The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret - Interview with Marc Burrows: A Reader's Guide to Terry Pratchett (Volume One, 1962-1999)

Episode Date: August 8, 2026

The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret is a podcast in which your hosts, Joanna Hagan and Francine Carrel have emerged from Discworld and are now exploring the worlds of speculative fiction. This week, we spoke to BFF of the Pod Marc Burrows about his brand new (and very on brand for us) book, A Reader's Guide to Terry Pratchett, Volume One, 1962-1999.Marc’s stuff: Reader's Guide to Terry Pratchett: Volume one 1962-1999 - Marc’s websitePen and Sword Books: A Reader's Guide to Terry Pratchett 1962-1999 - Hardback Marc Burrows in the Ten Best Songs of All Time | Edinburgh Festival Fringe Find us on the internet:BlueSky: @makeyefretpod.bsky.socialInstagram: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretFacebook: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretEmail: [e-mail]: www.patreon.com/thetruthshallmakeyefretDiscord: https://discord.gg/29wMyuDHGP Want to follow your hosts and their internet doings? Follow Joanna on BlueSky @2hatsjo and follow Francine @francibambi Music: Chris Collins, indiemusicbox.com

Greetings, lovely listeners, and welcome to a special episode of The Truth Shall Make You Frette, in which we are joined by, Friend of the podcast barely covers it, Mark Burrows. Mark, as diligent listeners and average Patchett fans will recall, is the author of The Magic of Terry Pratchett, the first full biography of the Terry Pratchett ever written, prolific performer of a stand-up show of the same name, and, most recently, writer of a reader's guide to Terry Pratchett, volume 1, 1962 to 1999. There will, as the more astute amongst you can probably predict, be more to come. But for now, I can confirm that this book, available to order now directly from our court, pre-order from large vendors ahead of a wider release on 30th of August, links in show notes,

is a superb return to the topic dearest to all of our dear little hearts. This episode is a little more spoilery than most, just because of the amount of books we talk about, but obviously we will avoid spoiling any major plot points, and we will not be spoiling the Shepard's Crown. So, without further ado, or rather commencing the further ado from all three of us, let's make a podcast. Hello and welcome to the Tushcheon Makey Press at podcast in which we were reading and recapping every book from Terry Pratchett's Disc World Series, one of Stime and Chronological Order, and now we're doing all sorts of other things.

I'm Joanna Hagan. I'm Francine Carroll. And with us today. Oh, I'm Mark Burroughs. Hi. I'm back, bitches. I wasn't calling YouTube bitches. I was calling the listeners bitch.

Hang on, no. I wasn't calling the listeners bitches. let's do a no I stand by it okay fantastic stand by your bitches I was just like to say to the listeners

I've listened back to a couple of episodes we did was Mark a few years ago and can confirm that is at least the third time we've set him up

to fail with the intro by not warning in what we're about to do which just suggests that I should have learned by now that this is how your intros work

I know but we leave just long enough between it don't we just set it up to be slightly awkward we're nothing if not consistent the wonderful friend

of the pop up Byers is here today to talk about his new book, Out Nowish, Terry Pratchett, A Reader's Guide, Volume 1. Give it its full title. Hang on, I haven't got the full title in front of my. It's a reader's guide to Terry Pratchett, Volume 1, 1962 to 1999. That's what the book's called. Thank you.

I said that in a really obnoxious way. I was trying to be... I'm not to say it properly. Yes, I am. I've got a new book out. I've got a new book out about Terry Pratchett because people get asking me to write another one. I can't think of anything more relevant for this podcast, to be honest.

So, pretty excited about this one. What I've done, Brian, what I've done is my new series of books, of which there will be three, is a literary exercise in which I read and recap every book in Terry Pratchettish Disquil series in Chronological Order. That's such a new and novel idea. I love it. Listeners, I think can, sorry, readers, is that what you call it, a visual listener? Can come on the journey with you, can they? They can. And I also note, right, I do note in the introduction that I do avoid any and always, spoilers for that book to the board.

In order, particularly any spoilers regarding to the final book, The Shepherd's Crown, so you, dear, it can come on the journey with me. So that is, like, yeah, I've got it all sorted out. It's perfect. Yeah, that's genius. I wish I'd thought of that. It actually was surprisingly tricky to not do forward spoilers. I imagine you found that with the podcast.

It's actually really difficult to talk about one, to talk about weird sisters and not talk about witches abroad. It's especially difficult to talk about guards, guards and not talk about Nightwatch. And it's like, so yeah, I did actually have to set myself a hard and fast rule about that. And sort of like, I cast forward a few times. Like there's a bit in the interesting times chapter where I say that the, the theory of, the, the theme of revolutions will be, will be looked at again and in more detail and to greater effect in Nightwatch. But it was very, yeah, there was a lot of, um, of trying to pull. my punches a bit and make sure that I always stayed on the book I was writing back.

I feel like if you can get it from the Nightwatch blurb, then it's not a spoiler. Yeah. Because I think that's what we did. We were allowed to say that characters would come back or that themes would come back because otherwise it's very, otherwise you just sound like you're dancing around something ridiculously. But it must be even hard if you actually, Mark, because you, I don't know if you rewrite all the books before you started this project or like as you were going, but you've done a full reread and not that far back anyway.

Yeah, and I did do another one. But the sad truth is I'm almost always doing one. Like, I'm almost, I mostly at least at the very, I don't know, loads of people will relate to this, but at the very least audio books at bedtime kind of thing. Or I, um, and I've actually had to sort of wean myself off just rereading, just like rereading Pratt. Because I, I listen to audio books. I cycle a lot.

I always listen to an audio, but when I'm cycling, when I'm cooking at night at the gym. and that takes it between all of those things that's quite a lot of time and I've had to wean myself off through redoing practice just go just go it's ridiculous like like have a break from these books

read something else but yeah so I did I did do a complete re-read for this because I kind of had to I had to read his book in order to you know that like in order to then deep dive into it although some of them

I really kind of I almost didn't need to because I know them just so well and I've written about them so much but yeah I did I revisited everything did do it like, sorry, I know Joanne is talking about process a lot more later on,

but did you do it like one book, then write that bit or full reread and then go back? I actually, how did I do it? The problem is I wrote the first, because this book is in three volumes, right? I've written the second volume is already written and the third volume I'm halfway through. So writing volume one was quite a long way back. So I'm trying to remember what state. I think I didn't, it was, I tried to. to read a book, then write about, make some notes, then write about it.

But just because of the nature of when I had time to write and stuff, I never see, find out that I was three books down the line and I hadn't got back to writing yet. But I go into the habit of keeping notes. So I threw out whatever reread I was doing, I was making notes. So then when I got to that book, I would just go back. I read on Kindle as well. So I was highlighting on my Kindle. So I would go back.

okay what book are we looking at now go back to the kid go to kindle look at what pieces what lines are highlighted go back and look at my notes kind of get my head in the game of it go back and look at what I'd written about it in the biography

and then sort of go from there so obviously this is a topic very close to your heart as you said people kept asking you to write another practical book yeah and it took me a while to work out what that would get I was going to my initial response because I wrote

the story of terry pratchez life and then people go are you going to write another book about terry pratchett and you're kind of go, about what? Like, like, spoiler, tragedy, he does die at the end. Like, there is not, if there is a sequel to that book,

either it's going to be fascinating or really dull. Because, depending, depending on your perspective on what happens after one's death, like, I just didn't know what else to write. So I resisted the idea for ages. I was just like, there was no point in writing another book about Terry Pratchett. I'd written his life. life story. I wanted to update it at some point. I think when the 10th anniversary rolls around

which of the book, which is now closer, we're now closer to the 10th anniversary than we are to the original release of the book. It came out in 2020 and it's 2026 now. Oh no, I don't like that, Mark. So I'm going to do a revised edition in 2030 where I sort of, with all the stuff I've learned since, because I've continued to learn about Terry Pratchett. And obviously I turned into a stand-up show as well. I was going to say, yeah. We must have talked about it in an interview with you at some point, but between your biography of Terry Pratcher and this readers guy, you've done how many shows? I mean... Oh, I mean, I've performed probably upwards about 120, 130 at that show. The show I took to like two Edinburgh fringes, an Adelaide fringe,

a Prague fringe and several tours. Like, it's sold like 15,000 tickets now, which is absurd. It's currently, I'm currently resting it. We're looking at filming it and I'll, when we, and I'm trying to find the logistics of that are being worked out. And when I do that, I'll do a couple of warm-up shows as well, and I'll have to relearn how to do the show again. But yeah, so it was like, I didn't think there was another story to tell. And then I realized that one of the most common things I'm ever, that ever, anyone ever says to me, either after the show or in a Q&A about the book, or when I meet people at conventions or whatever, is why didn't you write more about this? Why didn't you write more about insert favorite book here? Because the biography

and the show. I've got a lot about Nightwatch, a lot about the color of magic, a lot about his earlier books. But when you're writing somebody's biography, I tried to at least mention every book he wrote in the biography and have a little bit on it of context. But Lords and Ladies has got like a paragraph,

it's got like a sentence, I think. The inadulterated cat has a footnote. And I realized that actually what another book would be and what I actually really wanted to write was, I was like, over the course of the Q&A, because I did the live show, I would do the second half of the live show. The first half would be the hour-long show

that I did at the end of the fringe. And the second half would be some extra little bits and bobs and stories and some little bits of stand-up. And then I'd do a Q&A with the audience, and they would ask me questions about anything to do with Terry's life, and I would tell them from the best of my knowledge. And sometimes be about what's your opinion on this? And sometimes it was, what do you know about this?

