#terry pratchett wrote 75% of go

[shaggydogstail]

Trying not to get full tin-hat that Amazon pausing S3 of Good Omens comes just a week after Rhianna Pratchett confirmed that Terry wrote 75% of the GO novel, with footage reappearing on twitter.

I have zero faith in Amazon to do the right thing over the most profitable thing ever. But the Pratchett Estate presumably has the power (as a copyright holder) and a vested interest in protecting Sir Terry's legacy. They possibly could call for Neil Gaiman to be sacked and Amazon would have to listen.

Honestly, this would be preferable to Amazon acting off their own back. Although I want him gone, something about a multinational conglomerate ditching creatives from their own copyright sat wrong with me (NG deserves it, but you know they'd do it to ppl who don't just as happily). The cast and/or the Pratchett Estate pushing him out always seemed like the best case scenario.

This is all pure speculation, of course. But just the thought of Neil Gaiman getting canned by the Pratchett Estate is giving me hope.

[captainfantasticalright]

Another Sir Terry Pratchett interview on the details of writing Good Omens with Neil Gaiman. (More about this process x).

Question about how he goes about collaborating with someone else .

Terry: “You make them do what you want”.

Gary Cornell came up with something very apposite talking about working together, he says : It’s not that (each) of you does 50% of the work, each of you does 90% of the work.

Um. The way we did it then, and I can’t really speak as an expert because it's the only time I’ve ever done it and other people do it in different ways, it wasn’t a case of, the way the Americans tend to do it, um, is one person writes a draft and the other person goes in and noodles with that draft. We did the whole thing from the ground up; each was doing bits. The ad hoc way we had of working, it’s simple: I’ve got a track record writing novels, Neil hadn’t. So I became like the editor, the taskmaster. Because the other thing is the practical problem about two people 120 miles apart doing something, is that, um, it would be different now, but in those days we had no reliable means of electronic communication. We could connect computers together with modems and then spend the whole evening at cross purpose and ringing each other up and saying “I’m getting lots of little faces and shit like that all over..”

Three quarters of an hour and about eight phone calls, you actually managed to transmit about 2000 words you could have actually phoned and sneezed in a morse code.

[w]hen we were doing the first draft of the film script, we were both members of CompuServe so crappy our BT rural lines that the quick efficient way was for me to go into CompuServe and leave the work I’d done in Neil’s mailbox on the computer in Ohio or someplace and later that evening he would dial CompuServe in America and download it from Ohio or wherever it was.

So in order to get the script 120 miles, electronically it was doing about 10000. This is from the global village.

What we would do is I would hold the master copy and sometimes work would have to stop for 24 hours because stuff was in the post, because the nightmare, the absolute nightmare which I knew would happen if we let it, was that somehow we’d end up with two master copies in existence with little, minute changes, and we’d never be able to spot which was which.

So the last thing we wanted was two master copies, and we worked on the phone who did what. I did a bit more than Neil, of that anyway. But, it also felt to me to be an awful lot of the glue that no one wanted to do because it was easy to do set piece scenes and written on a kind of, on the kind of plot somewhere you get A and B to F and X and Y across to C T. And that really is like 3000 words where you have to move people around and then,you know, shove extra bits in; so I ended up probably doing near 75% of the book.

I would probably say because it’s, because had we’ve done it any other way it would’ve been like three months longer to do.

Also part of the process from another interview with Terry Pratchett:

Q: Let's talk a bit about the book you collaborated with Neil Gaiman on: Good Omens. That was before email, so how did it work on a practical basis? What was the most challenging aspect of writing with someone else?

I'm sure what I have to say will echo what Neil has said. When two people work on a book, it isn't a case where each one does 50% of the work. Each one does 100% of the work. There are some bits in Good Omens which I know are mine. There are some bits in Good Omens which I know are Neil's. There are some bits which were Neil's idea which I wrote, and there are some bits which were my idea which Neil wrote. Some bits we no longer know exactly whose ideas they were, or who wrote them. By the time we'd gone through all the drafts, it had been written by some sort of composite entity. We wrote it in the 14th century. We each had one phone line and a 1200 baud modem. We'd work it out: "OK, you send, I'll receive." Sometimes it would take 20 minutes to half an hour before we could send the stuff. It would have been cheaper and easier to have rung each other up and sneezed out the text in Morse Code. I was the Keeper of the Disks. I insisted that there should only be one official version in existence at any time. The moment it split into two, we would be in dead trouble. But Neil would sometimes send me a disk with 2000 words, saying " This is the scene with so and so -- insert it here." It more or less worked. It took us about six weeks to do the first draft. I think it worked because, at the time, we were each making a name for ourselves in our respective fields. It's not that we didn't take it seriously. But we were relaxed. We thought we would earn some holiday money by doing it. The nice thing about collaborating is that there is one other person in the world who is thinking about the exact same thing that you are thinking about. We both have a similar reading background, I suppose. It was quite rare when one of us came up with something that the other guy didn't know about. So we could bounce ideas off one another quite easily.

