2011: How It Was For Me, Darling

Now, then.  Having tidied and sorted my office, which had rather begun to take on a life of its own, I’m in a good position to sit down and sum up my 2011 for you.  If you like.  (Your continued reading of these sentences and paragraphs will be taken to signify interest in this proposition.  Possibly in a court of law.)

Globally, 2011 was clearly an extraordinary year of unrest, whether natural or social.  You'll be relieved to hear I won't be writing an incisive essay about these seismic worldly events: this is purely about my year in the altogether more comforting world of fiction.  And on that front, 2011 was great.  Sure, there was some bad stuff, but there always is - and this year, that stuff was solely confined to utterly tedious business matters which almost certainly won't interest you.

Smug pointing at London's Leicester Squar Empire cinema

STORMHOUSE

My debut feature film, Stormhouse, which I wrote and executive-produced, certainly made the most of 2011.  We threw a BAFTA test-screening, combined with a cast-and-crew screening, which very much taught me the value of test-screenings.  We made some really significant changes to the film, based on our audience's questions afterwards, which improved it tenfold.  Director Dan Turner created a whole new edit and it was good to spend a day with him at Elstree Studios, helping to tweak and overview what we had.  That's another thing I learned: removing even so much as a single frame in a horror movie's 'jump' scene can have a dramatic effect.  It was also a valuable lesson in terms of how much you can cut out of a film without losing the basics you need.

The finished film played festivals around the UK and indeed world.  We couldn’t have had a better world premiere, playing two nights at the Edinburgh International Film Festival.  I'll be forever grateful to Edinburgh's fine organisers for approaching us, having seen a Berlin screening of Stormhouse, to ask whether they could screen the film.  Oh yes, that was a good day. 

Over the August Bank Holiday weekend, we played the UK's biggest and best horror festival, the Film4 FrightFest at London's Leicester Square Empire, which was a real honour too.  Amazing stuff.  After that, Stormhouse was screened at the Birmingham Comic Con, the Chichester International Film Festival (as part of a Best Of FrightFest bill - honour upon honour!) and finally Los Angeles' excellent Screamfest - an event which I'd attended twice before, but typically couldn't make this year.

Stormhouse is now scheduled for a Lionsgate DVD release on February 7, 2012.  Very exciting - as is the trailer which Lionsgate cut together, which is definitely one of my favourite things of the year:

A UK release will also happen in 2012 - we're just waiting to hear when the distributor plans to release.  And of course, it will be issued in other territories too.  More news to come.

DOCTOR WHO

Wonderful 'classic DVD' mock-up of The Gemini Contagion

I had great fun in Whosville this year, getting to write for the Eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith) three times.  Firstly, for a Doctor Who Adventures comic story called Earworm (which you can read in its entirety by clicking the Comics tab at the top of this very page), also featuring TV companions Amy and Rory.  I was really happy with how that one turned out and it seemed to be received well.

Next came a BBC audiobook, Doctor Who: The Gemini Contagion.  Read by the excellent Meera Syal, The Gemini Contagion was a whole load of fun to write, concerning a futuristic anti-viral handwash which turns out to contain a virus (oh, good lord, the irony!) which overloads the language centres of the brain.  That one also featured Amy, who's obviously great to write for.

My third Eleventh Doctor Thing this year was a piece of fiction for the BBC's Brilliant Book Of Doctor Who 2012.  I had an irresistible brief from editor Clayton Hickman - fill in the blanks between TV episodes The Impossible Astronaut and Day Of The Moon!  Surely you can't ask for more fun than that.  I had a brilliant time, writing an intro from the Doctor, then Amy, Rory and River Song's diary entries as they traipse around a late-'60s USA, feeling the presence of an unseen enemy, while the tally-marks on their limbs mysteriously multiplied...

The Brilliant Book gave me another fun highlight of the year: appearing among the book's various authors, to sign at London's Forbidden Planet venue.  The signing, and drinks after, were as much fun as you'd expect.  And I've noticed recently that an attendee uploaded their brief video of the event to the YouTubes.  Here it is:



I've had a couple of Doctor Who releases via Big Finish in 2011.  My short Fifth Doctor audio story The Lions Of Trafalgar featured on the company's Doctor Who: Short Trips Vol IV collection (a lovely reading by Peter Davison); and my full-cast Eighth Doctor four-parter Doctor Who: Army Of Death was released in December 2011, starring Paul McGann, Julie Cox, David Harewood, Carolyn Pickles, Eva Pope, Mitch Benn... a really nice cast, that.  I received my copies of the Army Of Death CD just before Christmas and haven't had a chance to spin them yet, but I'm hearing good things.

It was also announced this year that 2012 will see the release of Big Finish's Doctor Who - UNIT: Dominion.  This is a four-hour Seventh Doctor mini series which I've written with the splendid Nicholas Briggs - a hoot!

OTHER WORLDS

Among all the Doctor Who and Stormhouse stuff, I was toiling away on projects of my own, or those brought to me by other people.

I script-edited The Man Inside, the film which Dan Turner shot in Newcastle this Summer, starring Ashley 'Bashy' Thomas, Peter Mullan, Michelle Ryan, David Harewood, Jason Maza and other fine thespians.  That one should be out in 2012 and it was nice to be involved with a non-horror feature project.

I was delighted to be invited to quack at the Cambridge School Of Art and the London Screenwriters' Festival 2011 this year.  Felt like those events went well.  I also signed various audiobooks at the Big Finish Day in Barking, where one of my favourite things of the year happened - a guy called Mick handed me a homemade card, which visually gathered together a couple of different things I'd worked on.  You can see the card here, below right.  It was, and remains, so touching - the idea that someone might actually be aware of, or even care about, your work as a whole.  Thanks, Mick - and Happy New Year!