And I realized in the course of that, I had been asked about literally every single Terry Pratchett book. And I had an answer. Where do you think his ideas came from for this? What do you think he was trying to say with this? Or what do you think of this? I'd actually pretty much written about or have spoken about every single one. And I've actually got really into the idea of doing that.

And I was like, and I think subconsciously, maybe I think your podcast probably was in the back of my head a bit as well. And the other Discworld reread podcast are going, well, can I go book by book? and not just the disc world books and not just the novels. Start from the beginning of Terry's life. Start from these earliest short stories. In fact, I start from the very first story I mentioned is a story that we don't even have. The first story that we know that he wrote that has lost a time.

Which is his mashup of Lord of the Rings and Pride and Prejudice that maybe didn't even exist. Who knows, is Terry Pratchett, let's face it. If he had an entertaining story to tell, an entertaining anecdote, he wouldn't let the truth get in the way of it. that anecdote. We know that about Terry and we love that about him. But he said that he's the first story he remembers writing at school was a mashup of Lord of the Rings and Pride and Prejudice. So I start with talking about that and I go through all his school stories and then I go into the newspaper stories. And what was nice about that is actually I went back and re-read, I went back to the source, I went back to the newspapers because a lot, there's still

I think something like 20 of those stories that haven't been republished. Oh, wow. The own, that you won't have read unless you dug into the newspapers. And some of them are brilliant as well. There's some really nice ones. They've tended to republish the funny ones and leave the sort of Alan Garnerish fairy tale ones. And there's actually some really beautiful stuff that he wrote. So going back to those and I was like, well, I'll do it like that.

And then I'll kind of sort of tell the story of the life, but through the work. And then through the themes and what was important to him and what did he believe? And how do we see that emerging? And like, you see the idea, like some ideas that start. kind of poke their head above the parapet in dark side of the sun, but don't really come to fruition until witches abroad. And you can see it. And I was like, actually, that's going to be, that would be really interesting.

So I was like, oh, that's the book. That will be the book. I will write my, I will write an essay, like my thoughts. What I think Terry was trying to say, like, also some nerdy reference spotting and some like, like, go, this is why this joke is brilliant. And really, like, try not too much, but trying to like do something. some nerdy joke spotting and put each book in context of his life. And it'd be a different way of telling Terry's life and a way of also celebrating all of the work.

Because you get readers guides like this about Dickens and Austin and Shakespeare and, you know, insert favorite classic author here. And no one had given Terry Pratchett that same respect. And I thought, well, if I can be the first person to ever write a biography of him, I can be the first person to ever write a biography of him. I can be the first person to ever write a reader's guide as well. And that's, so that's what happened. And it was meant to be, it never occurred to me that it would be more than one, it would be more than one volume. That didn't occur to me.

I started writing it. And then I was like, oh, hang on, how many books did he write? I was like, I need to give at least sort of 2,000 words per novel, really, to do it justice. And so then like you eventually do the maths and go, no, that's like 200,000 words. Yeah. So I like it. I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to, went back to my publisher. Would you mind if I did a second book if this was two books?

And they were like, oh, yes, absolutely. No, no, definitely. We can sell this twice, of course. And so, yeah, I capped it at 1999, which is a nice point to stop it as a real. I mean, it's pretty much halfway through as well. Yeah. It's kind of halfway through the output of work. But thematically, it works really nicely.

And I can talk, oh, like, we can talk about that later, if you like, about why it stops there. But volume two picks up with the truth. and runs to the end of Sir Terry's life. And like the, well, it's, it technically goes to 2016 because the long cosmos came out in 2016. But it'll finish with, it'll finish with the shepherd's crown and then there'll be an afterward. Yeah. There is a third volume. Yes.

Yeah, I was going to say there's some extra, at the moment you've got excellent supplemental materials, but they're kind of going to form the third volume in a way. Yeah. Well, the third volume was because I started doing, I was like, because I always do, if you've followed my stuff before, I always do like, bonus material for my books. So, you know, you can buy the book or you can spend a little bit more and buy it and get an extra thing. And the, the, the, the biography had originally came with this, with a kind of a making of book. I did book of what I called the DVD extras, which was I put all the interviews from the, from the, from, from that I'd done for the biography in full, and some notes about how it was written and some bits and bobs. And I like that. I've done that for all of my books. I like doing extra content stuff. It makes me happy. And I like, because I like it when people do that. You know, I like buying. special editions and extras. So I thought, obviously, I'll do the same for this. And I thought, well, what can I do? And I was like, well, short stories. There's loads of short stories. And there's all the extra bits. There's the Discord companion. There's the maps and all that.

I was like, I'll do, I'll do that. So that was going to be the bonus book. Started writing that. And it was meant to be, you know, meant to be a pamphlet, basically. It was meant to be like, you know, a booklet. Realised I'd got to, I'd got about halfway through what I wanted to write and I'd gotten to 20,000 words and was like, oh no, this is actually, this is going to come out 40,000 words just for this. And I have a copy. I have it here. This is the, this is the spin-off that's, um, um, the short spin-offs and adaptations that comes if you buy the special edition. And it's really cute. I'm really pleased with it. And it's, um, and it's, uh, it's, uh, 173 pages long. And, um, um, in quite, um, um, um, um, in quite, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um,

quite a small font. And so I thought, well, if I do that for volume two as well, because then that will take me to 80,000 words, and that's a book. So I went back to the publisher again. I was like, I'm going to do these two bonus books. Shall we just combine them, and that can be volume three, because not everyone's going to buy the special editions. And if you do buy this special editions, I don't expect you to buy volume three.

But so, yeah, there will be a, so, and actually, this has been the one that was most fun to write. because it was revisiting the stuff that was less that I'd sort of concentrated on less and the short story so there's the short stories the video games like there's a chapter in here on the

on the 1986 colour of magic text based adventure game for the Sinclazellic spectrum and I wrote the longest chapter in this is on the From the Discworld Prague rock album which

How nice were you in that chapter? Not at all, I'm brutal it's the only it's it was nice that was nice because I you know it was letting the music journalist out because that's one of the things I do and I was like I

but also it's interesting to write about because it's sort of it's there's an ongoing conversation that happens through this book because I talk about the the adaptions this only covers the same period of volume one so it only covers up to 1999 so but that means you've got the adaptations

of the animated version of truckers the Cosgrove Hall Weird Sisters and Soul music the live action Johnny and the Dead plus the video games. So it's really interesting to look, go, oh, this is, what does it take to do a good version of Pratchett? And that becomes a conversation that goes through it.

And the mistake that from the Discworld Hour makes is it removes Terry Pratchett from the scenario altogether. His voice is not present. It's not, it doesn't feel like, it doesn't feel of a piece with what he's writing. It just feels like a terrible prog rock album. And then it kind of improves at the end when Tony Robinson turns up and narrates the final chapter, the final passage of moving pictures. And you kind of go, that's what it was missing all along. It was missing that. And if it had that weaving through it. So that was really fascinating.

And then go like how fascinating it is that if you look at the kind of the growing, because, because Terry spent so long, like all of the spin-off stuff, he couldn't ever let go of. Certain things like TV adaptions and stuff, he had to, they had to force it out of its hands, stuff that he couldn't do. But the maps, the everything, the companions, the diaries, like they've got Terry's fingerprints all over them. He oversaw all of them and he wrote substantial amounts for all of them. So suddenly you go, well, these are worth, this is worth talking about.

