Author meets Book

...and it's love at first sight.

Volcano Day!

Well, book release day anyway.

Along with the three other excellent titles in the series Rose is now available as an ebook from the Obverse website, along with the other three launch titles. I'd recommend waiting for the very sexy print editions but if you want to save a few pennies/are impatient/don't want to fork out for postage run, don't walk, Obverse's way and throw your pounds and pennies at them. Throw them enough and they'll do a funny little dance too.

Plus! Details released of the first two books in the monthly schedule: Simon Bucher-Jones's study of Image of the Fendahl and Jonathan Dennis's take on Ghost Light.  The summaries for both of these should have you slavering in antici...





...pation and wanting to throw more moolah Obverse's way.

Don't let me keep you; please go and make some authors, the editor and the publisher happy little elves.  Thataway!

The Black Archive Blog: Why Rose?

With the launch of the first four Black Archive titles imminent a blog about my entry on Rose; to explain why I chose it and the thinking behind my approach.  None of the actual analysis though, you'll have to give the frankly sexy and beautiful Obverse Books your cash to get that...  

Originally I was thinking in terms of my favourite stories; a fair number of them being those that congregate around the top of the polls along with more idiosyncratic choices (I pretty much considered every McCoy era story aside from Time and the Rani).  I soon realised that it was the wrong angle to approach such a choice from; it’s not your affection for a story but how much you have to say about it that counts. In that sense a lot of the most interesting stories aren’t the most successfully realised but ones where ambition has clearly exceeded grasp.  So I scrapped my original train of thought and cast around for ideas.

The final choice of Rose was partly a question of timing and partly a question of what the story meant to me personally.  The first solicitations for The Black Archive series took place in early 2015 and the early part of the year naturally saw a lot of material about the tenth anniversary of the new series with Rose being a particular focus. Most articles swerved between nostalgic and adulatory but few really analysed just *why* Rose had been so successful.   It’s the start of the mythologizing of the RTD era; it’s distant enough for the details to blur and it to become part of the show’s history. Rightly so too, in Doctor Who production terms ten years is forever; there are vast differences between An Unearthly Child and The Time Warrior or The Horns of Nimon and Survival. We’ve had four season of RTD and five of Steven Moffat plus numerous specials since that first episode. Much of the analysis had a narrow focus too; on the episode itself rather than the wider context of the TV landscape or why creative decisions made by Russell T Davies and those involved in the production of the show ended up being spectacularly validated.  I was looking  to put what was achieved with Rose into the context of the show’s own history and the popular culture of 2005.

On the personal front the episode meant everything to me as a fan too.  It catapulted the show back to the heart of British popular culture to the point of it being a default reference when talking about SF; to add to the excitement the production of the show was based five minutes from where I was living at the time. I passed the studio every day on my way to and from work and even saw Eccleston and Piper rehearsing outdoors in late summer.  For a long-term Who fan the combined thrill of proximity and success was something it was difficult to put into words.  The pinch yourself wonder of having Who back; not only having it back but having it back on Saturday night and achieving ridiculous ratings.  I wanted to capture that thrill in the book; the essence of success that we’re all quite blasé about in the wake of the show’s subsequent success.  I said earlier that much of what’s interesting about Doctor Who are the heroic failures but Rose is an exception; in terms of what it sets out to achieve it’s unarguably the most successful episode in the show’s history.* Not only in terms of the initial impact in its own country but it’s the most frequently bought drama of the past 40 years for BBC Worldwide. More successful on that front than Eastenders, Howard’s Way, House of Cards, Dennis Potter’s most acclaimed works, State of Play, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Call the Midwife, Happy Valley, This Life, Casualty, Our Friends In the North… It appealed on a national and international basis.  What was fascinating about it was why it had such universal appeal; why the revival of a 42 year old series struck such a chord.

With that overarching theme of the rebirth of the series in mind I sent Phil a proposal for the structure of the book; what seemed the most fascinating aspects of the rebirth.    He agreed them with minor modifications and some excellent suggestions for further investigation.  In keeping with the tone of the new series I was aiming to blend my analysis with a relatively light tone; reflecting the story it examined.  

Fast forward to December and just before Christmas and after some excellent feedback from beta readers (thanks, in particular to Geoff Wessel for a couple of excellent points), a some thoughtful notes from the editor which added clarity to certain areas, depth to others and generally tightened the manuscript it was ready to be sent to the publisher.  Fast forward another couple of months and you’ll see an author bouncing happily up and down after having seen the gorgeous cover artwork from Blair Bidmead and Cody Schell and having read through the beautifully put together ebook.

At the time of writing the first four volumes in the Black Archive series are at the printers and on target for their early March release date.  It’s been a privilege to be part of the launch of a series I’d be delighted to read even if I wasn’t involved; quite aside from my own title I've read an early draft of Dark Water/Death in Heaven (a breathtakingly fine set of essays) and I can’t wait to read The Massacre and The Ambassadors of Death both for the stories chosen and the authors.  Similarly the remainder of the year promises a strong selection of writers and stories which I’ll be pre-ordering. You can give Obverse your money for the first four titles here,

Now all that’s left is the always nervous wait to see what everyone makes of it.  Time to see if fingernails can be gnawed down to the bone then…

* Not necessarily in terms of the actual episode but in successfully relaunching Doctor Who.  There's a decade's worth of TV, spin-offs and foreign sales on my side here.

