What Would Terry Pratchett Do?

(and Happy May 25th to all who celebrate)

Greetings, new subscribers! In case you don’t know, Elizabeth Kaye Cook and I let readers eavesdrop on our bookish correspondence. Check out our piece about today’s very special holiday.

Dear Liz,

In the day to day I’m an aspiring novelist and poet – with all the random, erratic, and unplanned interests that result from those pursuits. But last week I passed 75 subscribers here (!!!) and have been thinking a bunch about what they might like to hear from me. It’s so hard to know! I suspect most of them have found me through our Persuasion pieces here, here, and here, but those represent just one small slice of my writerly concerns.

I firmly believe a writer’s job is to entertain, but I’m afraid my own life isn’t interesting enough for a newsletter. I write, I work, I pet my dog. I text dumb pictures to my sisters, study French, swim, read books, and make Indian food for dinner. I take long walks. Sometimes I sew and make collages. It’s a boring life, my favorite flavor.

I recently finished Rob Wilkins’s fantastic biography Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes. I find myself flipping back through it for wisdom the way I once threw I Ching coins in the long ago. My question, What would Sir Terry have written about in his newsletter if he’d had one?

Judging from the biography, I think he’d wax about his electronic gadgetry projects, his extreme distaste for travel while on book tours, his obsession with greenhouse gardening, his favorite hat shops, and his love of orangutans. Terry was, after all, just a man living his life. I suppose I am just a woman living mine. Hmmm.

My dog, Tater Frisée.

I’m often struck by how often bookish people refer to fictional characters and scenes for life guidance. You said to me the other day something about how you remembered a line from Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son. A North Korean sees a strange photograph: two escaped children, a boy and a girl, wearing “black caps with ears that made them look like mice.” A family at an amusement park lives a fantasy of well-being for a few hours, forgetting the dark past long enough to ride roller coasters. You decided to do the same during a difficult situation.

There’s a reason Shakespeare still speaks to us. For every thorny problem in my life, Shakespeare has tackled it already! Or John Donne. Or Jane Austen. Or Sir Terry. Or Stephen King. Or every other storyteller in the history of the universe. Books live, breathe, and speak, no matter their time and place. I’m not for moral or message books, but I am for human books. Humans in crazy circumstances they try to deal with in interesting ways. That’s life!

Sometimes I make collage bookmarks like these.

So what I want to do with my newsletter is what I want most to do with my poetry and fiction: connect with people while entertaining them. Write something meaningful, moving, informative, and, on occasion, a talisman for daily life.

In that vein, here are some potential newsletter topics:

• My favorite books, what they mean to me, how I think about them, and overall general nerditry on my interior, bookish world – like the time I discovered Connie Willis’s blog and was like, holy shit, Connie Willis went to Quilt Town and wrote about it!? (My enduring thanks to JoPo for first introducing me to the world of Connie Willis).

• How the sausage of my own writing gets made: inspirations for poems and novels, for example, why (and how) I’m currently writing a “hotel novel.”

• Scenes from our literary friendship and the fun stuff we do together (upcoming Discworld convention in Germany; Jane Austen’s 250th birthday celebration events in the UK; hopefully another Stephen KingCon or King-related events in the fall; etc.)

• Original poems (and maybe fiction? teasers from the novel?) written by moi.

• My dog, French, cooking, collage, swimming, travel, and my dog again.

My BFF taught me how to quilt-as-you-go and I’ve been making these potholders ever since. Hoping to make an actual quilt someday.

So let me ask you this, why do you think your subscribers open your email and read what you have to say? Also, for my actual subscribers – !! still amazed you’re here and thank you !! – what do you want to read in this newsletter? Enquiring minds honestly, truly, deeply, wanna know.

With love,

-mel

PS - Liz and I will be at Discworld Germany and in the UK for Austen events very soon!