And I realised, hang on, and I'll read the end of the introduction to this. It's what made me really, it kind of clarified it for me. This is the end of the introduction to the spin-off one. It says there will always be those who say that analyzing Pratchett is. a fruitless pursuit, either because they don't believe his work bears the scrutiny or because they don't enjoy dissecting the frog. To borrow an analogy from the reader's guide itself, you have to buy that to understand that bit. This little volume is not for those people. If you don't believe that Weird Sisters deserves analysis, you're certainly not going to see the value in picking

apart the Discworld map. But if you're someone that enjoys seeing the patterns in the clouds and dreaming of what they mean, that revels in trying to understand the man through his creations, if you, like me, believe that you simply cannot overthink a Terry Pratch's story, then this one is for you. Because if Leonard of Quirm has taught us anything, it's that the sketch is scribbled in the margins can change the world. So let's start looking at those scribbles. And that was like the manifesto for that. And I'm really looking forward to writing the second half of that

because that's when I get to go into the journalism and the documentaries and shaking hands with death and the saga of the Good Omen's adaptation. And the full saga, now we have the full thing is there. I want to tell the full story of that in a way that, in as legally applicable ways I can. And so that, I was like,

that's going to be a really fascinating book as well. And I'm going to hold some stuff back for the proper volume three so people don't feel shortchanged. But yeah, so it's become quite the project. Readers guys in general,

actually, skipping back a topic, you were saying that obviously classical authors you get these readers guys. I've not really consumed any of these. Is yours kind of classically a reader's guide? Because I think what I wouldn't have expected, except for the fact you wrote it,

was so much of the author's life, so much of Terry Practor's life being included in the analysis of the books? That's a really good point. I called it a reader's guide, but it was based on kind of what I assume a reader's guide is, because it's not something I've really picked up. I think I would have done if there'd been one for Discworld, I think I because I enjoy analysis that way. But then again, I like album by album books. I've both written and have read a lot of that sort of thing. It's very common with music to pick apart an artist's work or filmography, like film by film. And I find those really,

so it's kind of that, that's the sort of thing I was really thinking about. But if, like you had to include, I felt like you have to include the sort of the biography aspect of it, because it's such an important context in certain points, particularly when you're, I mean, I think it's, there's more biography in the first third of this. And I was trying not to repeat myself as well, having written a biography.

But the first third, I think you need to understand why the short stories are important. And to understand how he approaches the first version of the carpet people, for example. And you need to know about his life. And I think his life and where he comes from, it informs his writing. And it continues to inform his writing all the way through. There's a fundamental thing. in Discworld and Terry's writing in general and it's the idea that you're not set on the story that's been put in front of you, that you don't have to follow the path that other people

are shunting you down, right? That's a core belief. And so to talk about that and not talk about the fact that when he was six years old, he was told that he would never amount to anything and sent to the bottom of the class to hang out with the children who were never expected to do anything. From the very start of his education journey, he was told you will be this kind of thing. And he rebelled against it and he pushed back. And I don't think you can remove that theme from his writing. So you need the biography of that.

I don't think. I think that's true of any writer. I think that's true of any artist. I think you need to understand something of the person will help you understand the writing. And I think it's an interesting experiment to reproach something, not. knowing anything about the author because of course most people don't know anything about the authors they're just they just pick up a book or listen to a record or watch a film you don't necessarily know the full biography of the person who created it but um it changes it can change your perspective

on that and i think if we're trying to get under the skin of one of the books and there's something relevant from terry's life uh i thought it kind of needed to be in there i one of the things i find i i will occasionally hark back to the short stories because there's some stuff i found in it that that really kind of opened my eyes a little bit on on how things would go afterwards. But do you know the short story, final reward? Helping out. Final reward is the one about the author

who has written a kind of Conan the Barbarian saga, like 28, 29 novels about a kind of Conan figure and then he decides to kill him off at the end of in the final book and then the character turns up on his doorstep to claim his final reward, which is to go to the hall of his creator, except his hall has got a telephone in it and a coat rack.

And that's very Terry. But that's a story about a guy driving himself literally mad and eventually to suicide. Yeah, bit dark. Yeah, because he can't stand the idea of rewriting the same book over and over again. And Terry literally said that. He said he would rather open a vein

than write the light fantastic. plastic 25 times. And then he writes a short story about a guy who basically does that, who is the version of Terry that decided that this is where the money was and wrote 25 novels of The Adventures of Rinceman the Wizard or 25 novels of King Caritabank. And the author he didn't want to be. And again, that's biography. That's looking at the man himself and how he felt. And that directly reflects on how he saw the world. And I think you can't separate that on the work. And that continues all the way through it. I mean, towards the end of his life, it's really interesting when you start, actually, it's quite interesting when you look at the final books, the post-embuggerence

books, where he's actually, after spending pretty much a decade talking about interiority and how people feel and think and people choosing to be themselves and the interiors of our own heads, which the Tiffany books and the Vine's books, are really, he kind of stops doing that after the embuggerence, because I think he probably goes, well, it'll be a bit on the nose. it'd feel a bit obvious but knowing what's going on with him the biography informs the work you can't necessarily separate the two things

so it's something you always had you always had to put those two things together and I think it's a different way I saw it as a different way of telling the story of Sotteri's life the AGM supplemental oh yeah I should explain that

so because I did a few different levels of special edition and like the basic special edition you get the short stories book. If you bought the slightly posh a box set version, you get a second booklet. And the second booklet is me and Rob Wilkins in conversation, which I called the Guild of Terry Pratchettich biographer's annual general meeting.

Basically, Rob and I went for, just went for lunch, as we do. And over scotch eggs and cider, I interviewed Rob about the early part of Terry's career and transcribed it faithfully after. after editing out all the libelous bits. And that became, and that, because I thought Rob's voice. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, I did. So that was, yeah, that became, that became the, that became the, not only I, I edited it,

and then I sent it to Rob and Rob did another pass. Yeah. But that became the second. There's a really, really secret special edition with all the cut bits, but you have to sign a lot of paperwork before you can get it. That somehow has seeped into the. magical world and it's kept in the mat full of ice with the chains. Yeah, exactly.

Actually, I don't think that even exists. I think, well, it exists because you can go through, because Google, because Google docs have history. So you could go back and find the, find the full transcript. But I edited it. I edited the live document. So I don't think a lot of it. I deleted a lot of it.

It's for the best. That's probably for the best. I mention it because, you mentioned during the ATM and it's really interesting to see it in context with a conversation with, you know, Rob Wilkins. his assistant and the other biographer. I'm sure he's like being called the other biographer. The second biographer. He would say the better selling biographer.

I say the second biographer. He would say the official biographer. I say the second biographer. But yeah, you said and he agreed with you that it's a little on the nose to be explicitly referencing the kind of the darkness behind the eyes topics after the diagnosis of the buggerence. And yeah, it's interesting actually reading that sort of mention just how much you two are on the same page about what I would consider quite abstract concepts as well. Really? That's interesting. What do you mean by what abstract concepts?

What Terry Fratchett would have liked about the set of the other. Yeah. Unfortunately, my brain has taken up quite a lot of space with one of the lines that Rob said, which made me laugh for quite a long time about Josh Kirby spending quite a lot of time alone and not being reflected in his artwork. That was my favourite line. I'm really trying to think of one of the deep things that I'd noticed. He just dropped that in as well, really. It was really funny.

Yeah, they're like, I was crying also for earlier. Reading that. I said, yeah, I say sometimes, yeah, sometimes in some of Terry's earlier female character. Yeah. Some of Terry's earlier female characters, you suspect the, the, the, um, the, um, They were two dimensional with a third dimension often only supplied by Josh Kirby's cover artwork. Yes, that was yours.

Rob, just paused for a second and went, yes, he did spend a lot of time alone. Yeah, that really made me laugh. I wasn't sure if that would stay in as well. I wasn't sure if that would survive the Wilkins edit, but it did. I think he was quite pleased with the line. Things like both of you agreeing

which version of the carpet people was better as well. Just like... Yeah, I wasn't... There were a few times you just... said, and I think you know what I'm going to say here, and I don't think anyone but you two would have known. That's what I mean, I think. Really? Yeah. That's really interesting. No, you're right. And the carpet people thing is quite, I wasn't sure if Rob would think that. Terry, I don't think, would ever have said that the original version of the carpet people was the

better of the two versions. And yeah, I didn't think Rob would think that either. But, yeah, And the interesting thing about the carpet people is that almost nobody has read the original version of the carpet people because it's so hard to get hold of. It's never been republished in that form. Like, weirdly, the most valuable Terry Pratchit book you can buy is a true first edition color of magic. Those are the most valuable ones. It baffles me that the first edition carpet people isn't more valuable because there are slightly more of them. them. I'm aware that that's why it works. But the text of the first edition of the color of magic, give or take a couple of corrected typos,

is the same text as the version you can go down to Waterstones and buy today. Whereas the text of the carpet people, the first edition, only exists in that book, in that hardback book. And there were only 3,000 of them printed. And, you know, we don't, no one's ever ever counted up how many of them are accounted for. But it won't be 3,000. There'll be a lot less than that. And the own, it's not available online anywhere.

You can't, like, there is no PDF floating around. There is no, like, facsimile edition. There's, it's never been republished. So, because Terry preferred his version. He preferred the version he rewrote in 1992. And so I assumed that Rob would be with me on that, would be with Terry on that. He would say, you know, Terry, Terry didn't,

wasn't happy with the original version. I, going back, going back and I reread them back to back, because I do one of the things when the first biography came out and it did all right one of the things I treated myself to because it's something I'd always wanted to own was a first edition of the carpet people

like it's not the kind of thing you know I don't normally spend I don't drop 300 pounds on a book willy-nilly and I bought it in the full knowledge that one day I may have to sell it. It's an investment it's lit yeah it's actually an investment but I do own a first edition carpet people and so going back

through it and reading it. And the first edition is so much more charming. And yeah, it is a, it does dramatically rip off Lord of the Rings. It really does. But, admittedly, set in a carpet, though, you know, give him his flowers with that. That's for it.

