Big Finish Limbo #2: The Devil is in the Detail

Written by The Mara

Click here for Big Finish Limbo #1

There is a chasm between intention and actuality. I’m sure readers who intended to enter the competition and didn’t end up doing so, know this very well. Although I had every intention of writing a short story for the competition, and entering it, this presumes I had an idea worth writing up and also happy with the final draft.

Morbius started writing three different stories before he hit on the one that worked. And there were other concepts that didn’t make it to the writing stage because he could already foresee complications. These were usually the result of his ideas being too complex for such a short word count (2500 words – more on that in the next entry). Mine came together a lot more easily than that.

When I started writing my story I did not have blogging the experience in mind, so the actual steps of creation are a bit fuzzy now. What I am definite about is that I had only one idea. I wrote it up. Yet I can piece some of the earlier steps together relatively easily, and a lot of it comes down to me being strategic.

The first thing I knew is that I had to come up with a story that would be different to other entries (although originality is overrated – a well-written story will appear fresh, whereas a collection of new ideas will seem dull if written poorly). It also needed to talk to a modern audience, have a theme greater than itself. It had to fit with the rest of Big Finish’s output. There were two pivotal points to achieving these things; how was I going to approach the competition brief, and what Doctor was I going to use?

Morbius and I discussed the brief first. The premise of each story needed to work from "How the Doctor changed my life". We decided that the use of the determiner ‘my’ would probably lead to a lot of first person narratives in the vein of ‘Love and Monsters’. Both of us like that story, so that wasn’t why we wanted to avoid that style – it was simply that we could see a lot of other entries written like that, as well as the fact that Big Finish work, while it does experiment in narrative style and structure, generally does not come from this perspective. We could also see people taking the brief too literally and writing a piece based on themselves, which we also decided was a no-no. We also decided that we had to be quite creative with the brief as the premise could be applied to every Doctor Who story – he does change people’s lives.

So what could we add that would make this premise a new force rather than a run of the mill story? Me being the morbid soul that I am, eventually picked on the Doctor changing someone’s death. This was not fixed in stone – if I had come up with a different idea that would not fit I would have happily discarded the premise, as it isn’t that brilliant, but it did hold up with my other choices.

The choice of Doctor was easy. The third Doctor is my favourite, and strategically also made sense. In all of the BBC, Big Finish and Virgin output the third Doctor is underrepresented. On the Big Finish site they had example short stories, and none of them came from the third Doctor. If we now take the 110 entries mentioned on Outpost Gallifrey as a representative sample of the 1072 submissions, it would appear that this strategy was not as successful as I thought it would be; there are less submissions for the fifth Doctor, and about the same amount for the first and second incarnations.

Having picked the third Doctor, a lot of things fell into place. I wanted the story earthbound; the short word count means there’s no real space to indulge in world or culture building, and an earthbound story suits the third Doctor just fine. This Doctor has always had stories that reflect on the ‘bigger issues’ in society, and given my political bent, it was quite clear I could write something that would fit both the Doctor and my own need for a social message.

I toyed briefly with global warming, but quite frankly it sucks as a narrative device. That’s probably why it has had little impact on our collective psyche even though we’ve known about it since the days of Kit Pedler. I also toyed with heavy metal poisoning of fish, and the dumping of industrial and nuclear waste in the ocean, both being contemporary with the Pertwee era, and still having resonance with today. But these did not really grab me. I decided to focus on the setting instead, and see if that generated any plot ideas.

I’m pretty pleased with the setting I picked. I am pretty sure, after questioning some of my walking encyclopaedic friends, that it is one that has not been seen in professional Doctor Who output before. Go me. So excuse me for keeping it fairly close to my chest – I may want to use it again. I feel safe enough to drop a hint though; Morbius and I have always discussed the merits of the claustrophobic space and inherent value of a small cast in creating a tension-laden narrative.

At any rate, with the 3rd Doctor, a claustrophobic space, me wanting an earthbound story in the 1970s (although again, I could have moved it if it hadn’t worked as well as it did), and a change of death, I picked the 3rd Doctor favourite of ‘radiation’ as my form of social commentary. I must have still had poisoned fish on my mind, although I should also acknowledge how prominent the Litvinenko Polonium-210 poisoning case was at the time.

