Early pseudonymous Terry Pratchett stories identified and published

Originally published at: Early pseudonymous Terry Pratchett stories identified and published | Boing Boing

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Note to self: trust no-one. Get a burn box.

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Anyway: this actually is kafkaesk for a change.

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Wouldn’t have helped in this case, unless you were really determined (and wanted to incur the wrath of librarians among other things)

Honestly? It’s all likely really rough. He’s a brilliant author, but it’s not as if he came out of the gate as a genius. He worked really hard and made his mistakes in public on the page.
Is it interesting in a scholastic sense? Sure. Literarily? :grimacing:
If I were to become a famous author, I imagine there would be many manuscripts I’d prefer to drown in a bathtub

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Which is true, but might be read as implying that it was Rob’s idea. Rob was of course following Terry’s instructions which explicitly required a steamroller rather than one of those modern diesel powered road rollers.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/09/02/0147203/terry-pratchetts-hard-drive-destroyed-by-steamroller

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I have toyed with the idea of a device in the upper one-digit megaton range in some sort of Wildfire setup, but the paperwork involved is simply unbelievable.

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But, if you did it properly, there wouldn’t necessarily be any paperwork left to check…

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True, true… Maybe I should get back to work on my doomsday device. I kinda fizzled out there when the lockdown ended.
Did I say doomsday device? Sorry. I meant cold fusion. Yes, cold fusion…
So they found some older works by Terry Pratchett, did they? Tell me all about it!

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PTerry always had this attitude to his notes and drafts. He really didn’t want people poking through them.

From an archived usenet discussion (via lspace)

  • Does Terry keep earlier drafts of his novels around?

“I save about twenty drafts – that’s ten meg of disc space – and the last one contains all the final alterations. Once it has been printed out and received by the publishers, there’s a cry here of ‘Tough shit, literary researchers of the future, try getting a proper job!’ and the rest are wiped.”

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Posted this in a wrong place.

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