That, that's, that original, that, that, that note of originality forgives the fact that he's, that he essentially recreates Aragorn, Gandalf, and Frodo. Like, takes lines of dialogue. The whole thing about, like, when you step out onto a road, um, it joins up to all the other roads like a river.

Billuogne's has a song about that. You go to the city of where, the ancient city of where, which has got a tree in the middle. It's really not subtle. But actually, the original edition is so much more charming. And it feels honest.

It feels honest about what it is. And it feels like a really nice children's adventure story. Whereas when you read the 1992 version, it's a little bit self-aware and a little bit knowing. And I do get, like, he is right. The first version was written by somebody who thought battles was about fantasy. It was about fantasy was about, fantasy was about somebody who realized that fantasy should be about not having battles and doing away with kings. And, oh boy, if I quoted that doing away with kings line at people sometimes.

When they're during arguments about things. But it's actually a little bit smug. He comments on himself a lot. Like he gives the character of Pismire. He gives him all these lines all the way through where there'll be a line from the original version. And then Pismarer will go, ah, melodrama. And it's like, it's Terry going, looking like doing a DVD commentary on his own work.

It just doesn't quite, like, it doesn't quite hang together for me. And I think there's a lot of charm and on. And I didn't think Rob would agree with me on that, but yeah, he does. Yeah. Because, yeah, it's hard to comment on your own teenage self, isn't it? It's hard to edit your own teenage self in a way that isn't way to. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

And actually, and Terry's, you've got to commend him because in a blink of the screen, the short stories collection, he allowed to be published, not just a couple of his early newspaper stories. he also has to be published a couple of stories he wrote for his school magazine when he was when he was literally 14 like 13 14 and and they're okay they're interesting and I but I think they're more interesting than they are good but they're okay and he says in the introduction to it that you know I'm I'm I'm itching to strip this down and rewrite it but I'm not going to I'm going to let it stand like as a historical piece and I'm really glad he did

because those short stories are really interesting the way Terry wrote is really you can see something of they're very clever for a 14 year old but also they they're clever in a way where they know they're clever like there's a knowing twist in the tale

like he's obviously read a lot of old dull short stories and there's a lot of there's a there's a twist in the end that makes sense of everything and like they're very pleased with themselves but then when you were like ridiculously bright teenager who writes, of course, that's part of your personality. Of course, you're pleased with yourself. That's kind of part of the journey that writers all go through.

But yeah, it's interesting that he allowed those out and edited. And he did edit the children's ones, Uncle Jim's stories. They did get a light edit, which mostly I think consisted of adding footnotes and taking out a few jokes that let's say did not, necessarily passed the smell test of 21st century standards. Of their time. But by and large, they're like, if you compare them with the early,

with the early newspaper versions, they're pretty similar. So Mark, would you like to bless us with an excerpt from your shiny new book? Yes, happy to. I've not done this before. I've not done a reading.

So yeah, I was trying to work out which chapter to do, and I've settled on right on reading the witches abroad bit, partly because I think which is abroad I think I think it might be

my favourite Terry Pratchett novel I don't think I'm not I wouldn't say I'm not going to say it's his best one but I think it's the one

that I that sort of speaks to me the most and that I'm most fond of yeah and it's like it's my comfort read this one novel

but also it's the one where I think there's an idea floating through all of his work starting pretty much with Dark Side of the Sun

in 1974, 76, sorry, and crystallising as it goes along, this idea of stories and of the how stories are shaped by people and all that sort of stuff. And which is abroad is the one where I think he finally works out how he feels about that. And it kind of crystallizes for him.

And it kind of sets a template and a tone that goes through the rest of the series. And the rest of his writing, writing, really. So that's why I thought this was a good one to do. So yeah. Cool. Okay. Shall I just start? Yes. I'll play some like, I don't know, harp sound effect when you're I to. Which is Abroad, Brackets, 1991. People think that stories are shaped by people, writes Terry at the very start of Which is Abroad. In fact, it's the other way around. It's one of the key tenets of the entire series, and he announces it with the confidence of someone who has finally

worked out an idea he has been circling for several novels. Stories have their own gravity, their own momentum, and people get dragged along whether they want it or not. A thousand grandmothers have been devoured by wolves because that's what the story demands. But more than that, a million people have glided along in the groove of their lives that could have been something else. Because it was easier to do what was expected. We have listened to the stories that have been imposed on us. We've followed the path of the done thing. Because the momentum of our lives, everything we have been taught to do or think, not least by the thousands of fictions we've imbibed since birth, make it so.

It's something that he had experienced himself. As a child, he'd been sorted by teachers into the lower set at primary school, the dumping ground for the children not expected to thrive academically, who were more or less left to fend for themselves. Teachers had seen a working-class kid, the son of a car mechanic and a secretary, who was something of an unfocused dreamer and made a decision about his capabilities at six years old that set him up for a specific journey through life. It's to Terry's credit that once he'd worked out what was happening,

he refused to follow the script, the story that had been set for him. Here, Terry finally gives the concept a name, narrative causality. Things happen because there is a story that says they should. It will become gradually the central theme of his work. Standing against all that narrative inevitability, he sets three oddball women from Lanka, each with a broomstick and with enough collective stubbornness to redirect a river. The witches had very much found their true voice. In equal rights, Granny was a prototype.

In weird sisters, all three witches were, to an extent, archetypes, at least as their starting point. Here they are magnificently themselves. Granny Weatherwax is a creature of uncompromising certainty. Nanny Hogg is a being of cheerful chaos, and Magrat clutches her earnest anxieties like protective talismans. They're caricatures, but recognisably human ones, and it's the warmth of their bickering, they're grudging care for one another,

and their refusal to be told what to do, each in their own way, that carries the book. Readers fell for them completely. In an essay on fantasy storytelling, written for the Sunday Times in 1999, Terry had said this, J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mount Fuji appears often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it's big and up close, sometimes it's a shape on the horizon, sometimes it's not there at all,

which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mount Fuji. As Witch as Abroad gets underway, Terry is clearly standing on Mount Fuji itself, and he's enjoying the view immensely, tasked with an improbable mission to travel to the far-off swampy land of Jay. the central trio initially follow a collection of Tolkienesque beats with a cheerful precision. The magic words allow passages through the gates of the dwarf mine, open up you little sods, an unexpected cameo from Golm himself, and the dwarf bread that stands in for Elvin Lempas,

sustaining travellers forever on the grounds that you will do literally anything to avoid having to eat it. And like many throw away gags in Pratchett, this one will prove to have a long tail. But this isn't pastiche for its own sake. Terry demonstrates his mastery of the form by showing how easily he can invoke it and then twist it to his own purposes. The quest structure is a vehicle for something more subversive. In Tolkien, as in most fantasy,

heroes answer Destiny's call. Not here. Here it's three interfering busy bodies, or at least two busy bodies on a wet hen anyway, refusing to let Destiny have its way unchallenged. Having got the Middle Earth references out of his system, Terry then sets about dismantling fairy tales with surgical precision.

And like a surgeon, or at least a good surgeon, not the gibbering insane kind, nothing he is doing here is for the sake of, disfiguring the subject. The parodies of both a narrative and a thematic purpose. Narratively, it's happening because someone somewhere is deliberately engineering reality to resemble fairy tale logic, regardless of the human cost. The big bad wolf was as much a victim as anyone else in Red Riding Hood's story. It's an ordinary wolf given human instincts, being driven

slowly insane as it's forced to act against its nature, before eventually having to be put out of its misery, willingly placing its neck under the lumberjack's axe. A toy maker faces a rest for being unable to whistle whilst he works, a cook is terrorised into bustling cheerfully. The jokes curdle into horror. Stories Terry suggests can be totalitarian. Theematically, it's telling us something fundamental about his worldview, something that would shape the next 30 or so novels he would write. He's not interested in the traditional fantasy questions of good versus evil. He's interested in the more complex problems of competing versions of good, because someone here thinks what they're doing is right. At the book's centre is the confrontation

between Granny Weatherwax and her sister Lily, who has enslaved the Kingdom of Genoa by forcing everyone into fairy tale roles. Lily doesn't see herself as the villain. After all, she wants to ensure that Emberella gets her prince and that every story has its proper happy ending. The fact that this requires turning people into puppets and reptiles into people doesn't trouble her in the least.

