Past Tense - The Thief Of Sherwood – My favourite of my short stories. The idea, which felt original (though I daresay it’s been done before elsewhere), was to tell a story via its reviews, episode guides, novelisation, behind-the-scenes features and other secondary material. The way Doctor Who fans experience the lost episodes. It meant I could have lots of fun recreating the styles of old Doctor Who Weekly features and gleefully taking the piss out of David Howe’s writing style in The Doctor Who Television Companion. It’s one of my most labour-of-lovey Doctor Who things – it’s the one I like to read myself occasionally.
(Extremely kindly, editor Ian Farrington selected this story for the ‘Best of’)
A Christmas Treasury - The Clanging Chimes Of Doom – Inspired by that dreadfully over-earnest line from Band Aid, a story which (quite inadvertently) commemorated the anniversary of that recording. I recall the word-count was shorter than usual, hence the ending being even more rushed than usual, and I had to remove the names of any specific pop stars which was a shame. But it was fun, not too bad.
I did get asked a few more times, but I found I was running out of short-story ideas (particular Christmassy ones) and the time I took to write them meant I couldn’t really justify the time spent. I’m not moaning about the fee – it would be very generous if it took me a day to write a story but I always ended up taking longer. And it was frustrating that so many of the toys of the Doctor Who universe – the monsters, the worlds and characters of past televison stories – were off-limits. And Ian kept on turning down my idea of editing a humorous short story collection, ‘A Universe Of Laughter’. Can’t imagine why.