowed to see.

So those moments that are completely unguarded of compassion and of awkwardness. Those I think are the most fascinating things we see in the book. What do you think was the most surprising thing you learnt from this? And that's going to be a harder question for you than a lot of people. Because you've already learnt a lot about Terry Pratchett. I mean, I'd really be really interested in hearing your answers to that question. Mine was... I mean, I've already said it is the fact that it was actually Rob that was doing the typing for so much longer than we knew.

I found that really fascinating. In terms of the stuff that is revealed about Terry, I don't... I don't know. I spent so many immersed in his life that I... Actually, a lot of that didn't surprise me. Because I think Rob has been very respectful, as we've talked about a few times, to what Terry wanted people to know about his story. Which is why those moments when he allows the real person to punch through,

stand out quite a lot. But yeah, that fact, because it's such a well-kept secret, they never mentioned it. Which sudden itself, because being able to dictate a story like that, it's such a talent, like a rare talent. And I don't know if you've ever tried it. I occasionally dabble with using dictation software. And you do find yourself going, you know, adding comma, full stop open brackets, all that sort of stuff.

And it feels awkward. But it destroyed a theory that I had. Because I always found that the last few discord novels, Snuff and Raising Steam, especially, worked better as audiobooks than they do on the page. And I always assumed is because they were dictated. So they were read out loud. So when they read back, the rhythm makes more sense. But it turns out that had been the case for the previous 15 books as well.

Yeah. But still, I think there could still be merit to the theory, because prior to those books, practice was then going through the file physically. Yeah. And changing the words himself, even if he wasn't typing out straight away the first time. That's true. And actually, those workers audiobooks, they work very well as audiobooks anyway. Yeah, yeah.

Almost all of them do. I was interested to know how much he hated the abridged versions. Not surprised to know that. But yeah, it was funny and sad that Tony Robinson thought Terry Fratchett hated him for a bit. Imagine being a Terry Fratchett fan and thinking he personally hated you. That would be so sad. Because of a job you were doing, almost on his behalf.

And you don't like to think of Tony Robinson being sad either. No, no. I see that little face all screwed up and upset. The along the lines of the typing, the dictation stuff, actually, the main thing for me that was surprising was right near the beginning when Rob talked about the first file he got that was like changing fonts and color throughout. I was like, what? Yeah.

I was appalled. I made me so happy because I write like that. I do not. I would be very annoyed if he gave me that to edit. I don't. My manuscripts are spotless. I mean, typos, yeah. But yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it makes like a vein pulse in my temple if the font size is different. Yeah. Let alone the color. What was your most surprising bit, Joanna? There are a couple of bits. I mean, there were little silly things. Like I didn't know Rob had been the model for the Sean Ogg figurine. I love that.

But it made me very happy to learn that Rob had been the model for the Sean Ogg figurine. One thing that surprised me was how much Pratchett hated editing. Because you read the books and there's something we talk about on the podcast a lot. Like they're incredibly well edited. It doesn't feel like there's an ounce of fat on them. There's nothing there that doesn't need to be there. And yeah, he really didn't like doing it. And that kind of fits in with the idea that there was never a first draft of a book.

Like every book was like, was a zero draft. Like because he would never, he would just finish it and then go keep. He'd be continually editing it as he went along. So I, which I find really like, you know, I find that really interesting. There's a bit later on, it's one of the most fun lip-bix books. And the editor came back to him with, you've not finished this character's story. Could you by tomorrow?

Oh yeah. And that's fantastic because he spends an entire day doing everything except writing and a bit of story he needed to write. And then wrote it all perfectly in one sitting. With about one hour to go. Oh, I think Rob said something like it was written so well. It was almost like an attack on the editor. It was the end of making money.

Is it even an epilogue? It's what Terry would call a cigarette, which is what he called the bits of the end of books, where he tied things up and it fits so perfectly with everything that's gone with that character before. And it is an incredible bit. Here's a question. Were there any, was there any moment when you're reading it, when you went,

is that true? Oh, hmm. Good question. Because if Terry punishes anecdotes, and Rob doesn't, occasionally will go too good to check, and he'll just take Terry's party line. And the thing about his first day at work, for example, where he famously said he saw a body.

I did highlight that as a, does that fit it? Because you looked at it and the homeless man being dead didn't fit with it. And I mean, as far as I'm concerned, that didn't happen. Because in Rob's book, it happened like within the week, but not on his first day. I mean, I've never doubted that it happened. I'm sure it happened.

