Terry Pratchett (4)

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Op donderdag 15 april 2010 23:03 schreef Dagonet het volgende:

Ik heb net eindelijk Nation gelezen en die vind ik tot nog toe wel z'n beste denk ik, een culminatie van alles waar hij naartoe werkte in z'n eerdere boeken.

Ik vind het een briljant boek. Knappe verweving van echte geschiedenis met parallele universum-dingetjes, waardoor het herkenbaar is en toch helemaal anders. Ik vind het wel minder uitbundig humoristisch als de Discworld boeken.

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Op vrijdag 16 april 2010 10:20 schreef De_Hertog het volgende:

[..]

Als je de pocket wil duurt dat nog 55 dagen

6,81 pre-order prijs op bookdepository.

Toevallig vandaag gepre-ordered bij Play.com. 7,99 incl verzenden

This weekend the third Discworld adaptation by The Mob Films and Sky
will be broadcast on Sky1 and Sky1HD. Part one starts at 6pm on
Sunday 30th May and part 2 will be on Monday 31st.

The secrets of my success: Terry Pratchett


Terry Pratchett

'I will outsell the Booker winner, and that's not because I'm better than the Booker winner. It's simply a matter of popularity,' said Terry Pratchett

Born in Beaconsfield in 1948, Sir Terry Pratchett is one of Britain's most successful authors with more than 65 million books sold worldwide in 37 languages. He is best known for the Discworld series, which accounts for 37 of his 49 books to date.

In 2007 he was diagnosed with Posterior Cortical Atrophy, a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer's disease. Since the diagnosis, he has donated £500,000 to the Alzheimer's Research Trust, and become something of a figurehead for dementia sufferers. He gave the BBC Richard Dimbleby Lecture last year on the subject of assisted dying, which drew criticism from the anti-euthanasia group Care Not Killing.

Pratchett was awarded the OBE for services to literature in 1998 and knighted last year.
Remember what your mother told you.

If I say that it was my destiny to write, that sounds altogether too posh. But my mother, who was cremated recently, and is very much in my thoughts now, used to walk me to school. And she used to tell me stories on the way to school: all that she could remember of the Greek myths, for example. (I must have been the only kid on the planet who had a tortoise called Phidippides - the runner who ran the first marathon). But the thing is, I listened to these stories, not always understanding them, but getting enough of them over the mile and a half each way every day that it just stuck.
Appreciate the value of education.

My mother and father weren't great readers, but they valued learning, because a certain A Hitler spoiled things for everybody, and meant that such further education as they might have had didn't happen. They wanted me to have the education they didn't have.
Once you've got a kid to learn and read for pleasure, you've done nearly everything you can.

School is there to teach social interaction; how to deal with the *******s and the bullies.
Find out what you're good at.

I found out by sheer accident, and that became my life's work. Now that many schools don't have orchestras and don't sing, people are missing opportunities to find out what they can be. Somewhere out there in this country is a child who's probably now carrying a hod on a building site because he's never put his hands on a piano. I think once people know what they're capable of being, they become, not a better person, but less likely to be an unpleasant one.
Be self-motivated.

First you have to get it right for yourself. Then there are the readers - and there are the fans. There are probably 10,000 hardcore fans who will be the first in the queue, who will buy the towel, the eau de cologne or whatever, and there are thousands, millions out there who will buy the books, and maybe a poster from time to time. And you write for them. You write for the readers, and hope that you've got it right. What does help these days is that science fiction/fantasy is no longer a genre. It outsells mainstream literature. As a matter of course, I will outsell the Booker winner, and that's not because I'm better than the Booker winner. It's simply a matter of popularity.
Making money isn't something to be ashamed of.

There's a feeling now that if you have money you must have got it by having some kind of shady dealings, or being an MP. But I just did it - I sat down and did the one thing I was good at, for a very long time. Now I'm a millionaire several times over.
Keep asking questions until something happens.

Sometimes I think I have a kind of creative stupidity - it's the 'what if?' thing. If you have that curious mindset, you see things that other people don't. For example, have you read The Wind In The Willows? What seemed odd about it to you? The animals change their size repeatedly - they go down holes, drive cars, walk around - and nobody notices. The magic of The Wind In The Willows is that as a kid you don't question that - and it does wonders for the way they think.
Always write.

A day without writing makes me neurotic; it's something I should be doing. I've spent more than three decades writing the books, and my last holiday was... well 9/11 took place during it. I'm slowing down now, for reasons you know. I've signed a contract for two more books after this one - I don't know if my health will actually survive that, but it's an act of faith. I cannot conceive of not being a writer and not having a book to do. And I've always said that if my PA or my wife finds me slumped over the machine, what's the first thing they should do? Save the work in progress!
The fight gives you strength.