So about two weeks into December I am ready to start writing. So I start up the PC, open OpenOffice Writer, crack my knuckles and look at the fresh, unlimited possibilities offered by that big blank rectangle on my monitor…
And can’t write a single word.

My story is set in the real past, and I’m about to write about real issues. I need this story to hang together both historically and scientifically. There is no point writing it all just to find out it is fundamentally flawed - especially if I got it to the point of being publish-worthy.

Damn! After all that strategy, now I had research to do.

Coming soon – Big Finish Limbo #3: The murky land of Wikipedia.

The Saxon Files # 6

Written by Mr Saxon

Oh dear, poor old Britney. Did she hear the news that RTD wanted to fly out to America with the Doctor Who crew just to film celebs like her before or after she shaved all her hair off?

Perhaps the news tipped her over the edge. Or... and I admit I haven't checked the arse-achingly pathetic spoiler section on the OG Forum for this kind of rumour, could it just be part of the build up to hearing that she is going to play the Auton Qwween in the not yet confirmed series 4?

Yours Faithfully,

Master No. Six - Oh no what a giveaway!

Displacement

Sit back, relax and enjoy.

I saw a book in a shop this week all about thinking differently and therefore making your life more successful, less stressful and generally better. The basic point was that people who make a difference to the World start first by making a difference to their own lives. It's really simple too: When they have a good idea they put it into action despite it being daunting. Some people make a huge difference to their own lives without impacting on the World as well which is great too. Then there's us - we like an easy life.

We make no difference to anyone. Not even ourselves.

If you're a committed (not necessarily institutionalised) Who fan the chances are that you will watch every Who story available more than once, read about the programme regularly and spend time discussing it with fellow fruitloops. You might even go to the length of having your own blog and enjoy endlessly correcting your friends by telling them "it's not a blog - it's a site" despite reality.

We're talking years of lives - you don't win them back. There's no 10p when you redeem the bottle and it doesn't work like the Co-Op dividend either. The time is lost. Forever. Gone. Wasted. And you don't have the bottle anymore anyway.

What has begun to worry me more than anything else is that most fans I know have a secondary waste of time, some even more. Perhaps you'll watch Life on Mars, Lost, 24 or perhaps you're gonna have a weekend with that great Bod DVD. I stayed up into the early hours of this morning watching motor racing from America on the internet. My eyes hurt and on the whole it was dull. But I know exactly why I did it.

I tell people I enjoy it. The Life on Mars people tell me they watch it cause they enjoy it, comic fans read comics because they enjoy them. But the truth is they can all be used as displacement activities.

The motor racing was enjoyable because it stopped me from doing the hoovering, tidying my room and all the other things that I tell myself are outlawed on a Friday night. In short, it stopped me from organising my life and taking control. That is the peril of displacement activity.

I read an article by the environmental campaigner George Monbiot this week and he made a similar point regarding conspiracy theorists after he was attacked for saying he did not believe that there was a 9/11 conspiracy. The main thrust of his argument was that conspiracy theories are the political equivalent of displacement activity. Rather than getting involved with real issues and getting out and campaigning, conspiracy nuts can get their kicks safe at home in the knowledge that nobody can ever enter an informed debate with them. They don't leave the house to investigate their claims or campaign for changes. If anything, they just hamper real causes trying to get on the political agenda by taking up precious newsprint.

Reading comics all night, eating fast food, watching every surviving episode of Up Pompeii in one sitting might keep people happy for hours but waste a lifetime. That novel you could have written, that invention you're waiting for somebody else to patent, that boyfriend waiting to discover he's yours. It's all out there but you have to search it out and get it while you can.

[ooh! Hang on "Song for Ten" has just come on - I'll be back in 3 minutes and 29 seconds.]