Even the location itself, the city of Genoa, is an extension of the theme. On the surface, it's a sugar convection of fairy tale locale, with shining streets and dreaming spires and well-behaved citizens in smart uniforms. But that's all artifice. Below the surface, the soul of the city is an earthy swamp culture of wild abandon. Terry had recently road trip from Orlando, home of Disney World, to New Orleans,

and had been struck by the contrast between the forced fairy tales of the former and the uninhibited spirit of the latter. Throughout, which is abroad, concerns itself with duality. That's that there's a version of reality that should be, based on someone else's idea, and a version that is. There's the thing that people wants and the things that people need. The duality is how much time when we learn that the villain at the heart of the plot is Granny's own sister, a mirror image who wants to be seen as sweet, wise and noble, but is really

conniving, vicious and manipulative. Granny, meanwhile, who's arguably all of those things, is happy to be seen as sour and faintly terrifying, but has an ironclad moral core and perhaps the strongest idea of right and wrong in the whole Discworld canon, something that's explored further in future stories. Even this idea, though, is too straightforward, too satisfyingly neat a story. There's layers here. Granny chooses to be the good one, because she has to be, and she knows, absolutely knows, that she could choose a darker path anytime she wants to, and if she did, she would be sensational at it. Lily wears white, Granny wears black, good witch, bad witch. But white is contrived and black is serviceable, so which which is which. The line between narrative power and free will are blurred

this way and that. When Granny finally confronts the sister, we see how much this has bruised her. After you went, I had to be the good one. You had all the fun. This is Terry laying bare something crucial about morality. That being good is often thankless, difficult work, whilst being selfish, as many politicians can tell you, can look remarkably like heroism if you control the narrative. Lily's defeat comes when she and Granny fall through a mirror into a world of reflections and must identify which is the real one. Lily literally cannot find herself. She spent so long in the illusion, she can no longer identify what's true. When death poses the same challenge to Granny, she simply looks down to herself and knows she is real. The difference between someone who has

done the hard work of being honest and someone who has preferred convenient fictions could not be clearer. McGrath, the junior witch and wet hen, is buffeted by those powers too, wanting to do good, but lulled into storified versions of what good really is. Her development mirrors the book's central theme. She stops trying to be what the stories say she should be and starts being herself. It's now accident that the glass slippers don't fit her. She's not meant to be Cinderella.

Nanny Og, meanwhile, remains the glue that holds the coven together. She can drink a town dry and float with half a genuine, but beneath the jokes, she has something important in Terry's moral universe. the ability to enjoy the world without needing to control it. She doesn't use magic because she doesn't have to. Her appetite, her laughter and her sheer sociability are powers enough. And she's deceptibly shrewd enough to know when to deploy it. Whiches Abroad is a confident book.

The voice is clearer than in earlier books, able to deliver jokes and moral arguments in the same breath without either feeling forced. The journey structure allows for fairy-sale set pieces, but the thematic through line about stories and freedoms holds it altogether. Even the diversions feel thematically on point. Nanny's unlikely flirtation with Kassanunda, the name of that character remains for me an absolute top-tier Pratchit pun, by the way.

The world's second greatest lover plays out as pure comic business, but also underlies the central point. Neither Nanny, an old woman with a face, like, as Terry delightfully puts it, a happy apple, nor Kassanunda, a dwarf, are playing the parts allotted to them. People aren't stories. They're messy, hungry, contradictory,

and much funnier than archetypes. Kassanunder's outrageous lies, Griebos' unsettling transformation from Tomcat with the intelligence of a man into a man with the morals of a Tomcat, even the witch's encounters with innkeepers, woodcutters and riverboatman along the way, all these digressions emphasise that real life is untidy. It doesn't fit the grooves of fairy tales, and that's deeply important. Death appears at the end, as he often does, to underline the point. The answer to that is, hang on, Hank. The answer to that is somewhere between no and yes. He says, it's a perfectly ambiguous response that captures the book's central

insight, that the space between story and reality is where actual life happens. This is about power, choice and responsibility. Stories are dangerous, it argues. They can trap as easily as they can delight. The job of the witches, and of Terry as the storyteller, is to make sure people come first. It's a key book in the series, though it wears its importance lightly. It's also one of the funniest, full of genuine laugh-out-lound moments and gleeful character beats. Like its creator standing on Mount Fuji, it uses its elevated position not to dominate the landscape, but to see it more clearly. With witches abroad, Terry had become a philosopher of stories, someone who understood that the tales we tell ourselves

shape the lives that we're allowed to live. That's it. Fantastic. It's a really good book, by the way, Mark. I don't think I said that at the top. Oh, yeah, we should probably mention it. Thank you. Hardly anyone's read it, so I don't know what people are going to think of it,

and it's a really, I mean, Joanna knows this. It's a terrifying time as an author. Like, you've written a thing, you created something, and you don't know it is and you think it's all right but you don't know what anyone else thinks about it and I'm I've got 500 of them sat on a table downstairs waiting to be posted out into the world and then I have to sit back and watch the Amazon reviews come in and that's faintly terrifying so thank you for being nice about it well I think it's good to the point where I'm kind of furious about it

because you really done a good job of solidifying some concepts I think I rambled about it length into really good concise paragraphs. Like, I love the way you described the things in the dungeon dimensioning. Consequences rather than villains. God, I wish I thought of that. It's, yeah, no, it's a really good book. Thank you.

The themes run through it really well. I love a theme that runs through. I mean, I thought about when I was writing it, thank you very much to say that. The thing is, when I was writing it, I thought about, should I go back and listen to your podcast? Should I go back, listen? and every, when I'm writing a book, go back and listen to your episodes on it, because I know how much work you did and how much, and I'd heard most of those episodes at some point.

And then I thought, no, because if I do, it would, it will colour what I think. We couldn't listen to the other podcasts before we'd done the book they were talking about for the same reason, because you can't. You will end up kind of adopting someone else's opinions as your own, whether you mean to or not. But I have heard, not all, but most of your episodes. So some of it would have gone in.

We're in your head. We don't recommend that. So if I've crystallised an idea that you rambled about, it's very possible that I crystallised it because you rambled about it. I don't know. I can't think of any examples. But we've all been thinking about and talking about this stuff so much. And I think the reason that these ideas,

I think the reason that it was time to do this is because I'd spent so long thinking about all this stuff. I spent so long thinking about these books. And from, and partly it was doing the tour, it was doing 120 odd shows, each one of which came with a Q&A where I would be asked about stuff. And I wasn't always prepared for the question. I'd say about half of the questions at any, any Q&A I would have had before and knew how to answer them. But there would always be kerb balls, always be things that will make me think about the books in new ways. And every time I listen to them, and maybe it's that Stanley Kubrick thing as well, where Stanley It would make people do like 60 takes of a scene.

And so the first few takes will be okay. Then they'd get really good. And then they'd get really bad and they get really stilted. And everyone would get really angry and really frustrated and they'd be delivering really bad performances. And then they'd somehow break through a wall and find something that they hadn't found before through the familiarity with the material. And I think maybe I'd got to a point where I've reread them so much. And I've thought about them so much that I, kind of

you know something was crystallising something and partly also I think the live show was about crystallising the themes of Terry's work as well and it sort of record and that made me made me think a lot about

because to to concentrate Terry's life into a one hour lecture basically I mean it's a comedy standard comedy show but into a one hour presentation like I it really is I realized it was

about the details, it was about the themes, it was about the ideas, it was about what was important to him, and then you bolt on the details that represent those most, and I met, men, I'd really boiled down those themes. And then, I think after having done that, and then going back to do a subsequent reread, having done that level of deep thinking, and sat with it all in my sort of liminal space somewhere, in the kind of the back rooms of my brain. I found yeah I found a new level looking at the thing is I don't know

I've got to be clear that these are my opinions right and people are going to disagree with them there are going to be people who vehemently disagree I've already had people who were angry about the fact that I was quite harsh about sorcery in the biography I mean perhaps it was harsh about sorcery

well exactly yeah and I'm no nicer about it frankly in the chapter here. I mean, I think it's a very funny book and I think it's got a lot of moving parts but it's also, but there's also a lot of phoning in happening with that. And Terry moved on from it very quickly

because it was exactly the book he didn't want to write and I think he did a lot of damage to his career because I think when people thought, it was his first number one Bicello and when people thought about what a Terry Pratchett book was if they hadn't read them,

they're thinking of sorcery. They're thinking of like the high-kicking fantasy romp with a scantily clad woman on the cover. That's what they're like comedy sort of nerdy references. And yes, there was always that element, but there was always so much more to it. But I think that book kind of went, this is what people think it is. And there are other people who love those books. There are people who love the color, who go to their graves, claiming the color of magic is a masterpiece.

