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"I'm just a girl☺️🥰💖💞💅🌺🌷🦄" when you were eight and the teacher said she needed some strong boys to carry something you used to be furious, and when you convinced them to let you help, you carried twice as many chairs as the boys with the righteous anger of a girl who knew she was just as capable as them. Where did that go?

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Romance in many novels: Paragraphs devoted to lustful thoughts or implied attraction between two characters who were obviously written to be appealing to each other. It culminates in at least two pages of description for a consummated love so passionate that you are certain this is the author's personal romantic fantasy, and they wrote a book to put it on paper. Often, one of them will tragically die afterward or become very injured in the pursuit of constructed tension.

Romance by Pratchett: These two awkward idiots have been in each other's proximity for most of the book and are standing back to back against the sinister forces assembled against them, and when their shoulders bump into each other one or both of them thinks "huh, I kinda hope we live long enough to do that again," and then they DO. Then they get their time to snog after the book is over because we have loose plot threads to wrap up first.

And God help me, I think Pratchett's 'romances' are infinitely more relatable and real.

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it’s quick, it’s easy and it’s free:  pouring river water in your socks

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This is probably a criminally unpopular opinion, but people whose walls are covered in brand new booktok books are just as complicit in trend-driven overconsumption as the Stanley girlies or the showertok creators with 80 treehut scrubs. I don't necessarily mean the romance girls either, so don't think the 'my year of rest and relaxation' crowd gets a pass here.

Literally the amount of people I talk to who say reading is their favorite hobby and they read like 3 books a week then will tell me that they don't have a library card is insane. How much money do you guys spend on books without any guarantee that you'll even like it? Why not just read a library copy then buy the book if you really liked it?

"But why would I buy a book that I've already read?"

Why did you buy it without knowing you were going to want to read it more than once??? If you didn't like the book then you've just got a $25 piece of wall decor lmao.

I think that this also opens up a broader conversation about the commodification of hobbies on social media. Reading used to be a means to an end to consume a story you enjoyed, and now it's an aesthetic to be performed on Instagram, just like any other trend but with an added air of superiority.

I'm just ranting but if someone can explain to me how buying endless books that'll be read once and then left to collect dust on your shelf is different than buying an eyeshadow palette that'll be used once then shoved to the back of a drawer for years, I'm all ears.

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Death's fields of golden wheat

“What are you doing, master?” he said. REMEMBERING. “Ah?” I REMEMBER WHEN ALL THIS WAS STARS. What was it? Oh, yes… He snapped his fingers. Fields appeared, following the gentle curves of the land. “Golden,” said Albert. “That’s nice. I’ve always thought we could do with a bit more color around here.” Death shook his head. It wasn’t quite right yet. Then he realized what it was. The lifetimers, the great room filled with the roar of disappearing lives, was efficient and necessary; you needed something like that for good order. But… He snapped his fingers again and a breeze sprang up. The cornfields moved, billow after billow unfolding across the slopes. ALBERT? “Yes, master?” HAVE YOU NOT GOT SOMETHING TO DO? SOME LITTLE JOB? “I don’t think so,” said Albert. AWAY FROM HERE, IS WHAT I MEAN. “Ah. What you mean is, you want to be alone,” said Albert. I AM ALWAYS ALONE. BUT JUST NOW I WANT TO BE ALONE BY MYSELF. “Right. I’ll just go and, uh, do some little jobs back at the house, then,” said Albert. YOU DO THAT. Death stood alone, watching the wheat dance in the wind. Of course, it was only a metaphor. People were more than corn. They whirled through tiny crowded lives, driven literally by clock work, filling their days from edge to edge with the sheer effort of living. And all lives were exactly the same length. Even the very long and very short ones. From the point of view of eternity, anyway. Somewhere, the tiny voice of Bill Door said: from the point of view of the owner, longer ones are best.

I was thinking about how Deaths world is completely devoid of colour, everything there is different colours of black.

The only time Death creates anything with colour is in Reaper Man where he creates a field of golden wheat. And it struck me that the reason he was able to do this was because while Death can't imagine concepts like colour and time, Bill Door could.

Not only can Death remember being Bill Door, he remembers it as a mortal, he remembers the colours and sensations that he can never feel again, he remembers details that was always incapable of understanding. Bill Door learned how terrifying time is, how desperate and helpless it felt to know that you only had a little while left. He also learned what it felt like to want to escape him, when he saved the little girls life despite knowing that she was destined to die, despite knowing that he should not interfere.

Imagine going back to being Death again knowing all of that, having to continue his age-old task knowing what it felt like to be on the other end of it. To not interfere and try and stop the deaths he thinks are cruel or unfair or far too young. We see even in Mort that the Duty already makes Death sad, and that just one day off was enough for him to find happiness, but he is always dragged back to his place, and his job is one he needs to do.

And then in Soul Music, where he has to reap the souls of his own daughter and apprentice, and it destroys him. He feels so awful that he goes on a mad journey to try and forget about it even though he has a perfect memory so he ends up dragging Susan into his role and we again see how devastating it is on anyone who has to do it.

Death caring about mortals becomes more and more important to his character throughout the books, he learns to care for them and learns to feel for them and grows to understand their deepest nature better then most of them do.

Death is usually a funny character in most of the books so it's easy to forget how tragic his own story really is, and so impressive that he is still able to see so much wonder in life and will fight to protect it.

It's such an amazing character arc and one of the reasons Discworld is such a beautiful series.

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(parent feeding a baby in the 1800s before airplanes were invented) here comes the nothing

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Good Omens: *is a huge success*

Every Single Discworld Fan: Oh? Oh worm?

Transcript under cut

Keep reading

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i take back everything i said, one piece is good actually

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found this three year old draft buried in my files. is it funny? I don't remember

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This is legitimately one of my fav quotes from him

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On 27th August 2015, The Shepherd's Crown, the last book Sir Terry Pratchett completed before he died, was published. To mark the ten year anniversary, we have a message from Rob Wilkins.

If you do finally crack the spine on The Shepherd's Crown, or have done so over the last decade, we'd love to hear from you, see your photos, or hear your tales. As Rob says: enjoy. The Discworld journey is never over.

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I saw a post talking about how Terry Pratchett only wrote 400 words a day, how that goal helped him write literally dozens of books before he died. So I reduced my own daily word goal. I went down from 1,000 to 200. With that 800-word wall taken down, I’ve been writing more. “I won’t get on tumblr/watch TV/draw/read until I hit my word goal” used to be something I said as self-restraint. And when I inevitably couldn’t cough up four pages in one sitting, I felt like garbage, and the pleasurable hobbies I had planned on felt like I was cheating myself when I just gave up. Now it’s something I say because I just have to finish this scene, just have to round out this conversation, can’t stop now, because I’m enjoying myself, I’m having an amazing time writing. Something that hasn’t been true of my original works since middle school. 

And sometimes I think, “Well, two hundred is technically less than four hundred.” And I have to stop myself, because - I am writing half as much as Terry Pratchett. Terry fucking Pratchett, who not only published regularly up until his death, but published books that were consistently good. 

And this has also been an immense help as a writer with ADHD, because I don’t feel bad when I take a break from writing - two hundred words works up quick, after all. If I take a break at 150, I have a whole day to write 50 more words, and I’ve rarely written less than 200 words and not felt the need to keep writing because I need to tie up a loose end anyways. 

Yes, sometimes, I do not produce a single thing worth keeping in those two hundred words. But it’s much easier to edit two hundred words of bad writing than it is to edit no writing at all.