I wrote the short prose story The Screams Next Door for charity flash fiction e-anthology Voices From The Past, which you can still buy here at the mad prices of £0.99 or £2.99.  I also wrote the seven-page comic story Consumed for the zombie anthology Dead Roots (site here), which I'm very much looking forward to seeing brought to life on the page.  Oh, and I published my first non-fiction ebook, How To Interview Doctor Who, Ozzy Osbourne And Everyone Else, which draws on my journalistic past to tell readers everything I know about interviewing people.

Mick's splendid card

2011 has been my first year with an agent, the excellent Matthew Dench at The Dench Arnold Agency, and we've been building up various specs for film and TV.  One handy thing an agent can do, is 'package' you together with other people under his agency roof.  Matthew did that during 2011 - a welcome move which will hopefully result in a new feature film during 2012/13.  I now have three or four feature scripts in various stages of development now, so will continue to write/push those next year.  Needless to say, I'll also be looking to make my way into TV - things seem to be moving in that department, which is encouraging.

While Twitter continues to be the place where I spend most of my social media time, it feels like I've blogged more during 2011 than I have in the last couple of years.  Why, I even wrote posts across five consecutive days!  The most-read post here, over the last 12 months, was The Magic Of Draft Zero, which seemed to strike some kind of chord, while the one which generated the most comments and discussion, was the recent Eight Ways To Annoy People Whose Help You Want.

While I very much intend to be even more focused on the all-important writing during 2012, I'll try to keep up the bloggery-pokery.  Hope you'll join me!  I also hope you've had a tremendous Christmas and will have a magnificent New Year.

If you're a writer, what is your writing-related resolution for 2012?  Please tell us all in the Comments below.  (My resolution will be stricter time management.  In particular, not checking e-mail every ten minutes and definitely not replying to e-mail straight away.  That way lies distraction and sheer, screeching, wall-eyed madness.)

And now you've told us all about your resolution, why not check out my script-mates' own end-of-year posts, hmmm?  Good DAY to you.

James Moran: 2011 In Words & Pictures

Phill Barron: 2011

Dan Turner: 2011, Review Of The Year

David Bishop: My Report Card For 2011, Part One and Part Two

William Gallagher: So Where Was I?

Ken Armstrong: Happy New Microcosm

Helen Smith: Lovely Things, 2011
                                            
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My Amazon-acclaimed ebook How To Interview Doctor Who, Ozzy Osbourne And Everyone Else is out now on Amazon UK, Amazon US and Amazon.de.  You can also get a Triple Pack of files (PDF, ePub, Kindle/mobi) direct from me.  Full details here, you splendid individual.

Three Joyously Christmassy Doctor Who Events

JOYOUSLY CHRISTMASSY DOCTOR WHO EVENT # 1

Mark Gatiss, Terry Burnett and Ralph Montagu at the BFI

Until yesterday, there were 108 Doctor Who episodes missing from the BBC's archives.  Now there are 106, thanks to a brilliantly surprising event at the London BFI.

The BFI annually shows a Missing Believed Wiped programme, which presents various footage which has been pulled from the jaws of obscurity over the previous year (see, the BBC didn't always safely archive everything - they didn't know video and DVD were going to happen).  This year, I was tipped off that I really might want to go along, which made my legendary Spider senses tingle.

Plenty of Doctor Who-related folk were present in the NFT1 theatre (nothing suspicious about that at all, then), as we sat down to watch a mixed bag of footage which might have vanished forever, were it not for the efforts of historians like The Radio Times' Head of Heritage Ralph Montagu, Missing Believed Wiped presenter Dick Fiddy and many more.  We saw Dennis Potter's 1966 TV play Emergency Ward 9, some amusing footage of the Mumford Puppets (including one playing the piano while smoking a cigarette) and a great Peter Cook/Dudley Moore sketch which memorably saw Cook almost corpse at one point.

All good fun, of course, but anticipation was growing.  Doctor Who-loving corners of the internet had swollen like a storm about to break.  It's truly amazing that the news didn't burst forth days before the event, but no - Who/Sherlock writer and actor Mark Gatiss stood up to inform us that two previously MIA episodes of 60s Doctor Who had been rediscovered!  We then saw the first five-or-so minutes of Galaxy Four: Air Lock (1965) and Part Two of The Underwater Menace (1967) in its entirety.

What a joy it was.  Sure, these are not the most highly regarded Doctor Who stories of all time, but it's amazing to have them back.  It's great to see things like the Rill creature in Galaxy Four, which has hitherto had to exist purely in most of our imaginations.  Most of all, though, it struck me that it's magical (or "a Christmas miracle" as Gatiss later put it) to regain the performances of William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton.  The latter is especially brilliant in this 'new' episode - the moment when he brands Professor Zaroff "mad as a hatter" is one which really has to be seen to be fully appreciated.