The Black Archive Is Almost Open...

Well here's a thing.  A rather beautiful thing at that...

In case you're one of those souls whose eyesight is going due to decades spent staring at TVs or monitors it's the rather fabulous cover for the first of the Black Archive series the first four of which are released next month but available for pre-order from the modestly magnificent Obverse Books either on its own or as part of a bundle of the first four in the series.. Obviously I'd be obsequiously grateful to anyone good enough to but the book but I thoroughly recommend buying all four. 

The cover's a collaborative effort from the insanely talented pairing of Blair Bidmead and Cody Schell and you can see this and the three other spectacular covers on the Black Archive Facebook page or here. I'd say I'm absolutely delighted with it but that might be considered a ridiculous degree of understatement.  It's currently the wallpaper on my phone and I'm starting to consider texts and notifications which stop me admiring it in a near-hypnotic trance rude. 

I'll blog about this in more detail closer to the release but in the meantime keep an eye out for further announcements on the above Facebook link and feel free to get very excited at how damn fine this series is going to be.

The Joy of Having Written

It's just over 24 hours since I completed the first draft of the Black Archive for Rose and I sent it to the editor.  That's my first solo book off to the editor I have a little indie champagne* to celebrate and...

...got back to that there writing today, a ghostly short story for a friend.

That's how proper writers roll isn't it?


* Jack 'n' coke

The Black Archive is opening...

So this is an upcoming thing...

Phil Purser-Hallard, one of the smartest people I have the pleasure of knowing, came up with a simple but brilliant idea for a range of books; in-depth studies of single Doctor Who stories by a bunch of talented writers with interesting things to say. I've got the pleasure of being included in the first batch of books with a piece on the episode that launched Doctor Who back to the heart of popular culture.  Think the Doctor Who equivalent of the excellent 33 1/3 books.

These are going to be magnificent.  Further details here and whilst you're there you really should open your virtual wallet for a few of Obverse's other fine books.

And So The End Is Near... - The Writers Tale: The Final Chapter by Russell T Davies and Benjamin Cook

Yeah, I've noticed a theme with the stuff I've been reviewing lately too. I have been reading other stuff, honest guv.

The original Writer's Tale rendered whole forest's worth of books redundant - there was now no need for any biography of Russell T Davies, because it gave you more of an insight into the man and his methods of work than any simple recounting of facts could. No need for any 'making of' Doctor Who books, it was everything you needed to know about how an episode journeyed from the inside of Russell T's head to several million TV screens (unless you want the dull technical ins and outs rather than the really interesting stuff). And it pretty much renders most books about scriptwriting redundant at a stroke, being a practical guide in producing quality television scripts under extreme pressure of time and budget. It wasn't 'this is how to write', it was 'this is how I write, learn what you may'. And it was utterly compelling, despite it being over 500 large format pages I finished it in around a day and a half. Food and sleep? There's another thing you could learn from the book, they aren't particularly important. Although coffee is.

Normally I wouldn't have countenanced buying the paperback edition, but as with most of the product relating to Doctor Who in the last five years there's an emphasis on making it essential. Sure, you might lose the script pages from the material in the original Writer's Tale, but it's a small sacrifice to pay (plus they're on the Writer's Tale website anyway). What you get in return is around three hundred extra pages about the making of the Last Days of Tennant, watching how the specials came together. It largely lacks the frantic charge of the first half, primarily because there's far less Doctor Who to produce (and yet Davies still misses a Kylie concert in Paris!), but Cook and Davies' conversation is still never less than fascinating. The highlight is probably Davies reminiscing about his parents and childhood in Swansea, and how they inspired a Booker Prize winning novel. It's sentimental, wistful and touching without being sepia tinted and, as ever with Davies' writing, there's beautiful and unexpected observations. And for those more obsessed with Doctor Who content there's Cook persuading Davies to go back to watch Rose after production's wrapped on The End of Time. Davies' views on his own work are often cutting but always positive.

As it is, this stands as a perfect epitaph to the Russell T Davies era of Doctor Who - a testament to the hard work he and the production team put in. It's almost a shame that there'll be no more Rusell T Davies Who, if only because it's we won't get another of these books to lay out the writing process on a modern TV show in intimate detail. The book finishes with the correspondents now separated by the width of an ocean and a continent, and an unknown (or at least undetailed) future for the writer. It's a reminder that while certain tales finish, real life doesn't stop and there's more of this particular tale to be written. Unfortunately it's not likely to be documented, which is a shame as the tale's got a lot more mileage in it yet. Or maybe Davies is wise enough to take advantage of the old showbiz adage to leave them wanting more.