You're So Static

December will be plug time again!

Today saw the release of my latest Doctor Who audio adventure from Big Finish, Static. I’ve talked about it in the press release here, in issue 104 of Vortex here, and in Doctor Who Magazine, so I won’t go into detail here. Suffice it to say, the brief was to write a story as scary as The Chimes of Midnight, and having listened to the finished production, I’m very proud of my attempt. The cast are excellent – including the legendary David Graham, adding to my collection of City of Death actors, and the no less legendary Brian Prothero – it’s expertly directed by Jamie Anderson with excellent sound design and music by Joe Kraemer and Josh Arakelian. I am indebted to them all.

So please rush out and buy it here. The early notices have been extremely encouraging.

This Thursday, meanwhile, will see the release of the latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine. I have two bits in it – a second Blog of Doom which will hopefully tickle readers’ funny-bones, plus the Christmas Quiz. It was quite a challenge to put the quiz together – trying to come up with questions that are fun as well as taxing, that are hopefully gettable with a little lateral thinking and perseverance. As you might expect, every few hours I have been having little panics that I have got the questions or the answers wrong, going back and checking what I wrote to make sure I haven’t.

Anyway, it’s (inevitably) going to be different to the ones done by the guy before, I have a tough act to follow, but in the great Christmas words of the late John Lennon, I hope you have fun.

(There Goes) The Forgotten Man

Hooray! The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine has a thing by me in it! They’ve given me my own page!

The idea behind it (for which I cannot take credit) is to do blogs/diary entries/interviews with overlooked characters from Doctor Who. The guard who is knocked out, the bystander who says “They went that way”. They might be villains or monsters, or just a tramp who cycles into a ditch in surprise.

Basically, it’s doing the same sort of thing I did for the Daleks, the Cybermen and the Master in previous issues, which all proved fairly popular.

I hope people enjoy it. If they do, I’m happy to keep writing them. Of course, given that it is replacing a long-running feature which was curtailed prematurely (nothing to do with me and I’m not going to talk about it) I know that some people may come to it with their arms folded and an air of “What the hell is this, then? Is this trying to be funny?” I completely understand and appreciate that. I can only ask that people bear with it for a few months, because everything needs a little time to get into its groove. And it is only one page!

Backwards Traveller

There’s a new Essential Doctor Who Magazine special out now. Alongside many fascinating and fact-revealing articles there are two by me; one what happened to the idea of doing ‘sideways’ stories in the William Hartnell era, and one about the Blinovitch Limitation Effect.

Both articles were fun to do. The ‘sideways’ article involved detailed reading of some Doctor Who paperwork (printed in the magazine) and, I think, discusses a ‘sideways’ episode which has hitherto been overlooked, while the Blinovitch article also involved putting aside some received fan wisdoms and casting a fresh-eyed look at how the TV series has referred to this ‘law’ of time travel. It doesn’t work in quite the way I thought it did.

Most fun of all, for the ‘sideways’ article I came up with five stories extrapolated from the ideas in the production paperwork. It’s actually quite tricky to do – I’ve written a couple of other ‘sideways’ stories for the first Doctor, you can even read one of them here.

Anyway, it’s a great magazine, please rush out and buy.