Tag Archive | pratchett

Worldbuilding error-correction: Learning from the Master

I’ve been re-reading The Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett, in part because I just found it in a used book store when cluudle visited Ithaca.

And in this re-read, I discovered that Pratchett had very cleverly explained all of the storyline divergences in Discworld in one tidy plot device.

There are many chronological inconsistencies on the Disc. Creatures and contraptions from a hundred different time periods exist side by side. This is how it’s always been… or is it?… -the Discworld Compendium

This is brilliant. The Discworld books were written over such a large span of time, inconsistencies (or things that the writer just didn’t like anymore) were bound to sneak in. In one fell swoop, Pratchett wrote a wonderful, readable book, and made any and all consistency errors canon.

Love it!

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Love Meme Answers 4: Junie/Jin, Carrot/Angua, Regine/Ambrus

For the meme I posted Wednesday night here and here

I chewed over the Pratchett one for a while. Fanfic makes me nervous to write.

Having a big brother was sometimes a pain. He would mess up her hair and steal her dinner and pick her up and swing her when she was trying to be serious.

But when she looked at the mean girls the day after her ride with Jimmy in the parking lot, and not a single one of them would say so much as Boo to her – except to tell her they thought her shoes were poker, which meant cool this week – Junie thought having an older brother, having Jin for an older brother – was the most awesome thing ever.


Dear Mom, and Dad…

Carrot turned and looked at Angua, sleeping across his bed. The moon was new tonight, and she was sprawled in human form, but he could see, in her lines, the wolf she was sometimes. He thought about her running beside him, about the way she looked when she came in sweaty and filthy after a day Defending the Peace. He thought about the rare moments when she was out of uniform and not wearing fur. He thought about the moment when he thought that, perhaps, she had died.

He looked back at the paper, and thought about trying to put all that into words.

I am, in Love.


Ambrus was asleep, and Regine was not.

This was a common occurrence; she slept very little, and found often that a tlacatl Working would do her far better than actual sleep. She did not, as a rule, enjoy her dreams.

She did enjoy his, however. She enjoyed most of how her Kept’s brain worked, but his dreams, his mind unfettered and free to do as it would, were a fascinating place full of vivid, if unlikely, magic and sensuality.

She wondered, sometimes, watching his dreams, what it said that she enjoyed his unfettered mind the most.

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