there is no justice

...THERE'S JUST ME.

Terry Pratchett has died, and I feel like I ought to say something.

Celebrity deaths don't generally have much of an impact on me, even if I liked what they did and what they said. I feel sadness, but it's sadness about death as a concept, sadness because people have lost someone they love. I don't feel sadness for myself, as if I've lost something. The one exception to this was Linda Smith, who I still miss as strongly as though I actually knew her.

But now Terry Pratchett has died. And it kind of hurts. I can't think of anything to say that doesn't sound monumentally dorky, so I'm just going to go ahead and sound monumentally dorky.

Terry Pratchett was my very favourite author, as he is for many people. He occupied that space where so many people loved him that it wasn't considered the thing to write positive reviews. The ones I remember reading all said "oh, this silly little piece of genre fiction is very silly, isn't it? There is absolutely nothing to criticise so I shall praise it with all the condescension I can muster, because despite being excellent, it's not a real book. It's not literature."

Susan hated literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book.

I don't write fantasy. I've tried, and I can cobble together something OK-ish, but it's not what I'm good at. Where Pratchett influenced me most was in my general philosophy of life (I KNOW I KNOW I AM SUCH A DORK I'M SORRY).

I read the Witches books as a teenage baby Wiccan who had read many books on the subject of being a Wiccan and knew that one was supposed to have a large supply of ceremonial tools that one used solely for ritual and spellcasting purposes. I had two or three boxes full of supplies that I'd put together from the lists I'd read; most of it had never been used, but I'd done my research and I knew that this was the way to do things right. Pratchett's Witches were not this kind of witch.

She took the breadknife. It did all the things the other knife could do, plus you could cut bread with it.

Pratchett's Witches changed me. I stopped accumulating stuff and following stupid complicated spells (spell recipes? Spell instructions? There must be a word for this, surely), stopped having weird rules about what could be used for which thing, and after not too long a time stopped calling myself Wiccan entirely. I decided that spirituality and common sense weren't incompatible. I changed my approach to reading Tarot cards and started treating them as a focal point for a problem-solving session.

Cardboard isn't very bright.

I'd spent a lot of time in unhelpful corners of the internet, reading about life and religion and philosophy and things that were right or wrong from the perspective of other inexperienced teenagers and getting thoroughly confused by it all, when I read Carpe Jugulum and had a lightbulb moment.

"And sin, young man, is when you treats other people as things. That's it. That's all sin is."
"Surely there are worse crimes."
"But they starts with thinking of people as things..."

Life made so much more sense after reading that (YES I WAS AM AND SHALL ALWAYS REMAIN A DORK). I am a different person for Pratchett's Witches, and I feel a loss in my life now that the mind which created them has gone.

I met Pratchett once. He signed my book and said something polite. I had a mild freak-out and babbled something about Primark. He nodded patiently and waited for me to get out of the way of the queue. I was touched. And also a dork.

So thank you, Sir Terry, for everything you wrote. You changed me. I hope Death was as you pictured him.