Thank you, Pterry

I said, when I write my little tribute to Harold Ramis, that there was one tribute I was dreading having to write, as I knew it would be the one that would hit me the hardest. That time has sadly come, and in the end, it's taken me over a week to collect my thoughts, and finally get this written.

And I've decided: I'm not going to write a tribute to Terry Pratchett. It doesn't seem enough, somehow, not for the man whose work has had the greatest effect on not just my own writing, but on my worldview.

No, this isn't a tribute. This is a thank you...

A tribute (and a thank you) to the late, great Harold Ramis

It's no secret that while I may have been during the tail end of the 70s, I consider myself an 80s kid, through and through. I mean I may have been born 3 years before the decade started, but I grew up in the 80s, and something like is bound to have a big effect on a growing boy. Like everyone who was a child during the greatest decade there ever was, there's one thing that influenced me more than any other, beyond Transformers, or He-Man, or Duran Duran, or Robocop, or Frankie Goes To Hollywood, or any of that stuff.

Yes, I'm talking about Ghostbusters, a movie that, in hindsight, had a spectacularly big effect on how I write, and how I even think about plot-lines. And so, it was with a heavy heart that I read the news today (courtesy of The BBC), saying that Harold Ramis has died, aged 69...