#nation

five covers in half a year (I've actually already drawn all covers for Tiffany, but the publisher hasn't announced them yet), pretty productive

Were this an ordinary Tuesday night, Wendy Vance would return home from her receptionist job at a Springfield chiropractor’s office and spend the evening engaged in any number of empty, meaningless diversions: watching old, taped episodes of Friends, browsing the new issue of Cosmopolitan, or driving to Center Square Mall to browse for shoes.

Tonight, however, the 29-year-old is unable to bring herself to turn on the TV or even half-heartedly flip through the new Pottery Barn catalog. Instead, she has decided to visit her grandmother in nearby Mountain Grove.

“If none of this had happened, right now I’d probably be watching that stupid Journey VH1 Behind The Music episode for the 40,000th time. Or talking to my friend Kerri about the Gap skirt I want,” said Vance, holding her grandmother’s frail, time-worn hand. “Now, all I can think about is how precious life is, and how important it is to spend quality time with the people who matter to you, because everything could change in an instant.”

Something that I've seen in a large number of criticisms of Good Omens S3 is that Terry Pratchett wouldn't have written it that way because it's "too dark", and that Terry was lighthearted and funny, and clearly all the humour in the novel came from him and all the dark bits came from Gaiman.

This is an old misconception which has been around since the publication of the novel, and I think the people saying that possibly aren't very familiar with Terry Pratchett's work, or at least only surface level familiar. At times it can be easy to miss because of the humour, but Terry did dark better than almost any author I've ever read.

The first time I read this passage in Nation it was like being hit in the face with a brick.

Nation is a book that I've seen negative reviews of because it isn't funny, and they're correct, how could a novel which opens with almost all the inhabitants of an island being killed be funny? But it's also one of his best novels. It feels very much like a novel he wrote to house all the rage he felt after his Alzheimers diagnosis, a rage which is palpable in that quote above.

But to go back to his more humour driven works, read the section in Reaper Man where Death can't muffle the sound of the sand in his Lifetimer running out. Read Night Watch where Vimes is going through the torture chamber at Cable Street (actually the whole of Night Watch is pretty damn dark). The opening of I Shall Wear Midnight (which I won't go into because TW, but some of what happens is so horrific in a very real-world sense that I couldn't quite believe I was reading it, especially in what was intended as a series for children). The part in Thud where The Summoning Dark meets The Guarding Dark, Vimes' inner Watchman, who is there not to keep darkness out, but to keep Vimes own darkness inside. Many other instances.

Make no mistake, I still don't like how Good Omens ended. I think it highly unlikely it would have ended that way if Terry were to have had anything to do with it because he was a far better writer than that (though of course none of us know that for sure, and even if he had written it that exact way it would still be bad and absolutely gut the message of the novel/S1).