After the arguments I had with Care Not Killing, that's how I felt. I'm fortunate, given my circumstances, that I can work round the problems, and that my life is full of stuff to do, to the extent that I have to turn down an embarrassing amount.
Read a book, magazine or newspaper written by and for people who have a world view completely different from your own.

I won't go there with specific examples, but you should not live permanently in your own world view.
Always keep at the back of your mind the possibility that you're dead wrong.

It came home to me once - I was on a train, by myself, going up to Glasgow. A guy got in with a six-pack and a shell suit; he was big, uncouth-looking and probably a bit drunk. I had this sudden flash in which the train had had an accident, a crash, and there was this guy pulling ragged metal off me. I think that was my remembering one of the big London rail crashes - I remembered people going in, helping each other out. It showed the real commonality of mankind. And that sometimes happens, and when it does it's a wonderful thing.

'Terry Pratchett's Going Postal' is on Sky1 on May 30 and 31

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.u(...)ewsxml#ixzz0pOtd1Uh9

'Yes, I have got Alzheimer's, but in many ways I'm the luckiest man alive': Terry Pratchcett on defying dementia

Extrovert novelist Sir Terry Pratchett likes to make cameo appearances in the screen adaptations of his books - 'my one vanity', he calls it.

He was a toymaker in the Hogfather, an astrozoologist in Colour Of Magic and in the latest of his Discworld novels, Going Postal, he is briefly seen as a postman.

But is there more to this particular cameo than vanity? For viewers will see him pushing open a door only to find himself staring into a deep, dark void.


_{No fantasy: Richard Coyle and Claire Foy star in Going Postal which is based on Terry Pratchett's novels}

He can find only one word to describe the abyss: 'It's an embuggerance.' He also used that word - a Pratchett invention - to describe his feelings three years ago, when he revealed that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease.

Is the fact that his character is staring into the abyss a metaphor for Terry's own tragic circumstances?

'I've got a very serious condition but I've no plans to disappear into the abyss any time soon,' says 62-year-old Pratchett. 'If the truth be told, I wasn't that keen on playing the postman - I'm hardly the world's greatest actor.

'After six takes, I just about got it right. Mind you, I had to put up with Charles Dance looking on smiling while I was filming the previous five takes.

'He's a fine actor but I wonder what he would be like writing a fantasy novel?

'As for the scene - people always try to find extra significance in on screen events, but they are often just coincidental.'


_{Serious condition: Pratchett, who makes a cameo role in the TV adaptation, was diagnosed with a rare form of early onset dementia 14 years ago}

Aside from forgetting the odd word (bark, the name for the coating on a tree, eludes him for a while), Sir Terry is on fine form. He is wearing a black, polo neck pullover, dark trousers and his famous white beard is neatly trimmed.

He's anxious to emphasise that there is life in the old dog yet. 'Do me a favour', he says, 'and spread the word that I'm not short on intellect.'

He's even prepared to portray himself as an ageing literary sex symbol, recounting the story of a woman at a Discworld convention who was 'particularly keen to make my acquaintance and may possibly have wished to take things further'.

Was he tempted? 'Well I did have a spare afternoon, but I chose to go shopping instead because I love my wife, Lyn, and had no intention of straying after 41 happy years.

'In a funny way, I felt I had let the male side down by refusing this woman's overtures - even though I was rather relieved to walk away.

'Flirting I can handle, cheating I couldn't. The woman organising the convention sent out an email warning: "Terry will flirt like a champion. But don't worry, you will never meet a more married man."

'I was not ashamed she had written that. I enjoy the pleasures of life, but I know where to draw the line.'

Despite being diagnosed with a rare form of early onset dementia - posterior cortical atrophy - in 1997 and being aware that a frighteningly small percentage of those diagnosed with the disease live more than 14 years after diagnosis, Terry isn't about to stop enjoying life.

'I'm doing all right. There are problems caused by the disease. For example, if I go to the toilet from the kitchen I find it hard to remember the way back. But it's not a big problem - I might walk into a cupboard but there is always a door to get me back to where I was.

'I can no longer drive a car but I never had car machismo and my PA and my wife drive.

'I have minor problems with work. It was because my typing and spelling were becoming so erratic that I was first diagnosed as having Alzheimer's.

'If I did a job which didn't require me to churn out words the disease may have gone undiscovered. But I can cope with the problems. I use technology to dictate letters and I write my books by speaking what I want to say into a machine. My style of writing is conversational anyway.

'What I am hoping for is a piece of software that allows me to go into my office, say to the computer "open the file I was working on yesterday afternoon" and I can read it on the screen, then dictate additions. I hope that technology is available in time for me to use it.'

Sir Terry is also hoping that medical advances allow him to sustain his life well beyond current expectations. 'Alzheimer's will be conquered one day and I can only hope that medical breakthroughs keep me going.

