Out now is another great Doctor Who audio play from Big Finish, by me, called The Resurrection Of Mars. Honestly, it’s really good. I’m not just saying that because I wrote it. I’m saying that despite the fact that I wrote it. I listened to it last night and the cast, the sound design, and the direction were all fantastic, and that’s nothing to do with me. It’s the second half of a two-part story, the first half being last month’s Deimos, which ended on a hopefully surprising you-thought-the-story-was-all-about-that-when-in-fact-it’s-all-about-this cliff-hanger.
I couldn’t even remember what had happened in the story, because I wrote it so long ago – the first drafts were delivered on the 26th June and 6th July 2009, back when I was an unmarried man of a mere 35 years - and the second drafts were delivered on the 17th and 19th July. This is fun, this is like writing an Andrew Pixley archive about myself. After more revisions at the beginning of August, the play was recorded on the 19th and 20th August. I mention this not because it will be of interest to anybody, but because it illustrates one of the ironies of writing; you turn something around something quickly – it’s very unusual, and very fraught, to be writing something 2 months away from the recording date - and then it comes out 18 months later.
It seems to have gone down pretty well, which is always flattering, though it’s difficult to find good reviews encouraging when there’s a voice in your head saying “Maybe you were a good writer once - but that doesn’t mean you’re a good writer now. You’ve peaked, that’s what it is, you peaked 18 months ago, and now all you have to look forward to is irreversible decline.”
Torturing myself by listening to the bonus bollocks on the end of the download – they put these little DVD Extra features on, featuring light-hearted interviews with the director, the cast, and in moments of rare desperation, the writer. I always have my nervous, job-interview voice, which is all hesitant and gabbly and pitched a couple of tones above my normal speaking voice. Which is so disappointing, because in my head, I sound exactly like Jimmy Stewart. Anyway, in this interview I mentioned that as a preliminary thing to writing this story, I wrote a 2,000 word essay on What My Story Would Be About, The Themes It Would Explore and How These Would Be Illustrated With Dramatic Situations. Remind me about it in a month’s time, I’ll stick it up on this blog.
Anyway, you can download the play from here.