The last time a Doctor Who episode was recovered was in 2004 - a fact which led some fans' hope to slowly ebb as time passed since.  This time, two episodes were discovered by the same man - retired Southampton broadcast engineer Terry Burnett, who ironically worked for ITV.  Terry has been oblivious that the episodes were officially missing and seemed genuinely delighted to bring them to the world's attention.  By luck, he sat next to me during the episodes' screening, and it was great to personally thank him afterwards.  Tremendous.  And here's a video report by Ed Stradling, about the whole thing:



JOYOUSLY CHRISTMASSY DOCTOR WHO EVENT # 2

That Brilliant Book Of Doctor Who signing I mentioned in the last post?  It went splendidly well.  It took place on November 30 at London's excellent Forbidden Planet store.  Pretty much all the authors and creatives who contributed to the book were there, including me.  We all sat along a lengthy table, signed books like our lives depended on it, cursed our overly complex signatures, and felt sorry for the people queuing outside in the cold.  It looked rather like this (photo by @TheGazulator):

Gary Russell (far left), Paul Lang, David Llewelyn, Me, David Bailey,
James Goss, Benjamin Cook and his amazing HAIR OF SATAN

Just out of shot are all manner of wonderful people, including Mark Gatiss (gets everywhere, that bloke), Book editor Clayton Hickman and Doctor Who showrunner himself Steven Moffat.  I grabbed a picture of them myself here:

And here's the wonderfully inevitable but very welcome fez which we scribbled on:

A fine time was had by all signers, and hopefully by signees.  Hello, and thanks, to everyone who came along to the event.  Great to meet you all.  Here's another video - this time of Steven being interviewed mere feet away from our table and speaking at an admirable 666mph:



JOYOUSLY CHRISTMASSY DOCTOR EVENT # 3

Why, it's only the release of my Doctor Who audio play, Army Of Death!

Yes, this epic four-parter is now available through the Big Finish site, on CD and download.  It features:

• Walking, murderous skeletons
• Exploding cities
• Gunfire aplenty
• Political intrigue and treachery
• Flying robots
• Mary Shelley
• Paul McGann!
• A great supporting cast, including Julie Cox, David Harewood, Christina Pickles, Eva Pope and Mitch Benn.

Surely, I can't say fairer than that.  In the new Christmas issue of Doctor Who Magazine, I'm interviewed about Army Of Death - and also write the magazine's annual Review Of The Year.

Right, I think that's you fully abreast of Joyously Christmassy Doctor Who happenings.  Kindly uncork the sherry and pour me a cheeky snifter.  Have one yourself, while you're at it.  Good day to you.

                                            
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My Amazon-acclaimed ebook How To Interview Doctor Who, Ozzy Osbourne And Everyone Else is out now on Amazon UK, Amazon US and Amazon.de.  You can also get a Triple Pack of files (PDF, ePub, Kindle/mobi) direct from me.  Full details here, you splendid individual.

Brilliant Doctor Who Things

Good morning.  Dark forces are stirring in the Doctor Who universe.  And by "dark forces", I mean "things about to be released which I worked on".

The Brilliant Book Of Doctor Who 2012 is out today!  As with last year's inaugural release, it's a wonderful annual-style affair, officially sanctioned by the BBC and with the participation of many members of the Who writing and production team.  I've written a few things in it.

For months now, I've been dying to tell you that I've written a piece which reveals what happened in the three month gap between the episodes The Impossible Astronaut and Day Of The Moon.  This was, as you might imagine, incredibly good fun if slightly mind-warping at times.  I really went to town on this thing, printing out a map of America and charting Amy, Rory and River's separate paths around it with differently coloured pens.  A tidied up version of this map is included in the piece, illustrating excerpts from the three characters' diaries.

I looked for times and places in late '60s America when The Silence's influence on humanity might have been inferred by the TARDIS crew.  This was, of course, made easier by Steven Moffat's original conception of the creatures' look, which was cleverly meant to have prompted man's popular image of alien lifeforms in the first place.  I also got to write an introduction from the Doctor himself, explaining the whole three-month plan.  It was great to write for Matt Smith's Doctor and Amy again, having had so much fun with them in this year's BBC audiobook Doctor Who: The Gemini Contagion.

I also wrote the front page of The White Flag, the newspaper on the home planet of Gibbis from The God Complex.  As you can imagine, given the cowardly, invasion-loving nature of Gibbis' race, this was a proper hoot.  The whole book looks amazing and I'm currently trying to resist reading too much of it.  Still want to be reading it over Christmas.

My Big Finish audio play Army Of Death is on the horizon and a few snippets have been released in advance of its December 31 release date.  There's the splendid cover, for a start (get a load of that skull), and you can also now hear the trailer on the Big Finish site.  Love that trailer - it's all "skeletons" this, "death" that.  I've been interviewed about the play for Doctor Who Magazine and Doctor Who Insider, so those pieces should be emerging over the next couple of months.

Army Of Death has a great cast. Besides the joy of Paul McGann as the Doctor, as Julie Cox as Frankenstein author Mary Shelley, it boasts David Harewood (Robin Hood, Doctor Who and Dan Turner's forthcoming feature The Man Inside, which I script edited), Eva Pope (Waterloo Road), Carolyn Pickles (Harry Potter, Emmerdale), Mitch Benn (Radio 4's Now Show), Joanna Christie (the stage play Equus) and Trevor Cooper (Spooks!).  Can't wait to hear the finished article.

Pining for more Doctor Who?  As ever, there's plenty of Who activity beyond the TV set. Good day to you.

You can buy The Brilliant Book Of Doctor Who 2012 at Amazon UK here.

You can pre-order Army Of Death at Amazon UK here.

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My ebook How To Interview Doctor Who, Ozzy Osbourne And Everyone Else is out now on Amazon UK, Amazon US and Amazon.de.  You can also get a Triple Pack of file formats (PDF, ePub, Kindle/mobi) direct from me.  Full details here, you splendid individual.

Doctor Who: The Lions Of Trafalgar

God, you're painfully attractive.  Thank you for gracing this blog with your face.