Which I think actually, when you revisit it, it is a very good book. Yeah. You've got to remember that you've set the bar to practice. not to know not to every other version of it yeah exactly that um tell you one thing it's been really interesting though is I'm in the middle of writing a novel which may nothing may come of uh and I've got another novel I desperately want to write as well and I I put it aside for ages because I was rereading Terry Pratchett and I didn't really work on it for over a year and because I was deep thinking about Terry's work and I realized later that it's because I did I can't read Terry Pratchett

be inspired to write because all I can read it because when I read him all I can think of is is is I cannot get near this like this is like like if you can't write this why bother this is like this is like this is the master this is the master this is what you're responding to and you will never be this good and it's only when I went back to reading books by you know mortals like good like good writers but but ones that weren't Terry Pratch and was like and made me go, oh, actually, the bar is maybe more attainable. I can, right. Maybe I can go back to writing my book. And I went back to writing my, to working on my novel. And then I read a Georgette Hare novel. My partner made me was like, we did a, we made an agreement. She was

like, if you read a Georgia Hair novel, I'll read a Terry Pratchett. She still hasn't. But I read, I read, I read, um, I read, um, I read, um, I read, um, I read, um, I read, um, George Hatt Hares, who if you don't know, is a regency romance writer who was writing in the early to mid-20th century. I read a book of hers called Catillion. And it is an unimpeachable masterpiece that was completely delightful and absolutely hilarious. And I came back out of it going, no, I'm terrible. There's no point in writing books anymore. Making my usual list of media recommendations having talked about.

Oh, it's honestly, Catillian, it's so beautiful and so frothy. and honestly, it was the best book I'd read in so long, and I was just blown away. And then I was like, oh, yeah, no point. Lots of a point. Anyway, that's a digression. I thought a lot about these stories, is what I'm saying. Yes. So, yeah, absolutely.

You have thought about these stories. How did you decide what to include that wasn't just, like, going over what you've gone over before? I let the books guide me. Some bits that was easy than others, because there are some, you know, there's a, you know, I'm, there's a, 2,000 word essay in this book on lords and ladies. There's a 1,500 words in the unadulterated cat. There's, there's, you know, because there's a bit, thank you. There's, you know, there's 1500 words in the science of discourse volume one.

Like, you know, like, it felt like, like I was able to stretch my legs and talk about stuff that I hadn't talked about before because I hadn't had an opportunity to write about those things before. Other than that, I tried, like, I was, bit worried about the early chapters, the very early chapters, that's the first two, that I would be repeating the biography. And I just tried to root it as much in the writing, in what Terry was producing. So I don't go into too much detail about his school life. I don't go into too much detail about his home life. Um, you know, his, uh, what, his life outside of work, all, all you

need to know is he went to school that he had home and that he worked for a newspaper. Like, Other than that, I could write, I could concentrate on the, on the writing itself. And in all cases, I just let that, I just let that guide me. It wasn't so much going, what do I need to include? It was, what has occurred to me as I write this? Yeah. Like, what, what is the story I'm telling here? Because it's, it's all storytelling.

Non-fiction is as much storytelling as fiction is. And even a reader's guide is storytelling, or at least I think it should be. I feel like there is a story of Terry that goes through this book through Terry's stories. So I kind of let that tell me what to include and what I didn't need to include. So there are anecdotes about Terry's life that just didn't, weren't necessary and weren't pertinent. And then there were ones that were absolutely necessary to understand why he wanted to write about certain things. Did you find yourself getting to include stuff that you'd had to leave out for the sake of not having a 10 volume biography of Terry Pratchett.

I overloaded the biography of footnotes and the editor quite rightly just put a line through a lot of them. I was like, you know, you'd got too ready here. But there were some jokes that I lamented losing that I was able to bring back for this, which I was quite pleased about. Other than that, not really in terms of research or anecdotes, because if anything was good enough, it went in the biography. There was very little like out. But there's a lot of stuff I'd learned since.

And a lot of stuff that has come to light. since, for example, the chapter on Good Omen's is a very different chapter to the chapter in the biography. Yes. Because we, partly because there are stuff I've learned about Good Omen since then. For example, the Kit Kat advert, I didn't know about the Kit Kat advert. Do you know about the Kit Kat advert? Not until I just read your book.

Yeah. So for those who don't know, when Terry was given the original short story for Good Omen's, for what would become Good Omen's, gifted to him by A.N. other writer. And in the original version that he who we are avoiding naming wrote,

there was only one demon called Crawley. There wasn't an angel and a demon. But on TV at the time was a Kit Kat advert starring Ken Campbell, the great British character character actor. And in this Kit Kat advert had

an angel and a demon meeting in the vestibule between heaven in hell for their break, for their coffee break in the middle of the day. And the demon comes out of one elevator. The angel comes out of the other elevator. They sit down, they grumble a bit, and they have a break, have a kick-cat. And they share a kit-cat. And then the angel goes back to his elevator full of screaming and flames.

And the angel goes back to his elevator full of like choral music. And then says, well, no. rest for the wicked. And then, and you go, oh, that's a Zirafal. And,

like, Terry, and Terry just stole it. Just took that idea. Like, that idea of having the angel and the demon who meet as friends. And put that into the story.

And that is what really sets that story a light. That's what makes, that, that's the narrative drive of that story, is the, is that relationship between the two characters, which is established, just like,

that advert absolutely establishes the, the narrative relationship. that is the narrative engine of good omens. So I didn't know that when I wrote the original biography. I found that out, subsequently found that out later. So that meant I was, there's little things like that I've just picked up as I've gone along

because I've never stopped researching Terry. I've never stopped. The Patrick Kern's stories, we didn't know about those when I wrote the original biography. The stories that Pat and Jan discovered, we now know that when he went to work for the bath evening Chronicle, he was moonlighting for the books for the Western Daily

Press, writing short stories under an assumed name. So there's a whole bunch of more work that we didn't know about. There were a couple of stories he wrote at school that had surfaced that hadn't been republished that Colin Smyth found Terry's erstwhile agent

and original publisher and email me to me. There's a couple of stories that I write about there that aren't generally available. I can't remember which ones I get confused as to which have been published on which ones haven't, but it's in the book. So there's lots of new information that kind of shed more light on this stuff. So that was nice.

It was nice to have a bit of a do-over. Yeah. So there's new information. There's also, is it kind of, I don't know, a different angle or like a deep understanding since you've gotten to know what Rob in particular, but other people who were more personally involved with, yeah. Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, Rob is like having, getting to have a relationship, you know, a friendship with Rob and a relationship with Terry Pratchett estate has, is, um,

is an unbelievable privilege. And there is stuff that I think I've, I've learned that has, not so much. Not so much from, actually not so much from Rob, because Rob is very open, I think,

about, um, about Terry. And we'll, and has told a lot of those stories a lot anyway. But, you know, you meet people, you meet, and you gather another anecdote. And that's, but then, so yeah, there are,

and every time I performed, I performed a show, people want to come up to me afterwards. Afterwards, I go out and I, you know, sell books in the foyer, and people come up to me, and they always want, and they want to talk about their memories of Terry, and they want to talk about the time they met him, how much he meant to them, what their favorite books are, why why didn't I write more about their favorite book in my book?

The objectively best one, of course. I mean, shutting those people up is the reason that my new books exist. Here you go, shut up. That won't work. No, it won't work. So, yeah, I've constantly been getting new bits that informs either details that I can actually use or just something that kind of goes into my sort of mental picture of who Terry Pratchett was and how he thought and how he approached the world.

And it's always constantly being updated and evolving. And then you push the books, the stories through that filter. And something slightly different comes out than would have come out six years ago when I wrote the first book. Were there any books, like as you were going into it, you found you weren't looking forward to revisiting as much? No. No. Literally no. No, actually, only in so much as I was like, is there anything more that I need, like, there are some I've read so many times that I just felt like I'd, like, revisiting them wouldn't really make much difference, like, Nightwatch. or like or um

half of the sky or like there's a uh just books I've read I've read so often which is abroad I've read so often that I've felt like I don't really need to soul, not saw music,

it's small gods I don't really need to write to read these again because I've read them so often I did anyway and in every case I found new things like yeah always so I know there was never anything that I was not looking forward to covering um actually the reverse was looking forward to doing deeper dives into stuff that had been less well

trodden and I hadn't really thought about. There are some I think where I guess where I felt like I didn't have anything new to say that I hadn't said loads and that almost like Terry hadn't got anything particularly interesting to say. Something like Last Continent, which I really, I actually really like Last Continent. I'm not, I was genuinely surprised when Rob told me that it's, it's, it's the, it's the worst selling disc world novel by quite some distance. Yeah, again, I learned this from your writing to the last few years and I'm baffled. I love that book. Yeah, I've always really enjoyed it. I, I listened to it when I went to Australia last year. And like, like, I was like, this is appropriate, isn't it? And I, and I, um, and I felt like, but I also feel like Terry, what didn't have anything new to say particularly with Last Conton. I don't think it has necessarily much new to say in, I'm not about to say masquerade, but actually, no, there are some things. But yeah, so there was always something to discover in pretty much every single thing I looked at. That's something I hadn't thought about. Which I always, I've felt, like, again, it's the rereading.