Perhaps you don't want to achieve anything: professionally, personally, whatever. Fine but at least be man or woman enough to admit to yourself that you waste nearly every moment of your life filling it with Dr Who, Battlestar Gallactica, anything with a bloody spaceship in it, comics, football (come on the Imps!), beer, soaps. Don't use 'enjoyment' as an excuse not to join the human race.

There's another way which, in the long term, might lead to greater satisfaction and more enjoyment.

Give up most of the time you spend on displacement: get a girlfriend, cook a new dish, walk in the countryside during the rain, interact with humanity a bit more, ditch those blogs you sad git. Just get off your fat ass, Jon and do something with your life.

Oh sod it.

The Saxon Files # 5

Written by Mr Saxon

Below are a couple of photos of recent filming in Cardiff - thanks to the Student of Life.
And yes, that bottom pic has The Doctor, Martha and Jack, together.
Looks like this Saxon thing might be prominent - who knows. It could just be a load of old tosh.

Big Finish Limbo #1: In the beginning there was the Word.

Written by The Mara

The people who entered the recent Big Finish short story competition have entered a time of limbo while we all wait for the judges to announce the winner – and the 1071 also-rans. "Limbo" was the term in Roman Catholic theology given to the region between hell or heaven serving as the abode after death of unbaptised infants and the righteous who died before the coming of Christ. Now, while some entrants may feel strung up between heaven and hell, given that the RC church is currently debating whether or not to do away with the concept of limbo altogether, we would be better to take on a more secular definition of the word. According to the speedy, if not terribly brilliant, dictionary.com, definition 3: "an intermediate, transitional, or midway state or place", is far more appropriate.

We’ve all been there. Waiting for exam results, confirmation that we got "the job", the agonising seconds while we wait for someone we’ve asked on a date to say ‘yes’... or ‘no’. Even City boys experience it during the time between the annual round of bonuses being announced, and finding out that theirs is enough to support a developing-world village for a decade. An even more relevant example to this blog would be all the times Doctor Who has been off the air; 1985, 1989 – 1996, 1996 -2005, the seasonal breaks, the rest of the week…

During limbo we need something to pass the time. Rather than take up smoking, I seized the Keeper’s suggestion of writing a few pieces about my individual experiences during the competition as a way of doing just that.

So consider the last 271 words as just the preamble for a collection of musings on the entire competition process. 291.

In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was ‘competition’. It was closely followed by the words ‘Doctor’, ‘Who’, ‘writing’, ‘short’, ‘story’ and ‘published’. These divine words were uttered by a small-time god. From now on this minor deity will be known as "Morbius". I listened unto Morbius and said, ‘yea verily unto which URL shall I venture forth?’ And Morbius listened unto me and gave his wisdom of the URL and proclaimed; ‘go forth and create!’

It is the strength of the Doctor Who community and their use of word of mouth that has led to Big Finish being inundated with entries. I would never have known of the competition had it not been for Morbius informing me of it. He also would not have known of it without someone else mentioning it to him.

Of course the 1072 submissions (originally 1073, but we have since had an entrant own up to previously published paid fiction work) are just from those who managed to complete and chose to enter. Add a guesstimate of how many people wanted to enter but didn’t, and we end up with an impressive number touched by this competition.

The enthusiasm for the competition was highly visible in face-to-face meets and on fora like Outpost Gallifrey. Conversations about entry details, writing trials and tribulations, open declarations of support and encouragement were sparked by the competition and still continue through this limbo period.

Ultimately this competition has served as a catalyst for a level of enthusiasm, support and encouragement that stands as Testament to the strength of the Doctor Who community at its best.

But now I’ve jumped too far in the future. Also, warm n’ fuzzies don’t make for brilliant blogging; there needs to be more confession and Hail Marys, more ‘insight’ to keep the voyeurs of blog-land happy.

When Morbius told me about the competition, there was never any doubt that I’d write an entry. This comes down to the simple conceit that I do consider myself as a writer. I’m very much the amateur, which is a good thing given the rules for the competition, but I do have a bit of a writing résumé. I’ve had a short story printed in a county English teachers’ journal, a poem printed in a University collection, articles for street press and university rags, and my crowning glory, a non-fiction chapter in a collected work where I got to be printed alongside such luminaries as Francis Bacon, Aristotle, Goethe, Chaucer and Shakespeare… but none of these exploits received remuneration.

