Terry Pratchett Interview for North Shore Times Advertiser by Errol Kiong

A small, compact man, Mr. Pratchett is as entertaining in person as he is in his books.

His flagship, Discworld, is part social attire and part fantasy fiction, set on a flat world that floats through space on the backs of four elephants who ride on the shell of a giant turtle.

If you believe the rumors, Mr. Pratchett always wears black, dons hats wherever he goes and has venus flytraps in every nook of the house he shares with wife Lyn in Salisbury, England.

The truth is more mundane, he says.

"I wear black because I can't find anything darker, and black goes with everything."

He is wearing an Akubra hat for his Australasian tour because "down here everyone knows if you go without your hat for more than five minutes your head explodes."

And the venus flytraps grow like weeds, given the right conditions, he says.

He stresses that they're insectivorous, rather than carnivorous.

"It's the difference between eating flies, and eating the postman."

From all accounts, his childhood was very ordinary.

"I had to come up with my psychosis all by myself."

He went from a child who didn't read at all to one who read anything, after being given a copy of Wind in the Willows at the age of 10.

He asked to work at a library on Saturdays and would regularly take books home to read.

His first novel, The Carpet People, was published when he was 20.

Today, each Discworld book sells more than 400,000 paperbacks and 150,000 hardbacks in Britain.

He writes because he loves to.

"I wish I could convey to you the sense of elation you get when the writing is going well."

His incentive for writing is: "If you're a good boy, and you finish this book, you get to write another one."

He has over 40 novels to his name -- "I have to stop and think now, I've lost count" -- and he received an Order of the British Empire for services to literature in 1998.

Mr. Pratchett was in New Zealand to promote his 27th Discworld novel, Nightwatch, and the Carnegie medal-winning children's book, The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents.

The children's book, which features a talking cat and his posse of talking rats, is a new twist on the fable of the pied piper.

There has been criticism of the book's dark tone, with cannibalism among rats, and a brutal scene where rates are mauled by a dog.

Enid Blyton he is not, "and I consider that a good thing."

"If it's presented in the right circumstances, kids will accept a lot more than adults think they can. Modern kids are even more narratively savvy than they were in my day."

Adults can also sense deeper themes such as the clash between liberal compassion and the "survival of the fittest" principle.

Writing an average of two books a year, Mr. Pratchett has no intention of retiring.

"I don't think writers actually retire."

Two things he lives by are Leonardo da Vinci's "o moral open your eyes" and early 1900s writer G. K. Chesterton's belief that fantasy allows the ordinary to be seen in a new and different light.

This world is immensely wonderful, he says. The electric light represents 2000 years of cooperation.

"There're so many things that have to have happened, largely through cooperation, for one light bulb to be created.

"We're surrounded by things that we think are normal and they are not normal. They are better than magical; we built them.

"Occasionally, if I can get people to see common things from a new direction and realize how uncommon they really are, then I've done a good job."