I've decided to try and step up the frequency of posts here, for two reasons.  For one thing, I think I've fallen into habit of saving stuff up until I make overly long posts which tend to be groups of updates.  For another, Graham Linehan on Twitter mentioned the site 750words.com, which offers a way of limbering yourself up for a day's writing.  That looks great and useful, but it also struck me that a blog-a-day might not only keep the doctor away (although hopefully not The Doctor), but serve the same warm-up purpose.  For yet another thing (yes, okay, this is three things now), the tireless frequency of Chuck Wendig's blogposts have shamed me (not to mention the damn quality of the things - I hate that brilliant beardy bastard).  So I'm going to blog every day this week, even if it's about nothing in particular.  Let's see how it works for both of us, yes?  Yes.

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In something like February 2010, I was commissioned to write a short Doctor Who audio story for Big Finish's Short Trips series.  Short Trips were originally a long run of hardback books which collected various stories featuring various doctors.  Back in 2008, I wrote Christmas Every Day, a text tale for the Short Trips: Christmas Around The World collection.

For a while, an idea for a Doctor Who story had been bouncing around my brain.  Something involving Nelson's column, with something alien inside it - and something very wrong with the four stone lions at its base.  I started working the idea up and made several visits to Trafalgar Square, taking photographs like the ones below.  Not being much of a history buff, I bought a book about 19th Century London (Jerry White's recommended London In The Nineteenth Century), since the story needed to be set at 1843 when the building of Nelson's column neared completion.

The story really came together when a friend told me about a remarkable dinner which took place that year.    Fourteen stonemasons, including civil engineer and entrepreneur Samuel Morton Peto and his cousin Thomas Grissell, perched a dinner table on top of the column (before Nelson's statue was placed upon it) and enjoyed a full meal, in order to celebrate their three years of hard work on the monument.  I loved that idea and the meal immediately became the focus of the story, which was originally named The Sevakrill Mission, before switching to the hopefully less generic and more interesting title.

Each Short Trips audio collection features one story for each of the first eight Doctors.  I was really pleased to get one of my very favourite Doctors: the Fifth, played by Peter Davison.  I wanted to pair him with '80s companions Nyssa and Tegan.  Best of all, Davison reads all of the Fifth Doctor stories in this Short Trips run, so I got the pleasure of hearing him read The Lions Of Trafalgar.

Or at least, I have today.  While writing this, I've been listening to it for the first time, despite the CD having been released over a month ago.  So why didn't I listen to it straight away?  Two reasons.  First and foremost, I suspected it might be pretty overwhelming.  A Doctor forever embedded in your formative years, reading your Doctor Who story?  That's enough to make the brain melt in on itself.  The second point leads on from that - what if I listened to the story and winced at clunky prose which I'd forced Peter Davison to wrap his gums around?  That would be overwhelming in a very bad way.  One of the important distinctions about writing prose for audio is that you have to be extra sure it will sound good aloud...

... and I'm really glad I made the effort to read The Lions Of Trafalgar aloud before submitting it to editor Xanna Eve Chown.  The story sounds great.  Big Finish could have had these short tales read simply - just the text spoken bare - but they've clearly devoted a lot of effort to these releases, with sound effects, voice treatment and a lovely attention to detail.  Davison reads it brilliantly, putting on a great Aussie accent for Tegan - and the sound mix is nicely multi-layered, with Davison narrating in the foreground and the characters' dialogue happening in a bustling Trafalgar Square elsewhere in the soundscape.  I'm properly delighted with it and will definitely be replaying.  The cherry on the cake has been a really nice review of Lions in Doctor Who Magazine, which called it "marvellous" and "compelling".  Woo, and indeed, hoo.

You can order Doctor Who: Short Trips Volume IV, which features seven other tales by writers like Richard Dinnick and Cindy Garland, on CD at Amazon UK or on CD/download through Big Finish themselves.

That's all for today.  Same time tomorrow?

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My ebook How To Interview Doctor Who, Ozzy Osbourne And Everyone Else is out now on Amazon UK, Amazon US and Amazon.de.  You can also get the PDF Edition direct from me.  Full details here, you splendid individual.

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!

Doctor Who: Army Of Death

Hello captain!

Just a quick one: last year, I wrote a new Big Finish audio play, starring Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor and Julie Cox as Frankenstein author Mary Shelley. It's called Army Of Death and is out in December 2011, with a fine supporting cast in David Harewood, Eva Pope, Carolyn Pickles and Mitch Benn.

Army Of Death will conclude a trilogy of new Eighth Doctor/Mary Shelley stories. The preceding tales are Marc Platt's The Silver Turk and Rick Briggs' The Witch In The Well.

That's the bare bones information for now - rather appropriate since the story sees an uprising of scorched, walking skeletons! More, closer to release. Good day to you.

Big Finish Day

Good morning to you, sir/madam.

I'm appearing at the Big Finish Day in Barking on June 11.  Running from 10am until 4pm at Barking Abbey School, it will literally be awash with Big Finish's great and good.  And me.

The event's webpage claims that I'll be signing free autographs, but I'm afraid that won't be the case.  No - I shall be handing a crisp tenner to anyone who asks me to sign an item*.

In seriousness, it should be a superb event for lovers of the decade-old audio company, which makes officially-licensed audio plays for shows like Doctor Who, Highlander, Stargate and Robin Hood.  Big Finish's big hitters like Nicholas Briggs, Robert Shearman and Gary Russell will be present, along with a whole host of writers, directors and actors.  Tickets are £25.  Perhaps I'll see you there, hmmm?