[wizard-of-the-forest]

To the 2 of you, at most, who actively keep up with my actual posts and not the reblogs, I'm going to talk about something serious, so buckle in.

Getting to the meat of it right in the beginning, a couple months ago Neil Gaiman ( @neil-gaiman ) received multiple allegations of sexual assault. He has also been completely silent on tumblr since this point, despite being someone who for many years was the cornerstone 'celebrity' of tumblr. This is just an observation, nothing more.

I only discovered this at, of all places, the International Discworld Convention 2024 in Birmingham. Neil's name was decidedly redacted from a lot of conversation, effectively given the Voldemort treatment. It surprised me a little, but when I did a bit of digging it made a lot of sense.

The fact that several people who really closely knew Sir Terry Pratchett GNU, and almost certainly knew Neil Gaiman if not personally then at least by association, elected to redact his name in such a manner tells me that there's likely a lot of merit in these allegations. Though, I digress.

What I'm glad to have found out, is that their collaboration of Good Omens was mostly written by Terry himself. That 2/3 to 75% was Terry's work, and Neil had a hand in other points. Now, do I doubt that Neil and Terry were good friends? Absolutely not; it's certain that they were. But, it's also very clear that Terry was the writing powerhouse in their professional relationship, and it shows.

Good Omens, season 1 and 2. Season 1 really held the feeling of Terry Pratchett; it felt like his writing, all the way. Season 2, felt off. It wasn't a comedy about religion with a spattering of other things dabbled in, it was fanservice. Boring fanservice with a boring plot of 'oh look it's this bad guy, he's lost his memory, lets go help him!' whilst also 'oh look a gay couple, that's definitely not going to link in to the main duo no no no ;)'.

I know Neil wanted to have some continuity written between Season 1 and Season 3, because Season 3 is the effective 'Good Omens 2' that they both wrote. But, because of Neil doing his thing and getting these allegations, I highly doubt Season 3 will ever see the light of day. Or, if it does, it won't involve Neil; though the dilemma is, if not him, then who?

It's a question too grand for me to answer. But, I hope someone from the Pratchett Estate does decide to pick it up and carry it forward. At least then it'll hold most of Terry's writing, in a way.

[xserpx]

20, 15, and 29 for the ask thing.

20. would you rather be in Middle Earth, Narnia, Hogwarts, or somewhere else?

I like this universe, and I’m not an outdoors sort of person, so Hogwarts.

15. five most influential books over your lifetime.

Harry Potter by JK Rowling - without a doubt this fandom’s had the biggest impact on my life. It’s the first book series that I got seriously obsessed with, I got my Internet handle from it, I wrote Wizard Rock because of it - playing at Terminus in Chicago is one of the highlights of my entire life and I doubt I’ll ever top it - I made so many friends and met SO MANY ridiculously amazing people because of it… Wow, yes, HP definitely.

Night Watch by Terry Pratchett - For starters it’s my favourite book of all time. It’s the first Watch book I read, the first Discworld book I truly fell in love with. I based one of my GCSE music projects on it. I feel more strongly about the 25th of May than I do about Easter.

Artemis Fowl and the Eternity Code by Eoin Colfer - This book is a part of my soul. The entire series is great, but it’s this book in particular that holds the most meaning. Maybe it’s not as directly influential as HP or Night Watch, but I think of it like an old blanket. It’s very, very dear to me.

Dresden Files - I have not been able to go a day without thinking about this series for the past 3 years. It has brought me so much joy, especially through quite a rough patch back in 2015 (and all of 2016, lbr that year was categorically The Worst). It’s also the reason “Hell’s bells” is now my default reaction to most things IRL… #damn it harry

I really don’t know what to put for the fifth xD. Maybe Dracula? Although not so much Dracula itself as the reason for and result of reading Dracula. I read it for a Yr 9 English project in which we had to speak in front of the class, and it turned out I hadn’t actually understood the project brief and so the presentation I’d prepared was all wrong. The teacher forced me to perform it first, despite my protestations, and it resulted in the class watching me sit on a chair for about 1 minute in utter silence while my entire brain exploded in fear and anger. I’m pretty sure that project is 75% of the reason I now have social anxiety issues. FWIW Dracula is a very good book, and I recommend it.

29. three songs that you connect with right now.

My Shot - HamiltonCondemnation - Depeche ModeKW - The Accidentals

[hermitlibrarian]

The New York Times ‘By the Book’ Book Tag was created by Marie Berg on YouTube and I saw it done by Hilary on Songs Wrote My Story. Hilary was kind enough to tag anyone that wanted to do the tag; it sounded like fun so I thought I’d give it a go!

What book is on your nightstand now?