But I think it happened much further, like months into his tenure as a journalist. It didn't happen on the first day or within the first few days, because I went through those newspapers line by line for months. But I think Rob is, in those circumstances, happy to print the legend. And happy to print the myth. It's a better story. But I do wonder if there are any bits where, like that story of Terry working all day,

doing anything but finishing the story and then going and then dashing it often, often there isn't as perfect. Is that too good to be true? I don't know, because I obviously never to that level, but I have often done some of my best work under similar circumstances. And it's a bit without any editing needed. I didn't question it as I was reading it. I haven't until just now.

I don't think it is made up, but it did make me wonder if Rob threw in his own bits that were too good to check. Not things where, because I think he's very good at truth. He's very good at telling us as much as we can who Terry was, and we talked about the vulnerabilities that he allows to be shown. But there are other times where I think it's maybe in his interest as his friend, almost, as the guardian of his legacy to give some of these other anecdotes a bit of a spin polish, to further the legend.

And that kind of thing furthers the legend. That kind of thing carries on making us feel that Terry was a genius and doesn't compromise the innate truth of the story. Whereas I think some of the other bits, you wouldn't change or wouldn't edit or wouldn't scrub up. I'd like to think not. I'd like to think that that's just, I'd like to think not, but it's an interesting question to ponder. It is, yeah.

I'm not sure I've got any ammunition to have a shot at that at the moment. Joanna, anything else off your head? The only thing I think I felt really doubtful about was the story about a fax coming through on the fax machine that hadn't been used for many months and had dried up ink. Because I feel like anyone who would have tried to send a fax would have done something else. The fact that it was from Colin Smythe made it a bit believable. But that was one that felt like an exaggeration. Yeah, there's a couple of the tiny anecdotes.

I mean, this I think might have been filed under too good to check, and it was Terry's anecdote, not Rob's, but the paintbrush being accidentally taken home and painted the house, and Swatkeen team came and took plaster off the walls. Like that to me is like a, that's a good story. I don't know. I didn't work in a nuclear reactor. He had a lot of those stories as well. I actually was quite pleased that a lot of the ones that Rob uses weren't the ones in my book. Yeah, the fairy mound I thought I was going to see again.

And I wonder if that's just because Terry had told those stories. Maybe Rob assumed that the audience already know them or maybe actually, because one of my favorite bits in the book is the CGB stuff, the central electricity generating board for those not paying attention. And the whole stuff about the table of eight, because I didn't know that at all, because obviously that's really private stuff. One of the big holes in my book actually was the CGB. I couldn't find anyone who knew him there who was willing to talk to me.

I tried. I found one person and it was right at the end. I'd already started advertising the book on Facebook and somebody replied to the pre-orders and somebody replied to my Facebook comments. So now I used to work with Terry Pratchett, the central electricity generating board. And I was like, oh my God, can I speak to you? We've got like a day before this goes to print. And I managed to get a few extra bits of color that fleshed that out. But otherwise that whole part of his life is the least documented bit.

So I loved that whole kind of thing and that he kept those friends till the end of his life. And it was really interesting. And especially as you got the two, not quite did I cost me, but almost, because you've got those friends and the fun boys playing space invaders together and going to the arcade and just being nerds and fun. And then you've got like literally one door down, the stories about him going around and everyone learning to fear the words that start with, how do I say this in a way that doesn't offend?

And knowing him as a force of nature and a loud voice. Yeah, you're right. It was a really cool bit of the book that I really enjoyed that, especially with the details like still refusing to wear a tie. And just I did it. Apparently he used to wear a piano key tie. That's one of the details I've seen. Fair. Yeah.

And the thing about him making them play Dungeons and Dragons as well. And just all of them just just going, what? And yeah. And that never happened again. Oh, I'll tell you what I'll tell you what I did wonder about is the being so offended at the idea of a large advance that he shelved a slip of the keyboard for eight years. Yeah.

Yeah. That was really interesting. That's a, it would be such an odd thing to make into a made up anecdote that I don't think it can be, but it's such a bizarre thing. And it fits with the rest of it. But to that extent, good grief. His relationship with money was really interesting. I think he felt like he enjoyed being rich.

Yeah. He enjoyed having a, has he put it a shitload of money? Yes. But I think he enjoyed it especially because he'd earned it. Yes. And he felt like his talent had earned that money. He was worth that money. Like because his genius, his talent was what generated that cash.

And every penny was something he had earned with his imagination and his graft and hard work. Whereas I think with that, I think he felt that that would be money that he hadn't earned. Yeah. He didn't want to be some kind of futures market. Yeah, exactly. And that, so yeah, I thought that was really interesting as well. He had like his ethic, his work ethic is really strong. And that comes all the way through his life.

His work ethic is really strong. And it's the side there of doing the job in front of you and being paid fairly for it. Which is a really, it's a very working class idea. It is. But he's not, he's not got that annoying false modesty on top of it, which is nice. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I'm sure that shouldn't have ideas above my station type thing.