* Not really (just for the absolute avoidance of doubt).

Bonus Demons!

Did you buy Big Finish's audio CD set Doctor Who: The Demons Of Red Lodge & Other Stories?

If so, then first of all, thank you. Secondly, the company have just released a download-only extended version of the CD extras, which covers all four stories on the release. All four authors - me, William Gallagher, John Dorney (who also acts on this release) and Rick Briggs -are interviewed, along with Peter Davison, Sarah Sutton, Susan Kyd, director Ken Bentley and script editor Alan Barnes.

As you'll possibly discern while listening, I'm not particularly used to being interviewed. Much more used to the shoe being on the other foot. While being interrogated, I have to stop myself from firing questions back at the interrogator. Must shape up those interview skills for 2011.

In Other News: my new Tell Arnopp feature seems to be going rather well, with a fair few people responding to it. I'm enjoying reading what people are achieving, and it rather has the unexpected effect of spurring me on too. Lovely.

Oh, and I now have a Wikipedia page. Liking that.

And frankly, if I may be rather forward, I am LOVING YOU. Without you, this blog would be rubbish. Just letters and words, floating aimlessly around in an electronic lagoon.

Good DAY to you.

2010: Doctor Who, Stormhouse, Sarah Jane & Other Fun Stuff

Hello tinsel-chops!

Sweet baby Jesus in a Pret A Manger: what a year that was. If ever there was a year in which I did a shedload of work and gained confidence in my ideas-flow, it was 2010.  I wrote my first produced feature film.  I wrote my first scripts for BBC Audiobooks and Big Finish, including one for the current incarnation of the Doctor, as played on TV by Matt Smith.

What follows are the details of pretty much everything I did (professionally, mind - you'll hear nothing of the time I fought a 15-foot clay badger in a quarry) in the last 12 months.  To be honest, writing this stuff is more for my benefit than anything else.  At this time of year, I like to stop and take stock.  So if you'd prefer to return to your New Year Limbo Period booze, I certainly shan't hold it against you.

STORMHOUSE

Somewhere in the year's second quarter, director Dan Turner and I went for a drink.  We'd worked together before on various projects, including freaky, sexy short film Look At Me.  At one point during our beer-fest, Dan oh-so-casually mentioned his idea for a film in which "the military capture a ghost".  I immediately keeled over, picked myself up and became obsessed with the idea.  We spent the rest of the night quacking about it and deciding that this could well make a super-scary horror film.

The idea grew and grew, until suddenly it became Stormhouse, a film shot in August and starring the excellent Katie Flynn, daughter of Jane Seymour.  Yes, Stormhouse really happened that fast - and I'm glad it did. There's nothing like the rush of shooting towards deadlines like an Exocet to induce full creativity in the brain.  Stormhouse was filmed in a military base nestled away in the English countryside, with me as writer and executive producer.  That shoot was unquestionably one of the finest experiences of my life.  Cast and crew alike stayed in the base, which gave the production a real sense of camaraderie.  I slept each night on an airbed in a creepy office off a creepy corridor - both of which were locations by day.   I loved the whole experience - apart from the mad, incessant flies.

Stormhouse is currently in the last stages of post-production: music (Sam Watts!), FX, sound, grading - all with Dan and producer Dean Fisher toiling away at the eye of the storm.  We have a fine sales agent in AV Pictures, who handled the likes of Neil Marshall's Dog Soldiers (see their website page for Stormhouse here) and the film will be released in 2011.  Can't wait for you to see it, if supernatural horror is your bag.

FORGIVENESS

The first thing I wrote in 2010, Forgiveness is a horror feature spec script.  It was created while I was in a hateful mood, which I'm convinced can be the best possible mindset with which to approach writing a horror film.  Or at least, it seemed to work with this one.  A rather bleak and harrowing beast, it loosely combines Misery with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, as a story about a couple menaced in the middle of nowhere hopefully transforms into something a little different.  Forgiveness is now with a prospective agent.  Hooray.

GHOST WRITER

Somewhere around June, my 24-minute TAPS film Ghost Writer became available for anyone to watch online.  It was shot on Emmerdale's Leeds sets in December 2009, benefiting from a marvellous veteran TV director in Miss Marple's Guy Slater and a lovely cast in Barrie Ryan English, Grownups' Fiona Wass, The Bill's Giles Ford, Waterloo Road's Lisa Brookes and Seamus O'Neill from one of my favourite films, Shane Meadows' Dead Man Shoes.

Especially given the limitations which were imposed by the good folk at TAPS (no more than six characters, no more than 20 scenes, no more than three locations and a four-hour shoot!), I'm very happy with the results.  Ghost Writer was a training ground in every respect, teaching me a lot about the realities and economics of television production.

Sadly, the TAPS organisation folded in 2010, after 17 years of helping new writers up the career ladder.  I'm honoured to have been among their final batch of graduates.  Thankfully, Ghost Writer remains online at the TAPS website, so if you haven't seen it yet, then I'd be delighted if you had a look.

BBC AUDIOBOOKS

God, the amount of time I spent this year, explaining the various different formats of audio-things I was writing!  Audiobooks, audio plays, mimed vignettes on half-inch tape... Well, maybe not that last one.

In October 2009, I hosted a couple of sessions at the Cheltenham Screenwriters' Festival - and one of my panelists was Michael Stevens, the Commissioning Editor at BBC Audiobooks.  Afterwards, I shamelessly hustled the poor man, asking if I could pitch an idea for an Eleventh Doctor audiobook.  Being a splendid fellow, he said yes and advised me to submit something to his new range editor John Ainsworth in the New Year.