It's the Stanley Kubrick 60 takes of something like you hit a wall and then you go through the wall. One of the, what the biggest revelations wasn't in this book. it was actually in the biography when I reread soul music and suddenly realized that it's a book about grief and I'd never noticed before. I'd just never noticed that that's, that there is a seam of grief all the way through. Death's daughter dies at the beginning of the book and he grieves her for the rest of the book. And that's why he goes a bit du lally. And that's why Susan is like she is. And you're going to go, there's a relationship between the concept of death in that book, which I explored more in this one, I really dug into.

because I didn't really have much time to dig into it in the biography. And it was nice to really kind of explore that idea. And when you reread the book through that lens, rather than just through the lens of a bunch of jokes about music, you realized that even the lighter books, even the ones that you don't necessarily think of as the sort of staggering works of intellectual genius, had something genuinely interesting to say.

The second book was even easier to read. to write because Terry's books are better the second half of his career the books are so much richer that like that book feels like

that's a better book because it's about more things because Terry Terry wrote better books and it's really like I got to write really in depth quite emotional

I got really emotional writing the Nightwatch chapter because it's difficult not to get emotional when you're writing about Nightwatch because that book It's so involving.

Yeah, absolutely. Actually, that's not a bad point to revisit. What made you stop where you did, apart from the being vaguely halfway through? I genuinely think there's a really, there's a really clear dividing point in Terry's work, which I kind of think of Discworld, especially, as having three acts.

Act, like, Acts 1 is colour of magic through to about guards, which is kind of starting off as this kind of, as fantasy parody, becoming more and more grounded in reality and finding and references that aren't just in fantasy and then establishing a world and building a world. And then act two is kind of sort of Eric moving pictures through to Carpe-Juggium, which is kind of playing in that world and deepening it and revisiting these characters and the theme of stories. And then act three is the truth through to the end. And I think the truth is a really,

it was not so much about ending with Carpe Juggling, it was about beginning with the truth. Okay. Because the truth, the key scene in the entire, for me, in the entire saga in terms of what Terry is changing about what he does, is in the truth. It's the scene where Vettinari goes to visit the printing press

in the rocking horse factory. And he says, is this going to be, like, have you built this on the site of an angel? and burial ground? Are there going to be tentacled monstrosities from the dungeon dimensions ripping through to our reality? Like, you know, remember, I can't remember in the name. What's the Mr. Hong with the three jolly luck takeaway fish bar on Dagger Street? Thank you. Thank you. Yes. Exactly that. Like, is any of this going to have?

And William DeWords says, no, it's just a printing press. And it's Terry looking at us and going, I'm not doing that anymore. that's not the stuff we're doing now we're now concerned with something else we're concerned with... You'll never guess how much printing press travels but that's it but the mechanisms that drive the narratives

with the exception of Last Hero which is something of a throwback but even that is about endings it's about passing the torch, it's about moving on but the mechanisms that drive the narratives going forward aren't about those fantasy conceits anymore. They're about, you know,

what does the invention of the printing press do to a society? What does the idea of a free press do to a society? Suddenly, truth and information can be passed up passed freely. What does that do to us? What does a functioning postal service

do to society? What does instantaneous light speed communication do with the clacks? How does that influence what we do? And then with the Tiffany books, it's who you who we are, what are we, what's happening inside our heads. Like, what makes a person a person? That's the thesis of the last third, of the volume, of what for me I think of is now

volume two, is what makes a person a person, the darkness behind the eyes, how does, like, how does the society become a society? And then later, it stops being that, it starts being what makes a person, the person and becomes, given that we are people, how dare we treat each other like this? And that becomes, and so there's this gathering thesis that starts with the truth. So that's why I wanted to start the next volume there, because it feels like that fires a starting pistol on what Terry wants to say next. And it feels like, it does feel like a moving of eras. And for the same reason, although Rob disagrees me about this, it's one of the few things

we disagree on, but I feel like Terry does a victory lap of, towards the, the end of the 20th century of the characters that have sustained the series through the middle section, like mid-period disworld, we cycle through which is guards rinse, wind, death, Richie's guards, wins, wind, death, Richie's guards, rinse, win death. There are almost no, after moving pictures, there are, between moving pictures and the truth, we don't get standalones, we don't really get many new characters. We're recycling through the same thing, the same, and then he sort of got, sort of, The truth is here is a new person, here is a new thing.

Yeah. And then we get, we stop having rinse win stories. We stop having witches stories. Like after Carpe Joglum, we're not in Granny Weather Wax's Head again until the Shepherd's Crown. We don't see her from the inside again. We see her through other people's eyes. She becomes a mentor. She's not a driver of the narrative herself.

Same with Nanny. We don't see Susan again. after Thief of Time, which is, admittedly, is inconveniently the other side of the truth. But it's the time travel once, so that's fine, actually. Yeah, it's fine. But also, that, again, Thief of Time is resetting the world a little bit. It's going, oh, here is my explanation for all of the inconsistencies that have gone through the other. Here's the gas leak episode.

It levels the playing field and kind of steadies the platform for the next load of storytelling. So it really does feel like, like, new era starts that point. So it felt like a totally natural thing to start the volume two there, thus ending Volume 1 with Fifth Elephant. And again, Fifth Elephant is the last time we are in Carrot's head. Like, Carrot has been the main POV character in Guards, Guards, and in Men at Arms, and to a lesser extent in Jingo, Fee, Clay.

Yeah. And we don't, you know, he's a main character in Fifth Elephant. Like we see, we're inside his head, or Gasplode's head watching him as he goes to rescue Angola. We're never in sight. It's a really interesting perspective shifts actually. Yeah. We're never inside Carrot's head again. Carrot becomes another member of the watch.

He just slots in next to Nobby and Colon and Anger. And we don't really, we don't see it again. He just becomes part of the city, part of the backdrop. And again, that's important because Carrot was a really important storyline. It was he was the true king. And that's, he was the return of the king's storyline. And Terry's telling that story by not telling it. It's constantly always, you know, to protect.

And I'd never noticed this before. In Guards, guards, the legend that the king will come back to protect and serve the people. To protect and to serve being the motto of the LAPD. Like the, the prophecy comes true. He does come back to be a policeman. Like, beautiful, brilliant. Again, he's furious when I read that in your book. But then again, like a joke that it took me 20 years to get.

Like, and every book contains at least one of those. But it feels like the carrot story, that was a subversion of a fantasy trope. And Terry wasn't doing subverting fantasy tropes anymore. So Carrot no longer has a sort of key narrative role to play. I imagine had Terry continued writing and lived longer, those characters would have had new purposes and would have come, But people always say, one of the questions I get sometimes is, do you think carrot would ever have become king? Absolutely not. No.

Not in the sight. That's completely anti-ethical, antithical. That's the antithesis. Yeah. Yeah. Of what Terry's perspective was. He didn't believe in kings, despite being knighted by a queen. But that was a different.

But, you know, if you look at royalty in his books, which is weird sisters. the wrong person becomes king. Like hereditary power never works in Terry Pratchettich novels. So even Carrot says it, like people shouldn't do things because Corporal Carrot tells them they should. And Carrot always knows he can't be king. And Terry has investigated that story from as many angles as he needs to to get that point,

to hammer that point across and to hit people over the head with it. He's not interested in telling it anymore. And that's, again, that's why Fifth Elephant closes the book, because it's like we're moving on. We're passing the torch. We're going to, we're going to go into a darker, more introspective, so much more introspective and more analytical world for the next few books. And yeah, it just feels like that was where the curtain drew.

I remember Joanna picking up a few times during our journey. But at certain points it did feel. like Pratchett was like just having another go at a story that had done in near the beginning of act two or at the end of Act 1. And yeah, I think that makes part of the victory that we're talking about.

I'm really struggling. It's thinking of an obvious example. So like pyramids to small gods was... Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. And the watchbooks, because it is kind of the same story three times. Yeah, crystallising that idea.

The best example of that, though, from the opposite ends, is when he rewrites the story of equal rights in I shall wear midnight which when Tiffany tells us the story of Esk Tiffany goes tells us

Esk's the first witch train by Granny Weatherwax they say that she went to the big city and there she met a man called a boy called Simon who had every illness under the sun he could control he had ultimate power over

numbers but he couldn't walk across the room and it's not the story of equal rights that's not who Simon was But Terry improves it. He basically has Esk-Tellus a better version of equal rights. I think it's like he's literally revisiting his own story and kind of propagandising it,

which I find absolutely fascinating. But again, this is into the second book, which is the media of the two because of how media the books are. But read the first one first. Please do, yeah. Don't hold it. There's no good.

did you find yourself having to curtail your own kind of trains of thought? Did you have to make a real effort to stop writing about certain ones? Yeah, not really did I? Kind of the joy of this, the joy of the project was giving myself permission to do that. Actually, the whole point of it was to really go, was to let myself be indulgent about these stories. and really go into depth about what I feel and what I think about them. And really nerd out.

