Big Finish Day 2011 & Steven Moffat Interview

Peter Anghelides, signing way more than me, yesterday

Hello, sexface!  Enjoying the rain and wind?  Or are you somewhere on Earth where weather is actually season-appropriate?  (This question is rhetorical, obviously.  If I see weather-related comments I will go MENTAL.)

Had a good time at Big Finish Day yesterday.  The event happened at Barking's Abbey School and was a right old hoot for fans of the company's increasingly varied output.  There were various panels, podcast-recordings and signings.  Good lord, people even wanted my autograph, without me having to pay them money to come up to my table and pretend to know stuff that I'd written.  I signed a fair few sleeves of Big Finish's Doctor Who: The Demons Of Red Lodge & Other Stories, to which I contributed the title-story.  It was also nice to be presented with a few other items for which I'd written, like BBC audiobooks Doctor Who: The Gemini Contagion (craving more Matt Smith-era Who before the series resumes in the Autumn?  Buy it, damn you!) and The Sarah Jane Adventures: Deadly Download.

That lovely card!

The day's most surprising moment came when a Very Nice Man named Mick handed me a homemade card which combined elements of Stormhouse (buy your Edinburgh tickets here, I says atcha!) and Friday The 13th: Hate-Kill-Repeat (politely pester Warner Bros in the States for a re-issue!).  A really touching and thoughtful gesture and a big highlight of my day.

It was also great to catch up with various friends and meet a few new ones.  I got to meet Who novelist Una McCormack, Full Circle scripter Andrew Smith and Scott Andrews for the first time, for instance.  Lovely.  A really fun day, and I was glad to hear there are plans for it to happen again next year.

While I've got you: since this is a Doctor Who-related post, you might be interested to learn that I've added an in-depth Steven Moffat interview to this very site.  It's the online debut of an epic feature I wrote for Doctor Who Magazine in 2008, in which Lord Moffat reveals a great deal about his approach to writing, the love-hate madness of it and the psychology behind the whole creative thing.  You can find it here, after you've scrolled down past my Doctor Who CV.  Enjoy!