I was delighted when my two-page storyline, for something called The Language Of Spawn back then, successfully made it through the filtration process guarded by Michael, John, the remarkable Gary Russell (who is the nexus through which everything Doctor Who-related must pass, in order to gain a greenlight from BBC Wales) and supremo Steven Moffat himself.  The title became The Gemini Contagion (oh God, the number of alternative titles that got scribbled into a notepad, before I settled on that one) and I set to work.  Absolutely loved writing for Doctor Eleven and his companion Amy Pond - and I hope that, come the audiobook's March 3 2011 release, Who fans feel at least a fraction of my own enthusiasm!

While working on Doctor Who: The Gemini Contagion, I was invited to pitch for one of the BBC's two annual Sarah Jane Adventures audiobooks.  Elisabeth Sladen's performance as Sarah Jane Smith in Doctor Who is inextricably woven into my childhood memories and it's fantastic that she continues to delight kids and adults alike in Russell T Davies' successful CBBC show. So I pitched a storyline called Deadly Download and was delighted when it once again made it through the filtration process which included Russell himself. I didn't have too long in which to turn this one around, but sheer enthusiasm bustled me along.

One interesting distinction between the writing style required by both audiobooks was the POV.  Doctor Who audiobooks are written in the third-person and enjoy different narrators each time, while the Sarah Janes are necessarily first-person because Elisabeth Sladen will be reading them in character.  As a result in Sarah Jane audios, nothing must be described which Sarah Jane wouldn't be aware of in some believable way.  This makes things a little more challenging, but I like that.  The Sarah Jane Adventures: Deadly Download was released in early November and has since had some nice reviews.  I'm very happy with it indeed.  Elisabeth Sladen does a brilliant job of reading the story and whole-heartedly bringing characters to life, while producer Neil Gardner and Simon Power's soundscaping is exemplary.

BIG FINISH AUDIO PLAYS

Also during the Summer, I pitched a storyline for something called Nightfall to longstanding audio production company Big Finish. This was retitled The Mindkillers and then finally The Demons Of Red Lodge, which ended up as the title-story of the anthology Doctor Who: The Demons Of Red Lodge & Other Stories (see recent blog for full details). The first thing I actually wrote for Big Finish, however, was The Lions Of Trafalgar. 

That one is a short story featuring the Fifth Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan, which has been read for audio for Peter Davison. It will be published as part of one of 2011's three Doctor Who: Short Trips anthologies for CD/download. The research for this tale happily involved a couple of trips to Trafalgar Square, which is always a pleasure. I was excited to learn about a historic dinner party which took place on top of Nelson's Column, which ended up becoming a big part of the story.

OTHER DELIGHTS

I contributed a fair deal to a fantastic new annual-style Doctor Who book, Doctor Who: The Brilliant Book 2011, which emerged in plenty of time to be snatched up for Christmas. My work on this included a fun piece of short fiction, The Stone Totems, which took the form of a Natural History Museum plaque explaining the Stone Daleks' alleged history.

In February, I was pleased to number among the speakers at Newcastle's Story Engine event - a really friendly and intimate affair, which I'd recommend to any writer.  It's back again in March 2011!

With so much of my work in 2010 being bound for audio and film, it was good to write something for an actual book. That something was The War Of Art, a short story in Big Finish's hardback print anthology Bernice Summerfield: Present Danger. Floating lizard-heads, firey death, enormous art installations and timey-wimey tomfoolery were the names of that particular game.

I was among the judges in The National Student Film Association's inaugural scriptwriting competition.  A fun process, looking through the scripts and enjoying some really nice work.

On a journalistic front, I was delighted when the readers of Doctor Who Magazine voted my Tom Baker and Christopher H Bidmead interviews as their favourites of 2009. Amazing to get that kind of appreciation from a readership which I've numbered among since 1979.

And that reminds me of perhaps my proudest moment of the year. Andrew Smith wrote the 1980 Doctor Who TV story Full Circle, which I watched and enjoyed when I was eight years old. In November this year, Andrew sent me a message on Twitter to say that he'd bought my Deadly Download audio for his eight-year-old daughter's birthday. Wow. Talk about full circle...

2011: WHAT NEXT?

As happy as I am with my progress over the last 12 months, I'll be aiming to achieve more than I did in 2010.  But everyone says that.

As I said in the the last post, I have a couple of irons in the fire with Big Finish - one of which is a rather large iron which should keep me busy for most of January. I also have a couple of TV spec ideas knocking about the brain, two features in development and a non-fiction e-book which I want to write.

I will be writing a short story for an e-book anthology called Voices From The Past. This will be published by H&H Books in April 2011 and features a whole host of fine writers like Paul Cornell, Paul Magrs and Rob Shearman (see the current list here). All proceeds from Voices... will go to Great Ormond Street Hospital.

I fully intend to keep blogging in 2011, although as in 2010, the influence of Twitter will mean that blogposts tend to be reserved for longer pieces which couldn't be adequately conveyed in 140 characters. Incidentally, you may find my various Twitter lists to be of use - I have several, listing directors, scriptwriters, producers and all sorts. If you're wondering who to follow on Twitter, then these lists may be of some use.  I currently follow far too many people and seriously need to cut down on new follows, I'm afraid - but if you follow me, I will at least endeavour to put you on one of my lists in return if you're serious about one of the professions covered by them.

Right, that seems to be everything. I can now stop talking about myself. Phew.

Happy New Year!

Actually, no. That's not good enough.

Amazing New Year!

Demons Unleashed!

Festive greetings!