I have to be honest, when I went to type nightstand, I mistakenly wrote bookstand first. It’s much more accurate because there are about twenty different books on my nightstand at the moment and I don’t think I can fit all of them here. I selected these three because they’re closest to the top: For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf by Ntozake Shange, History is All You Left Me by Adam Silvera, and Heartless by Marissa Meyer.

What was the last truly great book you read?

I’ve got two for this question and for two different reasons: Allegedly by Tiffany D. Jackson was a truly great book for an engaging, fast read that I gobbled up. The Search for Aveline by Stephanie Rabig and Angie Bee was a truly great book for a slow enjoyment that I took my time with because I didn’t want it to end.

If you could meet any writer – dead or alive – who would it be? And what would you want to know?

Terry Pratchett! He’s the creator of Discworld, a series of over 40 books that was began in 1983 and completed in 2014/15 (The Shepherd’s Crown was completed in 2014 and published posthumously in 2015).

As for what I’d ask him, I don’t think there’s anything in particular I’d want to know. I’d hope we could just chat about his work and from there I’m sure questions would pop up. I usually think of questions in the moment.

What books might we be surprised to find on your shelf?

I read a pretty wide variety of books, so I don’t think there are any that would be too strange to find on my shelf. I think the biggest “surprises” would probably be the non-fiction books because I tend to read more fiction than anything else. Books like A Gentle Madness by Nicholas A. Basbanes or The Anatomy of Bibliomania by Holbrook Jackson are some examples of the non-fiction you’ll find on my shelves: even when it’s not fiction, it’s still book related!

How do you organize your personal library?

In theory it’s organized thus: all comic books or manga are organized alphabetically by title because with the manga I’m not 100% which is the proper last name, and with comic books I’m not sure whether to go by author or artist. All other books (fiction or non-fiction) are organized alphabetically by the author’s last name. Within a single author’s work, it’s organized chronologically by the publishing year (and all books within a series follow their first book, never separated).

I, however, ran out of bookshelf space ages ago, so there are actually teetering piles on tables all over the house that have no order to them, kind of like the mess being created in the gif above!

What book have you always meant to read and haven’t gotten around to yet?

Oh, we’re being serious? That list is, how shall I put this, quite a bit longer than I’d care to admit. My Goodreads TBR shelf is standing at 1,192 books as of writing this. If I had to narrow it down, really had to make a choice or I’d never be able to read again, I guess I’d have to say the rest of the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde. I’ve had to books for ages, but I’ve never gotten around to catching up and my best friend is always asking about them.

Disappointed, overrated, just not good: what book did you feel you were supposed to like, but didn’t?

I have a somewhat complicated relationship with this story. I was first introduced to it when the movie was released and I went to see it by myself. In 2005, I apparently had not hit my stride for British humor yet because I ended up hating it. Fast forward several years, I decided to give it another chance for some reason and I end up loving it. Thankfully, because it really is a lot of fun and Martin Freeman as Arthur Dent is a treasure.

I wanted to finally read the book last year and did so because a) my job allowed me to take advantage of my Audible subscription and b) Stephen Fry narrates the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy audiobook (did you know he was the voice of the Guide in the movie?).

I have to say that I was disappointed by the book. I enjoyed most of it, say 75% or so, but then things just got so bogged down and boring. I couldn’t believe this was the same story, regardless of being different mediums. Zaphod Beeblebrox really needs to be on film to be brought to life, I think, because on “page” he wasn’t as funny as he was in the film.

What kind of stories are you drawn to? Any you stay clear of?

I tend to read stories that are fantasy or science fiction (such as Saga or The Night Circus) or books that feature characters that I can related to (like Cath in Fangirl).

I try to stay away from books in which there’s graphic violence toward animals. It’s simply not something I can stomach and I can’t imagine how the author could have written it. I don’t have any examples, thankfully, so let’s hope my record of avoiding that will keep going for awhile longer.

If you could require the President to read one book, what would it be?

Are you sure I can’t just lock in him a library for the next four years?

…

…

Well, if you’re sure, then I’d say A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. It’s the story of first generation Americans that bring up their children in poverty, always with the mindset that education and hard work will help you get ahead in life. There are setbacks and always the stark reality that there is never enough money for what they want much less what they need, oftentimes not even enough for food. I think reading about this experience might be eye opening for the person we’re talking about here.

What do you plan to read next?

Remember that Goodreads TBR I mentioned earlier? Yeah, it’s not getting too much smaller any time soon because there are so many interesting sounding books coming out soon! Some of the ones I’m looking forward to the most are: The Bone Witch by Rin Chupeco, Perfect (Flawed #2) by Cecelia Ahern, and Definitions of Indefinable Things by Whitney Taylor.

I tag…

Everyone who wants to do it, but in particular Liv from Curlyhairbibliophile, Cait from PaperFury, and Krysti from YAandWine.

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The NYT By the Book Book Tag The New York Times 'By the Book' Book Tag was created by Marie Berg on YouTube…