I don't think I would ever tell anyone that 'Mort' is my favorite book. Looking at the mess I am in now, I might even say that 'Mort inspired me to do the worst thing ever. Of course, that wouldn't really be the truth.
You see, after I finished reading 'Mort', I wasn't content to just put it aside and write the name Death, in capital letters, at the top of my list of favourite characters. I don’t know why. Perhaps it was because of what ‘Mort’ was about — loneliness, not fitting in, searching for your place in the world. Or maybe it was just because I loved the pivotal character, whose name tells you more about his job description and scythe than about the fact he is a misfit with a passion for cats and curry. In any case, the school drama was falling apart and needed something revolutionary to get it going again.
I imagined producing ‘Mort’ would be hard but I never thought I’d be running the whole thing practically single-handedly. Nobody wanted anything to do with the ailing drama club. There were only four others involved and it was likely to stay that way.
“Has it been worth it?” I sometimes ask myself. It has been a struggle, certainly. However, then I look at the drama group. Once we were only a bunch of kids, with massive age differences, who dared call ourselves actors. Now that we have laughed over ‘Mort’ and shared in its tragedies, we’re more than that. Once we were just ‘The Starving Actors Cooperative’. Now we are friends.

Would we have put in this much effort for another book? I don’t think so. I definitely wouldn’t have. At the very least, ‘Mort’ is something to cheer me up, when things look bleak and the cast has forgotten their lines. Again.

We’re nowhere near ready to perform yet but if there’s one point ‘Mort’ makes it’s that sometimes you have to do difficult things, because no-one else will.