Over the last week, on and off, I've been working on a blog about My Writing Year. This will emerge in that glorious limbo between Boxing Day and New Year's Day. Right now, though, just wanted to stop by and issue the aforementioned greetings, while quacking about Doctor Who: The Demons Of Red Lodge And Other Stories.

While audio production company Big Finish's release date for this - and the one which remains on Amazon - was December 31, it transpired that both CD and download became available this week. This was a nicely surprisingly early Christmas present. So, what is The Demons Of Red Lodge...?

It's an audio anthology featuring four self-contained 25-minute stories. Each stars Peter Davison as the Doctor and Sarah Sutton as companion Nyssa, along with various supporting cast members. Due to the clever co-ordination of our brilliant script editor Alan Barnes, the tales enjoy the odd link while being completely and utterly different from each other. Why, the whole thing's like some kind of Christmas selection box.

The Demons Of Red Lodge...'s
beautiful Big Finish CD sleeve

I wrote The Demons Of Red Lodge itself. It sees the Doctor and Nyssa waking up in a woodshed in 17th Century Suffolk, terrified without knowing why or being able to remember how they got there.

The second story, The Entropy Composition, was written by Rick Briggs who won a Big Finish competition this year, and takes the novel approach of involving prog rock in the proceedings.

Doing Time was penned by my friend and fellow blogger William Gallagher (pictured above with some pointy bloke with a shiny ring, in the very depths of Big Finish HQ), who came up with the solid-gold genius idea of putting the Doctor in prison. For a year.

The collection is splendidly rounded out by lovely John Dorney's Special Features which takes the form of a faux DVD commentary in which the Doctor is one of the speakers. Remarkable, funny stuff. Dorney is annoyingly multi-talented: the man also acts in, I believe, three of the stories, including mine.

As I say in journo Dan Berry's preview piece in the current Christmas edition of Doctor Who Magazine, I was rather channelling The Blair Witch Project in my story. Mainly in terms of the atmosphere, of course - but also in terms of the rising panic of people in that situation.

Joshua Leonard in The Blair
Witch Project  (1999)

The Blair Witch Project is one of my favourite horror films. There, I’ve said it. Unfortunately, the 1999 delight really polarises people. This is largely, I reckon, because its US-based hype led to it becoming a glorified test of how tough people were in other territories: the cinematic equivalent of a vindaloo. Most folks then became determined not to let it burn them.

I also like combining things. So I wanted to see what would happen if I dropped the Fifth Doctor – the most fragile and vulnerable of them all – into Blair Witch territory, with scary woods, no compass, no short-term memory and no TARDIS. What if he woke up scared in darkness, in the middle of nowhere, alongside an even more petrified Nyssa? Without even a Blair Witch-esque legend to pin his imagination to, the Doctor would have no idea of the nature or magnitude of the threat he’s facing or even a recollection of where or when he is.

That’s the initial premise of The Demons Of Red Lodge. The Doctor, afraid in the dark, without even knowing why he’s afraid. He and Nyssa have nothing to fear but fear itself. Or do they? Little did I know, however, the extent to which Peter and Sarah seized that opportunity and made it all look so effortless in the studio, aided and abetted by top-notch director Ken Bentley. (Susan Kyd is also great in two roles here and it was also lovely to have a contribution from Duncan Wisbey - a great voice artist who starred in one of the sketches I wrote for Radio 4's Laurence & Gus: Hearts & Minds last year.)

On the day of recording, Peter had something of a gravelly throat from shoutingalot in the West End's Spamalot. This almost certainly helped him lend the Doctor's voice a nicely raw edge during the Demons sessions. I'm so happy with the results and proud to be a part of such a consistent release, which seems to be going down pretty well with fans. I'm especially prone to punching the air when someone refers to it as "scary" or even "terrifying" - that was very much the intention.

The Demons Of Red Lodge & Other Stories is my first Big Finish release. Will there be more? I don't think I'm breaking any confidences by saying yes. I'm writing two new things right now, for 2011. (Well, not right now. Right now, I'm lounging on a sofa with an iPad and a magically refilling glass of sherry, pootling around on Twitter and stuff. But you get the idea.) This pleases me a great deal - can't wait to tell you about this mad new stuff, hopefully in the first few months of the imminent new year.

I insist that you have the finest feasible Christmas! I'll back to babble about my 2010 and hopefully also list my Top 10 Writers' Apps/Games Of The Year.

Misletoeing you already...

Doctor Who: The Demons Of Red Lodge & Other Stories can be bought as a CD or download from Big Finish Productions here.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad (although I then had to use a netbook to get it just so...)

Release Schedule For The Rest Of 2010 & Beyond

Hello my little bowl of magic,

I haven't had material in a physical book for a fair while, since the Doctor Who story Christmas Every Day in Big Finish's Winter 2008 collection Short Trips: Christmas Around The World.  So it's nice that two actual-world, papery books have come along at once.  Namely...

THE BRILLIANT BOOK OF DOCTOR WHO 2011

A brand new official BBC tome!  It's like the Doctor Who annual you always wanted, full of fun and proper content for all ages.  I've written a smidgeon of fiction for it, in the shape of The Stone Totems.  This consists of a curator's plaque in The National Museum, attempting to explain what its Stone Dalek exhibits might actually be.  Oh dear lord, that was fun to write.  On top of that, I wrote a few articles about Daleks, Silurians, the TARDIS and all sorts.  Ridiculously exciting to work on a book edited by my former Doctor Who Magazine editor Clayton Hickman and designed by Doctor Who Adventures' equally super-talented Paul Lang.  Buy it for Christmas, or better still, get someone to buy it for you.

