Samuel Vimes

I've been reading Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels lately. I started reading some of them long long ago, about 15 years ago, when I was a library volunteer. Pratchett got knighted for writing 50 novels before his death from Alzheimers last year. He's got great instincts for humor, similar to Douglas Adams, and the same wry accusations about human nature. I agree with both, as they're equally cynical about people. Most of the things schoolteachers say about people are meant to create more victims in society, and they call it Optimism. I find that rather upsetting but there isn't much I can do about it. Sam Vimes is a character in Discworld, an officer of the Watch, which is the city police force. He mostly solves mysteries and attempts to avoid being a fool, though that is somewhat difficult as Discworld has Wizards and Gods and neither is terribly kind to people.

There are a couple movies/miniseries based on Terry Pratchett. Wait, three of them. Hogfather, The Postal Service, and The Light Fantastic. Hogfather is very well done, as is Postal Service. Hogfather is a nice story of Christmas, with the actual origin of it buried, the Celtic origin complete with animal sacrifice and bloodletting. Most of the charming holidays have grim histories. Remember that. Europe has Martial Arts too, they were mostly lost when we started using guns, but they're being rediscovered from old books and such, some most of a thousand years old. Just to give you perspective. English Broadswords are WAY more useful than Katana, which are only interesting because they are made from inferior steel with hilarious excessive amounts of labor and given to psychopaths who merrily murdered any peasants they could reach. Small wonder Japan had so many civil wars. Knights did the same thing in Europe, btw. A knight was a murderer, a brigand/pirate with a horse. Funny how it has come to mean something completely different in 1200 years since the Dark Ages.

I could see it would take a lot of work to write as well as Pratchett, but there's an audience to pay for his kind of writing and I'm just not interested in Mall Ninja audiences or writing porn for women, so no romance/blood novels for me. Humor, that sells well for a good long time, if it is done properly. Shock value just doesn't retain its shock, on a long enough timescale. My old novels were too shocking then, and too common now. That's the trouble with accurate social predictions. On a long enough timescale, you become boring.

On my walks, with my music player cheerfully informing me in heavily accented French of the joys of Nouvelle Vague, I ponder if I could take my ideas of using biotech to create immortals and all the trouble you can get into by not dying like you ought to. You have to live with your wrong ideas for a really long time, and your grudges, collected over decades and centuries, become your very definition. And how those definitions can become humor, twisted just the right way. The hardest part is deciding if you portray the character from inside his own head, or outside it with little explanation. Particularly since I feel inclined to jump around the character's life, back and forth in time, because the points to be made are rather awkward otherwise, and I want the reader to understand just how long a timescale he's dealing with. If I can make a Pratchett-sized setting, I can write within that framework of insider jokes and references and maybe build a following without trapping myself into Power-Is-Over-9000 nonsense which irritates me so much. That's where Clancy went wrong, after all, and Butcher seems to be going as his setting broke in the last couple books. I want something a little easier to write for. A little less demanding, and a lot more amusing.