No, no, no, no, no. I know what my station is. Also at that point, he could afford to turn down a large amount of money because he already had a large amount of money. I dare say that when he was on, you know, 15,000 pounds at the CEGB in 1982, if somebody came up and said, we'll give you three quarters of a million pounds or whatever it was to publish a collection of your essays. At that point, I don't think he would turn down.

He wouldn't, but he might have given himself an actual heart attack. A large part of it does seem to be the idea of him slowly learning his limits, learning his boundaries might be a better way of putting it, of learning what kind of pressure he can take. And like, I can actually kind of relate to it. Last year, I was asked to appear on GB News. Let's talk about council culture. And they offered me a hundred pounds, right?

And obviously I turned it down. But it made me think how much money would they have had to have offered me before I said yes. And I decided it was a thousand pounds. Because I decided once you get to a thousand pounds, that's where I would feel irresponsible to turn it down. Because, you know, it'd be worth it because that's a large amount of money. It's rare that somebody gives you that amount of money in one go

for doing not very much. And at that point, my principles would have kind of gone like, I can swallow it for this large amount of money. There's other things you wouldn't do for that amount of money, obviously, but, you know, for turning up, turning up, for turning up on tally and arguing with some racists. Like, for a hundred, for a hundred pound, I don't want to give them the airtime.

I don't want to give them the auction. I don't want to lend my voice to their horrible product. For a thousand pound, I'd feel like it was me that was winning. Not them. This is the thing though. And this is why, like, I think there's possibly two reasons for practice doing stuff like that. For me, I wouldn't take the ground to do it

because I would find it far too... Like, it's not my morals stopping me. It's, I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it. Being, I would be terrified of doing it at all. I'd have been terrified of the feedback afterwards. I wonder if stuff like this for practice, like, it's obviously a lot of morals in there,

but also imagine being given, and maybe not with a slip of the keyboard because it was so successful by that point, but a lot of the stuff of not wanting to have too much money before going to print, or not wanting to be put forward for the Carnegie, is I don't want to give myself that panic. Yeah, in later years, he withdrew his books from the Hugo.

And for anyone who doesn't know, the Hugo is a big science fiction award. It's probably the biggest award in science fiction. It's bigger than the locus award, which I won, but it is. Wait, Mark, did you win a locus award? I did. Have I mentioned that I won a locus award? Sorry, we do have an award winning guest for this today.

I'm frankly appalled it's taking you this long to bring it up. Sorry. But the thing is, yeah, for years, he was bitter that he was never in the mix for those kind of things. He wouldn't talk about it. He would never say that. He would always laugh it off and say,

well, I've made loads of money, so I don't care about anything. But he was genuinely bitter that he wasn't winning these major awards. And then when he was finally at the point where he could have actually been in the mix to win a Hugo, to win the most prestigious award in science fiction, which I think was for making money, actually. He withdrew it.

He decided that he wasn't going to be able to enjoy himself. His exact words were, I won't be able to enjoy the convention if I've got that hanging over me. And that's again, learning his boundaries, isn't it? Because that was another thing that did surprise me. Well, actually, Rob said it like this, so I can't, the lack of graciousness shown

when he did lose something. And I guess the kind of lack of being able to just swallow it for a bit, considering how carefully he was with his persona. Yeah, I wouldn't be very gracious if I lost out to Ricky Gervais. Well, no, not now you wouldn't, but at the time we didn't know.

It's this idea that, because we've got this, if we go back to Neil Gaiman's forward to the sort of simple keyboard, you have this idea of Terry as the jolly old elf, which was a part he played and wasn't true. And then Neil gives his idea of the righteous anger, of Terry as a flame of righteous anger, as somebody who is a furious campaigner for social justice, who is a crusader

for what is right in the world. And that's a different part of him. And then we got this from Rob, which is a different thing altogether, which is him as a cantankerous old bugger. Yeah. Him as moody and a bit moody and flinty. And I really like that,

because that's the stuff that humanizes somebody. Yeah, capricious, I think. He used it on point and I was like, ah, there we go, that's the word. Even the thing about the anger, how the anger fills in everything. And you kind of go, oh, we know, we know him a bit better for having read that,

for knowing that thing. I feel like, oh, that's an insight into his personality. But even that feels like, it doesn't feel like it's who somebody really is, or Neil's a storyteller as well. Yeah, it still feels like almost like a superhero's characteristic. It's his special power, it's his special ability. And he's a righteous crusader for the good

and he's angry about the injustices of life. Again, that still feels like it's the persona. We're being given the persona, we're just getting a different kind of the persona. But I think that element of the persona, of him being grumpy and a little bit unpleasant sometimes, that's far more real. That's the detail that I really enjoyed knowing.