BERNICE SUMMERFIELD: PRESENT DANGER

Bernice, for the uninitiated, is a former Doctor Who companion from various novels and audios.  She was created by that splendid fellow, Paul Cornell, and is a tad like a female Indiana Jones, being a feisty archaeologist.

I previously wrote the short story Prime Five for 2007's Bernice Summerfield: Missing Adventures hardback collection, so it was nice to return to the fold with a war story.  Edited by the excellent Eddie Robson, Bernice Summerfield: Present Danger is a collection of stories which document a one-sided war between mankind and the Deindum, who are a bunch of aggressive, paranoid, floaty lizard-headed bastards from the future.  

Rather than going for a full-blown war epic, out on the frontlines, I wanted to make the conflict more claustrophobic and personal.  So my story, The War Of Art, sees Bernice trapped in a crashed freighter with a bunch of refugees, menaced by a single Deindum.  There's fire, death, revenge, time travel and a 150-foot-high head.  Surely I can't say fairer than that.

THE REST OF 2010

Brilliantly, I seem to have to have something of a release schedule for the rest of the year. (A release schedule!  Loving those apples.) The two books already mentioned are available right now, and then I have one release per month until January.  Here's what's in store for the rest of the year...

TEMPTING FATES

Red Eye Pictures' teen web drama series, which I worked on last year, receives its full launch on November 1.  Three rather beguiling Fates arrive on a university campus, with a demented X Factor style mission to kill various people.  Professor Morgan Node is the poor bastard chosen to chaperone the Fates and make sure they don't misinterpret the various clues provided to them by the gods, and bump off the wrong target.  It's splendid black comedy fun, with some strong performances from the cast and more energy than you can shake a power generator at.  

SARAH JANE ADVENTURES: DEADLY DOWNLOAD

Wooo!  Especially now that The Sarah Jane Adventures' Series Four has kicked off (you can see the concluding part of Joe Lidster's The Nightmare Man story today on CBBC), it feels great to have this original audio story set for release on November 4 through BBC Audio.  Read by Elisabeth Sladen, it sees an alien attack on Earth, via the internet.  And good heavens, it's only £4.49 at Amazon UK!  I have yet to hear the finished recorded product, but can say I had a great time writing it and working with my great editor John Ainsworth, who really pushed for every last drop of value from the story.

DOCTOR WHO: THE DEMONS OF RED LODGE

Christ, what a way to end the year.  The Big Finish release The Demons Of Red Lodge & Other Stories will be issued on December 31!  Rest assured that I shall be partying with added vigour.  This is a release which I'm proud to share with three other writers, the first two of whom are good friends (I haven't had the pleasure of meeting the third): William Gallagher (who writes the story Doing Time), John Dorney (Special Features) and Rick Briggs (The Entropy Composition).  Four stories, starting with my own The Demons Of Red Lodge, and each featuring Peter Davison as The Doctor and Sarah Sutton as Nyssa.  Yes!

2011: THE PLAN

Next year will see the release of me and Dan Turner's supernatural horror feature film, which was shot in August.  It does now have a title, but not one which we're going to reveal just yet.  Editing and post-production are coming along apace, and I couldn't be more excited about that.  Elsewhere in featuresville, I have two new horror specs written, which need honing before I can lead them to market with bells in their noses.

There's one Doctor Who-related release scheduled for next year, which I've already written but can't announce yet.  Can't bloody wait to do so, mind.  The already-announced Short Trips Big Finish audio-story The Lions Of Trafalgar (read by Peter Davison and starring his Doctor along with Nyssa and Tegan) will be released on one of the Short Trips CD collections, to be decided.  I'm working on at least two more things in that expansive Who universe, with a great deal of work in store between now and Christmas.  Feels like I'm building up the head of steam I've always wanted. 

You can't see this, but I'm doing a celebratory dance.  And thank God you can't see it.  Far too arousing.  Shouldn't have mentioned it at all, really.

Good day to you.

Demons Of Red Lodge: The Cover

Hello!  Big Finish released this today and I love it.  That is all.

.

Doctor Who: Short Trips

After a few months of keeping it under my hat, it's lovely to announce that I've written one of the stories for Big Finish's forthcoming Doctor Who: Short Trips range.

Short Trips was once Big Finish's series of licensed books, compiling various short stories together - mostly under umbrella themes. I contributed the story Christmas Every Day to Short Trips: Christmas Around The World, which was released in December 2008, but soon after, those books came to an end. Thankfully, that Christmas book's editor Xanna Eve Chown didn't forget me and got in touch a little while back, asking if I'd like to write something for the rebirth of Short Trips... on audio!

My story, The Lions Of Trafalgar, features the Fifth Doctor (that's Peter Davison, in case you're a non-Whovian), along with companions Nyssa and Tegan. Like all of the stories on these new Short Trips CDs, it will be read by one person, yet to be decided. Whoever ends up reading it, I couldn't be more thrilled.

The Short Trips CDs will be out later this year. Among the other writers on board are James 'Trousers Off' Moran, Simon Guerrier, former TV Who script editor Andrew Cartmel, Richard Dinnick and former Sixth Doctor Colin Baker himself! Remarkable. Most of the other writers are triumphant winners of a competition which Big Finish ran to harvest new talent - congratulations to them all!

I also have a couple of other Big Finish irons in the fire, which I don't believe I can reveal yet. Needless to say, when I can, you'll soon know all about it. Oh yes.

Big Finish's Short Trips announcement today can be read here.