If, like me, you love Diana’s fiction, and you wish to learn more about the person, who she was and how she thought, then this book will enlighten you. But it will give you more than that. Her writings assembled in one place tell us how she thought about literature and the reasons for literature, about the place of children’s fiction in the world, about the circumstances that shaped her and her own understanding and vision of who she was and what she did. It is ferociously intelligent, astonishingly readable, and as with so much that Diana Wynne Jones did, she makes each thing she writes, each explanation for why the world is as it is, look so easy.

This is the Foreword to Reflections, a book of essays and nonfiction by Diana Wynne Jones.

Terry Pratchett: An Appreciation

Right.

So it’s February of 1985, and it’s a Chinese restaurant in London, and it’s the author’s first interview. His publicist was pleasantly surprised that anyone would want to talk to him (the author has just written a funny fantasy book called The Colour of Magic), but she’s set up this lunch with a young journalist anyway. The author, a former journalist, has a hat, but it’s a small, black leathery cap, not a Proper Author Hat. Not yet. The journalist has a hat too. It’s a grayish thing, sort of like the ones Humphrey Bogart wears in movies, only when the journalist wears it he doesn’t look like Humphrey Bogart: he looks like someone wearing a grown-up’s hat. The journalist is slowly discovering that, no matter how hard he tries, he cannot become a hat person: it’s not just that it itches and blows off at inconvenient moments, it’s that he forgets, and leaves it in restaurants, and is now getting very used to knocking on the doors of restaurants about eleven a.m. and asking if they found a hat. One day, very soon now, the journalist will stop bothering with hats, and decide to buy a black leather jacket instead.

So they have lunch, and the interview gets printed in Space Voyager magazine, along with a photo of the author browsing the shelves in Forbidden Planet, and most importantly, they make each other laugh, and like the way the other one thinks.

And the author is Terry Pratchett, and the journalist is me, and it’s been two decades since I left a hat in a restaurant, and one and a half decades since Terry discovered his inner bestselling-author-with-a-Proper-Author-Hat.

We don’t see each other much these days, what with living on different continents, and, when we’re on each other’s continents, spending all our time signing books for other people. The last time we ate together was at a sushi counter in Minneapolis, after a signing. It was an all-you-can-eat night, where they put your sushi on little boats and floated it over to you. After a while, obviously feeling we were taking unfair advantage of the whole all-you-can-eat thing, the sushi chef gave up on the putting sushi on little boats, produced something that looked like the Leaning Tower of Yellowtail, handed it to us, and announced that he was going home.