Read Online A Slip of the Keyboard by Terry Pratchett - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Terry Pratchett
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City-where-the-pizza-is-so-cooold …
They agreed to everything. I was astonished. And on the 2000 tour the smallest signing I did was bigger than the biggest signing I did in 1996. I did a tour a couple of years ago, same size crowds, a bit bigger maybe than an English tour. Suddenly, it seems, I’m selling in the United States. And who knows, with a bit of effort all round, within a few years, I might get up to where we could have been in about 1996.
And yet, I still feel like a fraud. It’s all been done in fun, folks. I had no big plans. I wrote the first few books for fun. I wrote the next books for fun. I did it because I really wanted to do it. I did it because I got something out of it.
I was a fan, a real convention-going fan, for only maybe three years. Went to a couple of them in the early ’60s. Went to a WorldCon. Got a job. Started courting girls. And suddenly I was whirled away into what may loosely be called “Real Life.” While I have to say, when you work on a newspaper, life doesn’t appear to be all that real.
In 1973 there was a convention in my area, and I thought, I ought to go back. You know, it’s been, what, eight years since I last went to a con. And I walked in, and there was no one I recognized, and I just couldn’t get a handle on it. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had gone in and gone back into fandom right there and then. Mind you, I do recall that SalmanRushdie actually came second in a science fiction writing competition organized by Gollancz in the late 1970s. Just imagine if he’d won—Ayatollahs from Mars!—he would have had none of that trouble over the
Satanic Verses
, ’cos it would have been SF and therefore unimportant. He’d have been coming along to cons. He’d be standing here now! Ah, but the little turns and twists of history …
Where do the ideas come from? I do not know. But one of the things I did learn from my science fiction reading was that there were other things you could read besides science fiction. I developed a love of history, which school had singularly failed to inculcate into me. I am now in correspondence with my old history master and we get on very well. But his lessons hadn’t told me the things that were really interesting: that, for example, during a large part of the eighteenth century, you could actually get pubs to pay you to take urine away and the tanners would actually pay you to have urine delivered to them. That’s an interesting fact. It must be even more fun to know it when you are fourteen years old.
I have to admit that I am currently in a position of having more bookshelf space than I have books. [Cries of “Oh!’] However, this is, of course, not counting all those books in the attic, the books under the bed in the spare room, the books wrapped up in protective paper in the garage. Those are the books you kind of, well, just have, they’re like Stonehenge. No one is ever going to do anything with them now, but obviously you keep them. Yep, I actually have empty shelves. I have got at least eight feet of blank shelves in my new library. I am sorry. But we went off to an antiquarian bookseller’s the other week, and I spent several hundred quid and now I’ve got probably only about four feet of shelving to fill.
I’ve made a lot of money out of the writing. A considerable amount. But I am horizontally wealthy, which is the way to go. I advise you all to consider horizontal wealth. If you are verticallywealthy, you think “I am rich. So I had better do what rich people do.” What do rich people do? Well, they find out where the hell Gstaad is, and then they go skiing there. They buy a yacht. They may go to beaches a long way away. Well, first of all, never buy a yacht. Yachts are like tearing up hundred-pound notes while standing under a cold shower. A nail, a perfectly ordinary nail, costs five times as much if it is a nautical nail. My PA is on at me to buy a light aircraft because he could fly
They agreed to everything. I was astonished. And on the 2000 tour the smallest signing I did was bigger than the biggest signing I did in 1996. I did a tour a couple of years ago, same size crowds, a bit bigger maybe than an English tour. Suddenly, it seems, I’m selling in the United States. And who knows, with a bit of effort all round, within a few years, I might get up to where we could have been in about 1996.
And yet, I still feel like a fraud. It’s all been done in fun, folks. I had no big plans. I wrote the first few books for fun. I wrote the next books for fun. I did it because I really wanted to do it. I did it because I got something out of it.
I was a fan, a real convention-going fan, for only maybe three years. Went to a couple of them in the early ’60s. Went to a WorldCon. Got a job. Started courting girls. And suddenly I was whirled away into what may loosely be called “Real Life.” While I have to say, when you work on a newspaper, life doesn’t appear to be all that real.
In 1973 there was a convention in my area, and I thought, I ought to go back. You know, it’s been, what, eight years since I last went to a con. And I walked in, and there was no one I recognized, and I just couldn’t get a handle on it. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had gone in and gone back into fandom right there and then. Mind you, I do recall that SalmanRushdie actually came second in a science fiction writing competition organized by Gollancz in the late 1970s. Just imagine if he’d won—Ayatollahs from Mars!—he would have had none of that trouble over the
Satanic Verses
, ’cos it would have been SF and therefore unimportant. He’d have been coming along to cons. He’d be standing here now! Ah, but the little turns and twists of history …
Where do the ideas come from? I do not know. But one of the things I did learn from my science fiction reading was that there were other things you could read besides science fiction. I developed a love of history, which school had singularly failed to inculcate into me. I am now in correspondence with my old history master and we get on very well. But his lessons hadn’t told me the things that were really interesting: that, for example, during a large part of the eighteenth century, you could actually get pubs to pay you to take urine away and the tanners would actually pay you to have urine delivered to them. That’s an interesting fact. It must be even more fun to know it when you are fourteen years old.
I have to admit that I am currently in a position of having more bookshelf space than I have books. [Cries of “Oh!’] However, this is, of course, not counting all those books in the attic, the books under the bed in the spare room, the books wrapped up in protective paper in the garage. Those are the books you kind of, well, just have, they’re like Stonehenge. No one is ever going to do anything with them now, but obviously you keep them. Yep, I actually have empty shelves. I have got at least eight feet of blank shelves in my new library. I am sorry. But we went off to an antiquarian bookseller’s the other week, and I spent several hundred quid and now I’ve got probably only about four feet of shelving to fill.
I’ve made a lot of money out of the writing. A considerable amount. But I am horizontally wealthy, which is the way to go. I advise you all to consider horizontal wealth. If you are verticallywealthy, you think “I am rich. So I had better do what rich people do.” What do rich people do? Well, they find out where the hell Gstaad is, and then they go skiing there. They buy a yacht. They may go to beaches a long way away. Well, first of all, never buy a yacht. Yachts are like tearing up hundred-pound notes while standing under a cold shower. A nail, a perfectly ordinary nail, costs five times as much if it is a nautical nail. My PA is on at me to buy a light aircraft because he could fly
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