Describing Terry Pratchetts Books Is Difficult. Someone Asked Me What The Book I Was Reading Was About,

Describing Terry Pratchett’s books is difficult. Someone asked me what the book I was reading was about, and I had to tell them it was about banking and the gold standard, but like in a cool way with golems and action. 

 I don’t think they believed me.

Reminder

I’ve pointed out a few times in the past that I will never have enough free time to answer all the Asks and such that come in here. (I’ve currently got just under 50,000 of them unanswered here. And due to the klunkiness of the Tumblr interface, they aren’t actually searchable or anything, so once they’ve dropped into the void at the bottom of the page, they are kind of gone.) Normally I get about 5 times as many arriving as I can answer. Right now times are not normal, Good Omens has exploded, and I’m getting not just more Asks in than I can answer, but I’m getting more than I can physically read. They are coming in in their hundreds.

So…

If I don’t answer your Ask, remember that I may not have seen it, and that if I saw it and even if I had planned to answer it, I may never see it again as it may have been swept away in the tide of new asks.

Please look through the archives and see if your question has been answered already.

Also, if it’s a Good Omens headcanon question, I probably won’t specifically endorse whatever your headcanon is. Assume that if it’s in the book, it’s in the book, if it’s in the TV show it’s in the TV show, if it’s something that was written to be ambiguous (“Does Aziraphale know who Crowley is talking about when he says he lost his best friend?”) then I’m not going to remove the ambiguity here, anyway, and generally if possible act as if I’m somebody who isn’t here on Tumblr.

If it’s important and you really want me to see it , you may want to wait a month or so until the Good Omens barrage has begun to slacken off and then ask me again.

Sorry about this. Please please don’t take it personally.

Writing advice: don’t use adverbs ever or everything you do is terrible

Best selling author and scriptwriter Neil Gaiman:

writers love to portray immortal characters experiencing time differently as something sad or frightening but what they don’t seem to have realized is that the comedic potential is limitless and, in my humble opinion, extremely underutilized

Twist on the ‘chosen one’ trope that I’ve been super into lately: your hero is the actual Chosen One, selected by gods or destiny or what-have-you, but they themselves think they’re lying about it.

It’s been centuries and nobody’s been able to pull the magic blade that can kill the demon king from the stone, but people keep dying–so the local blacksmith takes a hammer and chisel to the rock in the middle of the night because fuck it, somebody has to do something.  Little do they know the sword was specifically placed so as to be un-drawable by everyone until somebody came along with enough practicality to do things the sensible way.

The paladin very definitely never had any prophetic dreams, but if she’d said she was leaving her village to go be a mercenary just because she was so desperate to get out everybody would have cried and scolded and been super-judgy, so she maybe invented a Call a little bit.  But now her first aid’s working way better than it should and some weird shit happened the other day with those undead, and she still hasn’t had had any contact from her god but she’s not meant to be this good of a liar.

A trio of con artists take on the persona of an old folk-legend for a job, and gets in over their heads when a little sleight-of-hand gets out of hand and the whole countryside starts believing it.  They end up fulfilling half the prophecy just by deliberately trying so the con doesn’t fall apart around them.  Meanwhile the other half of the prophecy’s coming true around them at every turn, which they keep chalking up to good fortune, assuming one of their co-conspirators is pulling off on purpose, or just plain not noticing because they’re too distracted with the rest of the con.

Possibly I just need to watch The Road to El Dorado again, but seriously, more of THIS trope please.