One piece of good news in late 2020 was the birth of a new orangutan among the population in Prague Zoo. He's called Kawi, which is short for his official full name: Pustakawan, the Indonesian word for "librarian". (AP)

Ah, I see.

If you don't know about it already, I've done well out of Fancake's crowdsourced recommendations. Each rec is tagged for fandoms, themes and tropes, and length, so you can filter for things like Discworld works or works over 80,000 words.

I'm not sure what tone of voice I should be reading that in, but what's coming across is a certain amount of trepidation (as opposed to, say, "Oh, it's long! Good!", which I'd have read as more enthusiastic).

In case it's trepidation about the idea of a long fic about death, I should clarify that it's long because death is not all it's about: there is also quite a bit about life and joy and suchlike in it too.

...wow, that was amazing. Thanks so much for the rec!

You also have to avoid putting brackets around it, because the widget that automatically turns addresses into links is not very bright and thinks punctuation is part of the address, and then the link doesn't work.

So here's a version of the link that does work: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/3673824/1/End-Of-the...

Relatedly, here's the one quote on Terry Pratchett's writing process that I always know how to find on short notice:

"I save about twenty drafts -- that's ten meg of disc space -- and the last one contains all the final alterations. Once it has been printed out and received by the publishers, there's a cry here of 'Tough shit, literary researchers of the future, try getting a proper job!' and the rest are wiped."

Mark suggested in the last video that one of the things we could talk about is the books that Terry Pratchett never wrote.

On that subject, I have a story:

The one time I got to see Terry Pratchett in the flesh was when he was touring to promote The Last Continent. At the event I went to, he talked about how he'd written the novel, and about Discworld more generally, and about what he was planning to do next.

He'd written a short story a few years earlier, based on the story of the young King Arthur and the sword in the stone, but with the twist in the end that after the old king's lost heir does the prove-my-identity-by-pulling-out-the-sword thing it turns out (to the surprise of Merlin, who had skimped on his research because he assumed his supernatural knowledge would be accurate) that the old king's lost heir is a girl, not a boy. That's where the short story ended, but he said at this event that he'd been thinking about going back to that idea and doing a whole novel exploring the idea of King-Arthur-but-a-girl, and possibly giving her a mentor that was less like Merlin and more like, say, Granny Weatherwax, and seeing what changed as a result.

He never did write that novel. I don't know why, but I did notice that a few years later we got the first Tiffany book, and I wonder sometimes if what happened was that when he got to work on this idea of a girl coming into her inheritance with Granny Weatherwax as a mentor, it stopped being about Girl King Arthur and turned into the story of Tiffany Aching instead.

I knew somebody would get in before me with a recommendation for "Mister Vimes'd Go Spare"!

...so instead I'm going to recommend another of my favourite post-series Discworld fics, The Brain Thief by hollimichele.

It was written during the period of time after the announcement of The Embuggerance but before Terry Pratchett died, and in a way that's what it's about, too; though in the story, it's Lord Vetinari whose death is approaching and causing everyone to wonder what the world will be like without him in it.

But apart from that, it's an entertaining (if occasionally rather gruesome) case fic for the next generation of the Ankh-Morpork Watch, with some familiar guest appearances and a fun bit of sustained dramatic irony. It does a good job of capturing Pratchett's narrative voice (and his anger at the injustices of the world). And there are lots of footnotes.

(Content notes: death of various kinds, some violent and some self-inflicted; related discussions of grief and coping)

There are parts of this book I have been dissatisfied with, but I have no hesitation in saying: that was a good ending.

Oh, also:

some things her mother had decided she needed

Boy, I remember what that was like, when I moved out of the family home.

"They don't like it up and over 'em!"

Reference to the TV comedy series Dad's Army, about a group of old men in the Home Guard during WW2. "They don't like it up 'em!" was one of Lance Corporal Jones's catchphrases, usually connected to a reminiscence of his military service in the days of rifle bayonets.

those who had ridden into battle on yarrow stalks

Yarrow is a flowering plant with various useful properties. It has slender straight stalks which can be dried to produce slender straight sticks with a variety of applications (one that's not relevant here but might ring a bell is that yarrow stalks are used as a divination tool in association with the I Ching). According to some folklore, elves ride yarrow stalks the way witches ride broomsticks; I'm not sure why, unless it's to show off about not needing something more sturdy.

"This lady is not for turning"

A motto of the British PM Margaret Thatcher, a woman who, whatever else you might say about her, had an iron-hard self-confidence to rival Mrs Earwig's. Originated in a 1980 speech: "To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the 'U-turn', I have only one thing to say: 'You turn if you want to. The lady's not for turning!'"

It's also worth noting, since this is a Witch Book, that the speech writer is believed to have been making a pun on the title of the play The Lady's Not For Burning, in which the female protagonist is accused of being a witch.