Dear pTerry
I’ve always been too cool to be a ‘fan’ of anyone, save a youthful phase of being madly enamored of Leonardo Di Caprio in the winter of 1997 and Titanic had addled my brain.
Award-winning novelist & short story writer, Rijula Das
But given that I must have read every Discworld novel about 20 times and can now recite along the audiobooks, it’s safe to say I am a superfan. I don’t have much faith in the concept of genres, but I think that the entirety of your output should be in a section labelled This Book Will Save Your Life. I’ve read your books when I was happy, and when I was sad, when I was anxious and when I was drunk. I’ve read your books first as a reader unfamiliar with fantasy, then as someone who needed to escape into a world that was kind, familiar and full of characters I knew when life became too strange, and then, I’ve re-read your books as someone slowly molding myself into a writer.
I don’t know what you’d make of it but over the years, (re)reading discworld has been my own personal MFA programme. So let me take this space to acknowledge what your books have meant to me:
Thank you, for showing me that reading should be a bloody good time. That as writers, we ignore joy at our own peril.
Thank you for showing me the glorious importance of humour and proving over and over again that funny can still be important.
Thank you for teaching me how to write character. I don’t know quite how to do it as flawlessly but I know what it looks like when it is done well. I may not be able to sing but I can catch the false notes. Perhaps that is the most we can hope for from a tutelage.
Thank you for the pancake-shaped world borne on the backs for four elephants, flying through the multiverse on a giant turtle that has kept us company on nights when life in the roundworld feels overwhelming. I’ve taken refuge in it many times.
I needed your words to carry on, I needed your words to write.
"A man is not dead while his name is still spoken."
GNU pTerry.
Rijula Das latest book Small Deaths by Rijula Das is published on 13th September (Amazon Crossing), paperback £8.99.
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