While I am conceited enough to think I have a better than average chance of winning, this was not my main motivation for writing. I primarily saw the competition as a writing challenge. Where other people may be driven by the impulse to win, or have a story they felt had to be told in the Whoniverse, or saw this competition as a way of legitimising their fan-fiction output, or did not consider any of these things and just thought writing an entry would be fun, I saw this as a structured method to hone my skills. I had never written any Doctor Who fiction before this short story. In fact, I never wrote any science fiction either; my usual areas of fiction writing are fantasy, and things that can be amorphously grouped under ‘modern fiction’. So the tingle of doing something new, added to the tingle of possible publication and ‘winning’, meant that before I even put finger to keyboard I was already giddy with excitement… and hassling the rest of my fandom associates to discover who else was writing and thus being conferred the weird status of both competitor and comrade.

So! I sat down at my keyboard, after discovering three comrade-competitors, after reading the rules and –

In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was ‘Hell!’ It was closely followed by other words, and became a question; ‘What the hell do I write?’

Coming soon – Big Finish Limbo #2: The Devil is in the Detail.

Poll # 2

If you had a choice of either sitting down to a new episode of Sarah Jane or a new episode of Torchwood it seems that a mega 77.8 % of you would watch The Sarah Jane Adventures live.

Love & Croydon - A Pub Crawl

Many thanks to all those lonely hearts who took part in the pub crawl yesterday. I don't think a single one of us found love but it wasn't due to the lack of trying - well no more than normal anyway.

For the record: 8 people strutted their stuff and a mega 1 came from Croydon (Me!)

Poll Results # 1

When do you want the new series of Dr Who to be broadcast?

A resounding and massive 100% said the sooner the better. March 24th has been touted as a possible air date for several weeks and every last one of you voted for that date.

The near traditional Easter Saturday launch date is moribund as far as you seem to be concerned.

A Croydon Massive of 10 people took part in the vote

My First Time # 1

Name: The Mara
Gender: ♀
First Story: Talons of Weng Chiang
Approximate Date: September 1996.
Age: As old as nightmares, or you can do the math yourself.

When the Keeper asked if I would set the ball rolling on submitting guilty confessions of 'My First Time', I have to admit that I had to make sure that, yes, he was talking about losing my Doctor Who virginity and not that other kind. Yet for me there is a clear connection between the two concepts.

Of course for many of you the analogy between sex and Doctor Who does not hold - given you can clearly remember that your first time was at the age of six or seven, if it were sex we were talking about we'd have to have called in Social Services because your parents were clearly abusing you or letting you be abused.

Then again, my mother obviously considered Doctor Who some form of child abuse, as it was banned in my house. She was, and still is, the type of mother who only allowed soft drink and chocolate on your birthday, bought educational presents, and sent you off to school with brown bread sandwiches with grated cheese and sultanas in it. So my early experiences of Doctor Who are exactly like my early experiences of sex; both were reduced in my existence to occasional glances at books or television on the topic, but never knowing what either was really about. I knew there was a Timelord that changed shape and there was a police box involved. I knew that the 'scream' at the beginning of the end credits during the Tom Baker era made me jump, and I have a vague recollection of a yellow vintage car on the edge of a mound of gravel. But I never saw a complete episode, let alone a complete story.

It is probably telling that I lost my Doctor Who virginity a good four years after that other sort. And it still involved sex. Like a social disease, I had Doctor Who 'passed on' to me by my boyfriend. Like any social disease, there was a spectrum of ways he could approach the knowledge of him being a carrier; with the two extremes being that he could have told me at the very beginning and run the risk that I might turn around and say 'I'm sorry, I just don't think my feelings for you are strong enough to overcome the fact you're infected with Doctor Who', or he could have been one of those ones who kept his disease completely hidden. Watch the new BBC remake of Dracula, if you need an example for why that is always a bad idea.

