Once More With Footnotes

attention! There will be a short quiz when the rather thin gentleman WHO TALKS LIKE THIS shows up at the end. (And if you don't know who I mean, read more Pr atchett. You can thank me later.)
     
    -
     
    The Legend:
     
                  Terry Pratchett is the creator of The Luggage. This is in fact a highly resourceful bit of baggage (not counting some of the ladies of the Seamstresses' Guild of Ankh-Morpork) that cannot be lost, no matt er how hard you try to lose it. If unlosable luggage isn't something out of Legend, I don't know what is.
     
    -
     
    The Beverage:
     
                  Two simple rules.
     
                  1.   Do not be drinking any when reading Terry's work as this may re-
sult in spit-takes or worse due to your doomed attempts to ingest liquid
and expel laughter at the same time.
     
                  2.   Buy him one.
     
    -
     
                  It's an honor to know him, a pleasure to read that funny/serious/funny stuff wot he's writ, and a lucky thing for us all that he's on our side. Plus he is good to cats.
     
     
                  — Esther M. Friesner
    April 2004
     

Apology
     
                  Sorry there isn't more. But, you see, it's like this ...
     
                  On my very first day as a trainee journalist, I started keeping a cuttings book. It lasted about three months. By then, I was writing too much.
     
                  And, as I say somewhere else in here, when you're a journalist you're writing for tomorrow, or possibly Friday. You're not writing for forever.
     
                  In those days, too, a beneficent government had yet to outlaw the common practice in fish-and-chip shops of wrapping their handy takeaway meal in yesterday's newspaper. That put journalism into perspective. When you know your lovingly crafted work is going to end up as the container for an alfresco portion of cod and chips, a certain sense of hopelessness caus e s you to be less than careful about preserving it yourself. All things shall pass, you think. Nothing is permanent. Salt and vinegar dissolveth all.
     
                  In the early days, when Discworld was just becoming popular, I was invited to visit the huge national boo k warehouse of W. H. Smith. They used to do that to authors. They'd show you the huge inventory, they'd show you where your books go, and then, quite by chance, you'd pass ... the shredder.
     
                  I was fascinated by the shredder. It was huge, two stories high, and apparently-new books were disappearing into it for what I'm sure were sensible business reasons. They emerged as low-grade confetti.
     
                  I acquired a photo of it, which for a while I kept on my desk like an ancient philosopher would keep a skull. It was fish and chips all over again, a memento mori for those who write. Today a best-seller, tomorrow the padding in a Jiffy bag. Ho hum. The journalist knows that the important thing is to get the words into someone else's head and doesn't care too much about what happens to the paperwork after that.
     
                  That's why some of the stuff in this book took some finding. Some of it was located on ancient hard drives here, some of it was found by the diligence of NESFA and my agent, Colin Smythe. I thank them, particula rly for the ones they allowed to slumber peacefully ...
     
     
    Terry Pratchett
    May, 2004
     

As the author's note says at the end, this was based on a true story. At least, Diane Duane swore it was true, and I wasn't about to argue. And the story just rolled out in front of me. Fortuitously, not long after I was asked for a story for More Tales From the Forbidden Planet, published in 1990 ...
     
     
     
     
     
H ollywood C hickens
     
                  The facts are these.
     
                  In 1973, a lorry overturned at a freeway interchange in Hollywood. It was one of the busiest in the United States and, therefore, the world.
     
                  It shed some of its load. It had been carrying chickens. A few crates broke.
     
                  Alongside the interchange, bordered on three sides by thundering traffic and on the fourth by a wall, wa s a quarter-mile of heavily shrubbed verge. No one bothered too much about a few chickens.