'Above all, I want to remain in control of my own life. My mother was cremated a couple of days ago, having suffered a massive stroke, from which she never recovered.

'She had a good life - dying at 88 is not a tragedy. The last thing she would have wanted was to have been fed by somebody and to look out of the window all day, which would have been her fate had she survived.

'I want the right to decide how I live and how and when I die - to retain my dignity.'

Terry's determination to raise the profile of Alzheimer's, plus his attempts to legalise assisted suicide, means a pretty extraordinary postbag for the Wiltshire-based author.

'I only used to get letters about my books,' says Terry. 'Now, I get some strange stuff - and some pretty strange reactions in the street too.

'And I have had some mail from those of a religious persuasion. "You are going to die because God loves you," read one. In which case, thank goodness God doesn't hate me!' One is tempted to regard Terry's Discworld books - 70 million of which have been sold worldwide - as his escape from real life.

But Going Postal is very much of this world, with its focus on the evils of big business, represented by David Suchet's money grabbing character Reacher Gilt.

'It's about post offices closing, piratical takeovers. There are plenty of resonances with this world.'

He IS also currently writing his autobiography, which is obviously non-fantasy too. 'What I want to do is go away and write my next novel and connect fully again with that world of fantasy,' he says.

'That's what I have done for the past 30 years until I was foolish enough to say: "I've got Alzheimer's." Then it all changed.

'I wish, for so many reasons, that I could go back to the way things were - although I recognise that I have been luckier than most.

'I remember flying first class on a global book tour, looking in the toilet mirror in the dead of night and saying to myself: "You lucky b*****d.

"You are only in first class because you put letters in an amusing order. You really don't deserve it."

'But then, in my mind, I probably don't "deserve" to have Alzheimer's.

'I've just been unlucky, in that regard.'

Going Postal is on Sky 1 on Sunday, May 30, and Monday, May31. For more information, visit Alzheimersresearch.org.uk.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.u(...)e.html#ixzz0pOuABUIu

A new website that contains the fictional stories that Terry wrote
whilst he was working as a journalist for the Bucks Free Press
newspaper in the mid to late 1960s has just launched.

The stories have never been made available outside of the original
issues of the newspapers that they were published in; there are some
true gems, including a Carpet People story that ran in issues
published late 1965; pre-dating the publication of the original
Carpet People book by at least 5 years!

http://www.terrypratchett.weebly.com

Sir Terry Pratchett creates Wincanton ‘Walk of Fame’

Legendary author Sir Terry Pratchett OBE returned to the Somerset town of Wincanton to leave Hollywood style ‘walk of fame’ imprints at Taylor Wimpey’s Kingwell Rise development.


_{Sir Terry places his hands and signature into concrete}

The new homes development in the small Somerset town rose to fame this time last year when it unveiled Discworld-inspired road names in keeping with the town’s official twinning with the fictional city of Ankh-Morpork from the Discworld novels.

Treacle Mine Road and Peach Pie Street won the public vote but since then Taylor Wimpey has gained council approval to name all of the roads at the development after Discworld with additions including Hen And Chickens Field, Morpork Street and Kinklebury Street.

Hundreds of Discworld fans, many in costume, descended on Kingwell Rise to see Sir Terry place his hands and signature into concrete at the development following other Discworld activities organised by the Discworld Emporium of Wincanton.

Sir Terry Pratchett said: “It is just great to return to Kingwell Rise a year on and actually see homes now built along Treacle Mine Road and Peach Pie Street – it certainly feels more real now – as opposed to fantasy fiction! I hope the new residents are enjoying their road names – I’d definitely pay good money to live on Hen And Chickens Field!”

Richard Goad, regional sales and marketing director for Taylor Wimpey, explained: “We are simply over the moon to have Sir Terry back at the development leaving another permanent mark on Kingwell Rise for current and future residents. Following the public vote last year, it seemed fitting to try to get approval on Discworld names for all of the roads at the development and we are thrilled that we did.”

Replica road names were signed by Sir Terry and are planned for auction at the official Discworld convention in Birmingham in August. All proceeds, in addition to a further donation from Taylor Wimpey, will go to the Alzheimer's Research Trust, of which Sir Terry is a patron.

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Op zondag 30 mei 2010 13:01 schreef Pandora73 het volgende:
Vetinary,

Deel 1 van Going Postal aan het downloaden

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Op zondag 30 mei 2010 23:31 schreef wonderer het volgende:

[..]

Mijn torrentboer heeft hem nog niet... *nog even wacht*

Usenet

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Op zondag 30 mei 2010 23:32 schreef speknek het volgende:
Je zou maar op Treacle Mine Road wonen, hoe baas is dat

Lijkt me niet iets om hier in NL in te voeren. De vertaalde namen zijn lang zo leuk niet.