Touch A New Day

More stuff relating to my Doctor Who novel Touched by an Angel, available from all good booksellers and amazon. This time our saunter down memory avenue takes us back to October 2010, when I prepared a two-page synopsis of the story. It was based on a combination of two ideas I’d pitched (which I’ll share with you in my next blog). What’s interesting about it for me, looking back, are the bits which didn’t end up in the finished novel, or ended up different (I’m very glad I didn’t end up writing the ‘past’ stuff in 1991 rather than 1994)

DOCTOR WHO NOVEL SYNOPSIS: “TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL” by Jonathan Morris

Tone: Time-wimey extremely terrifying love-story. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll scream.

October, 2011. Since the death of his wife 8 years earlier, Harold Pearson (39), has lived a lonely life, working as a civil lawyer. A battered envelope arrives in the post. It’s from a man called Harry Marshall.... Harold investigates this Marshall person – he’s a shadowy figure who seems to have appeared without trace in the early 90s and vanished in 2003. A millionaire. Who bears a striking resemblance to Harold’s father.  
...
The only answer can be found by going back in time in the TARDIS to where Harold was sent back to – January, 1991. The baggy era! Having found himself in 1991, Harold is trying to fathom what has happened. He decides to visit his old home, meeting his parents (who died in the mid-1990’s) before going to his old university – where his 19-year-old younger self is about to meet his future wife, Chloe Hart.

...

In the laser quest zone, the Angels turn their powers on the Doctor and Amy – they quantum-lock our heroes, so they are unable to move if someone is looking at them, while the Angels, under strobe lights, are free to advance. Rory saves them, and finds that Angels are frightened by their own images, for fear of being caught in the glance of another Angel.

About two months later, the novel was officially commissioned, and one of the first things I had to was to write the back cover blurb (which meant that that part of the story, and the name of the love of Mark’s love, were figuratively set in stone). I also had to come up with ‘taglines’ for the front and quotes for the back (quotes from a book I hadn’t yet written, timey-wimey indeed)

Front Cover Tag:  

Whatever You Do... Don’t Look Behind You

It’s All Just A Little Bit Of History Repeating...

In The Wrong Place At The Wrong Time

In The Wrong Time At The Wrong Time

Blurb:

‘It’s not that you can’t change history. It’s that you really, really shouldn’t.’

‘What would you do, if you suddenly found yourself walking around in your own past?’

‘What would you do, if you suddenly found yourself walking around in 1991?’

‘The past is like a foreign country. Nice to visit, but you really wouldn’t want to live there.’