Happy birthday to Jess of the Shire! It turns out that she shares a birthday with celebrated fantasy fiction author Terry Pratchett, albeit a half century apart in birth year. While Jess is mostly known for her Tolkien related content (obvious by the screenname) she has dabbled in other areas of fiction like the Dune series and vampire stories. But the one that she hadn’t fully explored yet before now was Discworld, a series that I myself have wanted to check out in the past. Well, this video was enough to get me invested in the 41-book series that I will be reading over the next couple years.

This video saved my career as a writer. I needed an author to truly inspire me like no other had, and from just the glimpses of his work I got from this video, I tasted fresh blood after biting the inside of my mouth, hungry to become even a small fraction of the writer Pratchett was! Granted the video had a lot of spoilers, but those don’t concern me – only the quality of the writing and what he had to say. Oh, he had plenty to say!

The whimsical and often absurd nature of Discworld grounded in realistic characters is what really drew me to this series. I always thought it looked silly, and yes, at times it most certainly is. But what Pratchett gets at in these books, under the obvious satire, is the idea of a world driven by Narrativium. Essentially, what it is can be explained by this quote from the Discworld and Terry Pratchett Wiki:

“A little narrativium goes a long way: the simpler the story, the better you understand it. Storytelling is the opposite of reductionism: 26 letters and some rules of grammar are no story at all.”

This concept shook the foundations of what I believed stories could be, should be, and must be. The idea that our stories can become reality just by speaking them forth. The idea that someone was fighting reductionism long before I started screaming about how it was ruining our world. Terry Pratchett died too soon, and yet, perhaps also exactly when he was meant to, because his final novel, The Shepherd’s Crown, is exactly where I’ve decided to start reading.

Rather than read them in order, I’ve decided to read them as narrative arcs, as the series follows several different characters including DEATH who I’m very eager to read about. What might seem odd then, is that I’m starting with the fifth and final book of the Tiffany Aching arc, and not at the beginning. It has to do with what Death says to one of the series’ most popular and important characters, Esme “Granny” Weatherwax. Specifically, three things.

The first was from the narration: “Esme Weatherwax hadn’t done nice. She’d done what was needed.”

This really caught in my throat when I read it aloud to myself. I’ve been “doing nice” for far too long, and rarely doing what was really needed, often at a steep emotional, and sometimes even financial, cost to myself to the benefit of others, who would then squander my gift of time and resources.

The second is what made me sob and have my wife Emily order The Shepherd’s Crown using her Walmart Plus account… This quote from Death to a dying Granny Weatherwax was featured in Jess’s video.

FOR I CAN SEE THE BALANCE AND YOU HAVE LEFT THE WORLD MUCH BETTER THAN YOU FOUND IT, AND IF YOU ASK ME, said Death, NOBODY COULD DO ANY BETTER THAN THAT.

The second after she’d read that quote, I paused the video and broke down sobbing for almost twenty minutes. That is, easily, the most incredible quote I’ve ever read in my entire life. It reminded me of when I was very young, being told quite sternly to leave things better than I found them. I like to think I’ve left the world a better place than I came into it. I do believe that in some small ways that is true. But as a guiding principle, I realized I could do a lot better.

But there was a third quote, one that made me pause the video for even longer, that I failed to mention in my notes because it hit me so hard. Before that last quote, Death also said:

“YOUR CANDLE…WILL FLICKER FOR SOME TIME BEFORE IT GOES OUT – A LITTLE REWARD FOR A LIFE WELL LIVED…”

It’s sad, but like Pratchett’s books, while his own light may have been extinguished, his works and ideas continue through his stories. I fear there will never be another writer like Pratchett, and while Brandon Sanderson is a great writer and very prolific, his works don’t inspire me at all. I’d given up on fiction wholesale quite some time ago. But Discworld brought me back, reignited my dreams of being a novelist once again. The candle that Granny lit… the candle that Pratchett lit with his books… they will go out unless someone picks it up and keeps it burning.

My Tunes and Tails series, which has undergone so many overhauls and permutations over the past thirty years, is my Magnum Opus. I realize this now. I thought my legacy would be my essays. But, no. Like EB White, I will be remembered for the fiction. But is anything truly fiction? Stories are simply the vehicles through which the most pervasive ideas remain in our collective consciousness, become the lifeblood of our cultures, and allow some goodness and whimsy to survive in an otherwise dangerous and indifferent universe.

Thanks to this video by Jess, and the inspiration I’ve derived from Pratchett’s work, my Tunes and Tails books will finally be written, not quite in the form they once were to take, but in a new and fresh way. They will be quite different in every way to Discworld, except that they will be whimsical and also deeply philosophical at the same time and follow one of my main characters from all the aborted stories I’ve written over the years. Like Pratchett, I will also be aggressively protective of my Intellectual Property. I don’t care about money at all, only that people enjoy my stories and share them with others.

Again, thank you Jess for being really good at your job! I can’t wait for more videos in this Discworld series. I also can’t wait to sit down and truly absorb The Shepherd’s Crown and soon after the four books that came before it. I still have so much to learn as a writer, and what better 41-course meal rooted in fantasy and sci-fi could I ask for?

~ Amelia (AKA Artemis) Desertsong