It's nerding out. Every inch of this book is nerding out. It's me nerding out about my favourite book series. And that is, what a privilege to be able to do that, to be allowed to do that, to have an excuse to do that. It was just so much fun to do. So, yeah, I gave myself permission to, just go where it took me and not rain myself in.

And then you go back and you edit it and you kind of sharpen it and you go, that's not necessarily. A couple of them I wrote a few times. My original essay on joining the bomb, I never, I didn't like very much. And my original essay on Masquerade, I didn't like very much. And I went back and I actually deleted it and start it again on both of those. And a couple of them in the second draft. There's a lot more work in the second draft in this and then normally it's in my books.

But sometimes it's just because I think I'd been a bit tired when I wrote it. You know, I'd been going too long. I should have had a break. I shouldn't have gone. I shouldn't have bowled straight into the next. I shouldn't have bowled straight into masquerade after Johnny and the bomb. I should have had a gap between the two. That's the other thing that's important about these books, by the way,

is they're not just discord novels. Because I don't think it's one of the, it's a continual book bearer of mind that there's a subset of Patrick Fandom that refuses to read outside of the disc world and you go like go and re-truck us it's a masterpiece like Johnny in the Dead

Terry thought that Johnny in the Dead was the best book he wrote for a long time it's only when he wrote nation that he decided that he thought he'd written a better one Johnny and the dead for young people yeah yeah and he's he loved writing children's books

being a children's author something I think you covered really really beautifully when you were talking about the Ciphany books is Terry is Terry as Terry Pratchett as the children's author and how much it clearly meant to him and how much he started as a children's author

well he started as a child author and then he became a children's author like he wrote children's stories for the first 20 years of his career his first novel was a children's novel it was a huge part of what of how he wrote

And it's really, I really enjoyed digging into those. It's cool that you kind of built yourself a foundation from which to be able to do this, isn't it? Because to be given like the opportunity to do three volumes as it's going to end up like this. You've got to be the trusted person who knows everything about Terry Fratchett. And so you kind of gave yourself that journalistic base of knowledge to work from. So you're not just talking nonsense. Yeah, I think had I not written the biography, I don't think I'd have written this book. I don't think I would have done this project.

I think it felt like an extension of what I don't know. What we're going to end up with is the life of Terry Pratchett across four volumes. The biography is, yeah, the biography is your basic context and then the details of each of the books. Yeah, it's nice to be trusted with it. I mean, it's not an official project. It's not like anyone has come down and dubbed me like,

gone, you are the official. the official person who gets to write about Terry Pratchett, there are many of us. But the live show was, the live show was official. The live show was officially endorsed and backed by the Terry Pratchett estate. But this is, this very much specifically isn't. It says the story of the book. Do you want a big unendosed stamp on the front of it, try and drum off a bit of controversy that doesn't exist? Well, yeah, well, exactly, yeah.

In fact, there is, in fact, let me find the right wording. I, Rob specifically gave me the wording, which then I punched up a bit. Please note, though these works are published with the blessing of Sir Terry's estate, for which we are extremely grateful, this is an independent project, not an official release and the estate has no involvement or oversight of the contents. But that was important as well, because if I had big Pratchett looking over my shoulder, I wouldn't be able to write exactly what I wanted to write. I didn't want to write hagiography.

I also want to be able to call these. books out and say this could have been better, you know? Like there are rare bits where you go, do you know what? That didn't quite work. That joke didn't quite land, particularly in the earlier books. I don't think somebody writing officially wouldn't necessarily have been allowed to do that. So, but yeah, it is, it is one. It's more that the fan base trust me.

I think I could have got a publisher to agree to this out of nowhere, maybe. In theory, there's no reason maybe why somebody wouldn't have picked it up. But it doesn't necessarily mean anyone would have trusted it or bought it. But I think the Pratchett fan base knows who I am now. At least some of them do. Enough people for something I do to be taken seriously. And to actually have people who actually come out and will buy it and we'll give it a go. We'll see if they're still, if they still trust me after they've read it.

I don't know, but they may... Are you prepared for the delusion of opinion emails? No, I'm not. I'm actually quite thin-skinned. And I hate, like, I don't like it when people criticize my stuff. And I don't like, a bad review will put... I'm not one of these people who can't read reviews. If I see somebody's written...

If I see I've got a two-star review and I will read it. And then that'll be the only one you remember. And it'll be the only one I remember. Yeah. And that happened with my last fringe. show I got like a plethora of really good reviews. I got like loads. It was the best review show I'd ever done.

I got one bad review and the one bad review, one bad review amongst the like 10 four and five star reviews, the one two, two, I didn't even get any three star reviews. It was four and five stars and one two star. And but that two star review is the only one is the one that I didn't, that has lived rent free in my head ever since. So yeah, I'm, I'm hoping, you know, it's, I'm going to try not to be to, you know, thin-skinned about it. I don't know.

I also now live in fear of people accusing it being AI. That's become a real thing. Oh, yeah. To the point that I've rewritten stuff that is entirely in my voice and I've gone, no, no, that's that, the, like, AI has ruined this phrase for you.

You can't use this phrase anymore. You go back and read my biography, which was written in 2020, which was, you know, three years before LLAMs became a mainstream, tool. And it's full of M-Dash is. It's full of me using phrases, phrases like, it's not a thingy. It's this other thingy. Yeah, yeah, because that's a rhetorical tool. Yeah, exactly. Clisier, cliches are the nuts and bolts of the toolbox of language. I wonder who said that.

Somebody clever said that. So, yeah, honestly, what I want is just for people to read it and go, this has made me see this book this story in a new way like oh I hadn't thought of it like that even if they disagree they'll go I see what you're coming where you're coming from but I think that's bullshit and that's absolutely an absolutely valid interpretation but if it makes them

think again about it or want to revisit it or think deeper about what maybe Terry was really talking about what they think he meant and then mission accomplished that's that's why I want I think there is almost 100% chance who will get that out of it. Yeah. I mean, we've got to be edge case readers, and that was the case for us.

We've tried to look at it from way too many different angles over the last few years. Some of which shouldn't be physically possible. So obviously, at this point this episode comes out, Volume 1 will be out, hopefully similar day or close enough, since it's all around. Well, we have the same publisher, Joanna, so you know how nebulous their release dates are. like they are a thing of they are a fictional like they're completely mythical the release dates of this publisher

but I do have the book like it is out as far as I'm concerned in that you can buy it from me and I mean it's not I'm going to be starting sending out the pre-orders this week it'll be available at the Discold Convention next weekend it's not officially available until the end of August in shops and Amazon

the e-book will be out at the end of August and all that sort of stuff but the splash editions what you can get from me are and the signed versions and stuff are now, I guess, there. I mean, if you order one today, you're not getting it for a week, because

I've got an awful lot, because I've got a backlog to get through, but the process will be occurring. There'll be links down below to acquire all of those. Anything else you want to plug? Obviously, Volume 2 is coming out next year. Yep, hopefully this time next year. It's written.

Like I said, I really love volume 2. I think volume 2 is, it was so, it was really emotionally engaging, mostly involving to revisit the second half of Terry's career. I spoke, and I loved writing it. So that's this time next year, and then volume three will be the following year, which I'm nearly finished. Also, I'm doing the Edinburgh Fringe. I'm going to the Edinburgh.

If you're up at Edinburgh, if you're up at Edinburgh, from the 17th to the 30th, I'm doing a show called The Ten Best Songs of All Time, which is exactly what it says in the ten. It is me talking about what I consider to be the Ten best songs of All Time as a stand-up comedy show. It's at West Nick Records. It is free entry brackets, pay what you like. You donate on the way out. And I'm not putting anywhere near as much effort into promoting it as I did with my last two shows because they were expensive. And the cost of the Edinburgh Fringe is an entirely different podcast.

Yeah. Very much. So we'll have links to everything Mark is up to in the show notes. So you don't have to go far at all to find all of that, including buying his excellent book. I think that's everything we're going to say, although we could probably talk for quite a lot longer. knowing us, but eventually it'll get libelous and we can't afford to get sued either. We will be back very soon, dear listeners, with another one of our special theme revisit episodes and we are going to be talking about the power of belief. So expect that in your darling little ears any day

now. In the meantime, of course, dear listeners, you can join our Discord. There's a link down below. Follow us on Instagram at the Trisha Make You Frette on Facebook at the Trusham Make You Frette. Join our subreddit R-S-T-S-M-YF. Email us to your thoughts, queries, castles, snacks now, but try and Ross is the true shamakie fret pod at gmail.com. And if you want to support us financially, you can go to patreon.com. That's the true shamakie fret, where you can exchange your harder money for fun little uncut video episodes and occasional bonus nonsense. And until next time, dear listener, can I say it?

Yeah. Don't let us entertain you. Again, three times that are I'm so sorry. I meant to warn you. Didn't. It's okay. I enjoyed it all the same.