Yeah, and it doesn't make me admire him less at all. No, not at all. Yeah, which is nice. The more I read about him, the more I admire him, even if some of it is not objectively admirable. And I guess it is, yeah, you're right, it's humanizing. It's now you see him more as a person

and kind of the superhuman stuff he does seems even more impressive. You know, so we'd have to find out something pretty awful, which I'm 100% certain we never would. Not with a Queen's lawyers, I'm sorry. No, I'm going to be interested to see if that stays in. But I don't think we're ever going to find out anything really horrible. There isn't anything to find out.

But all of the stuff we do find out adds to our respect for him as a writer. Because that's what he is. Everything else is dressing. Ultimately, what he is, is an author of these incredible books. That's why we admire him. That's why we're interested. That's why we're having this conversation.

That's why this book exists. That's why my book exists. And all of that stuff we're learning is informing the bit about him being cantankerous and not suffering falls, being flinty and capricious and the anger and all of that kind of thing and the awkwardness. All of that is fueling our appreciation of his writing because you're seeing that reflecting.

It's giving us a deeper understanding of the work, which... So none of that is ever going to make us like him less because the reason we like him is the work and it's making us understand the work more. So actually, the more we know, I think it has to be something pretty unpleasant to change that. And I don't think that thing exists. Yeah, that's a good summary.

I'm quite pleased with that summary. Yeah, that's good. I haven't checked out the Reveased Robs book yet, have you? I've seen a few and they've all been very good. There is no such thing as a 100% loved book. They will always be better. No. The professional reviews have been very kind.

He's had really good professional reviews. Rightly so, I think it's a great book. It deserves them. But yeah, the fan reviews, I think, have been really good. That's a good point. Some of the literary merits of the book probably worth highlighting because we've never seen anything long-form from Rob Wilkins before, I guess.

And it's a really well-written book. It's got a great structure. He's got a lovely light... Perfectly split in half. Who manages that? Yeah. Like almost exactly. He wanted it to be two books.

He wanted that bit in the middle. He wanted that to be the end of book one. That explains why it's so perfectly split. And his publisher... Well, he was delighted when he got given a word limit then told he had to stick to it. And he said he's delighted. He was delighted to find that point in the middle,

that point where he felt was the end of act one, did fall almost exactly at the middle of his word count. Oh, I'm so glad he didn't even have to mess around with it afterwards to make that happen. Oh, great. But yeah, I think it's a very well... I think it's a skillfully written book. And I guess he spent 20 years

watching a master of his craft at work. So I think knowing how to structure a book, I guess, he learned at the knee of the what's name. He learned at the eight monitors of the master. Yeah. Not just painting a ceiling with Michelangelo, but mixing the paints and getting lead poisoning or whatever.

Or doing the painting whilst Michelangelo stood behind you going less of it. Yeah, I genuinely think it's got a lovely tone. It has a balance to it. When it goes serious, it doesn't drop that anew in ways that aren't... Unless it's ways that are effective. It's a skillfully written book.

And that impressed me as well. I mean, I wouldn't want to take any credit away from his editor. I'm sure he had a great editor, but I wouldn't want to take any credit away from Rob, who I think did a really brilliant job with it. Do you think we'll see more writing from Rob in the future? I strongly suspect we will. Okay, good.

That is everything we can say about a life with footnotes without this being a three-hour episode. Mark, where can people on the Internet find you and find out what you're doing in pre-order your books and things? I basically live on Twitter. That is where my exit... So recently I've worked for Twitter, which I never used to be able to tell people,

but now I don't work for them anymore, so I can. So I am at 20th Century Mark, to 0th Century Mark with a C. And that's what you can find basically everything as well. On markboros.co.uk, essentially, I never shut up on the Internet. So you should be able to find me. Also, please do sign up for my mailing list

because I send a newsletter once a month that has links to everything I've written recently and some sort of stupid essay about my life, normally, and then a bunch of recommendations, including this very bad cast. It's a good mailing list. And we will link to that in the show notes too, listeners. And it is worth very much signing up for.

Right, we will be back next week with the first half of The Last Hero. I don't know where the first half begins and ends because I haven't read it yet. Until next time, you can follow us on Instagram at The True Show Make-E-Fret, on Twitter at Make-E-FretBod, on Facebook at The True Show Make-E-Fret.

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And until next time, dear listener. Don't let us detain you. No helicopters or loincloths. Oh, I even had a loincloth, but oh well. What was the loincloth? We can put it in after the closing music. Hang on. Cage 31 in my copy.

I think it was in reference to Jesus. Terry barely gave this strangely suspended and wounded figure in his loincloth another thought. And should we call the Morris Minor van that did better than a helicopter could have done the helicopter? Yes, absolutely.