In the end it was somewhere in the middle. He told me early on that he ‘liked Doctor Who'. The evidence that this was an understatement was the complete VHS collection with hand typed labels and extant Target novelisation collection in his bedroom. Oh, and the porcelain TARDIS moneybox and Dapol figurines of the 7th Doctor and a Cyberman. I always stuck these in compromising positions and, I found out later to my mortification, were also always tidied up by his mother.

But the time-coded copies of ‘The Ice Warriors’ were turned off as soon as I arrived. Doctor Who had been partitioned off; it was present, but never really talked about. Until I pressed him about it and he eventually relented, starting my education with the classic of Doctor Who 'The Talons of Weng Chiang'.

Bad Move.

Losing one's virginity often involves a lot of confusion, surprise, disappointment and fear. I was confused by the simultaneous slowness and unfathomable plotting, surprised when I was shown the silly rat (and yes, the sex analogy works very well here), disappointed in that this was supposed to be the highlight of Doctor Who, and fearful that a major part of my partner's life was something I was never going to understand. Like first time sex where expectations have been built up too high, Talons was an utter let down.

But just like sex, one moves past the first time, knowing that it just has to get better. And Doctor Who did get better for me, although not through watching 'classics' or the boyfriend’s personal favourites. For those of you who watched Doctor Who when it was on, even if you did not begin on 23rd November 1963, you did watch stories pretty much in order until you got hooked and decided to go looking for more fixes (like the sex addicts you are). There is a reason this works, and jumping to random stories does not.

So my advice to the experienced that wish to embark on deflowering Old Series Doctor Who virgins of an adult age is to start slow and work with missionary for a while before trying the seventh position of the Perfumed Garden. Use ‘Rose’ and the rest of the new series as foreplay. When the time is right to move to the next base, pick an Old Series story with a natural introductory bit. Start with colour, because it's 'safer' than black and white. In other words, start with ‘Spearhead From Space’.

Saturday 10th February - Love & Croydon Pub Crawl

The next event will be a pub crawl in Croydon in anticipation of Valentine's Day. Kicking off at 4pm in The George on George Street we will crawl from 6pm.

Whether you've found love or you're still searching, a walk around Croydon on a Saturday night might put things in perspective!

Time to Reappraise Melanie Bush

Written by The Revisionist

Rose Tyler sets the standards when it comes to Dr Who companions. What more could a character like The Doctor need? She was willing to travel universe, fight danger, save planets, and teach The Doctor a few tricks along the way.

Looking at some fan favorites they now appear to fall short of what the Doctor needs. There are companions who spent most of their time in the TARDIS whinging, moaning and making a thorough pain of themselves. I can only assume that as each of them was pretty good looking The Doctor kept them around for reasons other than universal adventure. Why else would he put with Tegan?

But the worst companion in the history of Who is Peri. She hated everywhere she went, complained incessantly and then for reasons never fully explained left The Doctor to marry some right royal thug. Women.

The Doctor soon got a new one though and she's right up there with the best. Crazily, Mel Bush as played by Bonnie Langford is right down there in the mind of all good fans. The conventional wisdom is that she was awful (both actress and character) but it's time to take a look at the evidence.

Langford's performance is very 'theatre' - she projects her voice as if she didn't realise that the BBC had microphones in the mid 1980s. When she screams the effect is similar to being in a microwave. She cooks from the inside and gradually gets to the skin by which time you've had it. However, I recommend taking a close look at her performances because the character is superb.

Mel is there for adventure, the thrill of the universe and everything she can get out of the experience. When we first meet her she sets the pace of the story, much like Rose in many of her adventures. There's been a murder and The Doctor is quite interested in unravelling the plot but it's Mel who leads the investigation. She's fantastic.

The main problem for the character is she's in the lowest period of Dr Who's history where true classics can't be found and perhaps that's a reason for her reputation as being a poor companion. It's unfounded and I think the time has come to view her stories again considering what kind of a person The Doctor would want to have on board the TARDIS.

You can have years of moaning from a serial bore like Peri or you can embrace the universe with Melanie Bush and have fun no matter what the danger. Anyone for a carrot juice?