I've completed my 'tour' round the country, in the excellent company of fellow authors, Paul Magrs and Mark Michalowski, promoting the September Doctor Who books, and am now back at work with my nose to the Hellboy grindstone. Actually, it's not really a grindstone. It's great fun putting words in the mouths of Mike Mignola's wonderful creations, Hellboy, Abe Sapien & Liz Sherman. I'm about 60,000 words into the novel now, and hope to have it completed by the end of October. With around 30,000 more words to go, it's quite a tall order, but I'm going to give it a damn good go.
Going back to the Doctor Who 'tour' for a moment, our penultimate event was a panel discussion (Writing Doctor Who) at the Bath Childrens' Literature Festival. What a fantastic event this was! 350 paying punters, many of them Doctor Who-loving children, all packed into the lovely surroundings of the Guild Hall. We were miked up and spotlit, and had to walk out on stage from the back, and for the first time I got an inkling of what being a rock star must be like. It was amazing taking my seat and looking out on a sea of eager and expectant faces. Hopefully everyone enjoyed it as much as we did. All the children and their parents I talked to at the mass signing afterwards certainly seemed satisfied.
In the latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine, there's a short interview with myself and the aforementioned Paul and Mark. This is actually a fraction of the full interview I did with David Darlington, and so thought it was worth printing out a typescript of the entire thing here. As the interview is quite long, I won't rabbit on any longer for the time being. So cheers until next time. I'm off to the British Fantasy Society Open Night in York tonight. Hope to see some of you there.
The interview:
To start with - in Doctor Who terms, you sort of appeared out of nowhere in the early days of the BBC books, and then disappeared after doing just the two books. Had you always been a Doctor Who fan?Very much so. I was born in '63, and my first memory of Doctor Who is of the Yeti ambling down the mountainside to attack Det Sen monastery in The Abominable Snowmen. I remember finding that deliciously terrifying, and equally terrifying were the Yeti in the underground a few stories later, the thrashing weed creature in Fury From the Deep, the Cybermen coming up out of the sewers in The Invasion, the hissing, lumbering Ice Warriors in The Seeds of Death, and - most frightening of all - the Autons in Spearhead From Space.
So Doctor Who introduced me to TV that could terrify and thrill in equal measure. Every week the programme traumatised me, and every week I was there on the settee on Saturday teatime, desperate to see the next episode.
Having said that, I think I can pinpoint the day I became a bona fide fan as 11th January 1975. That was the day, at the age of eleven, when I bought my first Doctor Who book, The Auton Invasion. Now funnily enough, I only bought it because I liked the look of the big tentacled monster on the cover, and it was only as I read the back cover blurb whilst sitting in the car on the way home that I realised it was the story with the horrible plastic men that had so terrified me a few years before. I can still recall the wonderful frisson of fear I felt at that realisation. I read and re-read The Auton Invasion several times that week, and then the next Saturday I went back to the same shop and bought the other Doctor Who book they had on sale, which was Day of the Daleks. At this time Tom Baker was just starting out as the Doctor, and I instantly fell in love with his portrayal. And that was pretty much it for me - hooked for life.
How did it come about that you didn't get involved on the fiction side of things until about 1997? And how come you then more or less vanished again, only to re-surface now with one of the New Series Adventures?It was all really to do with timing. Whereas Doctor Who novels provided a lot of authors with their first publishing experience, I had had my first book, a horror novel called Toady, published in 1989, so by the time I turned to Doctor Who I was already reasonably well-established. When Virgin starting publishing original Who novels in 1991 or whenever it was, I had every intention of getting in touch with them, sending them a proposal, whatever. But at that time I was just starting to make my name as a horror writer, and because I was young and British, and because Toady had made a pretty big splash and had reached something like number 7 in the bestsellers list, I was inevitably being lauded as "the next Clive Barker", and was being interviewed fairly regularly on TV, and in newspapers and magazines. So I was pretty much caught up in the whirlwind of all that, and because horror fiction was going through a real boom period, I was being pressurised to quickly follow up my first novel with my second, and my second with my third, and so on. So by the time I finally managed to emerge three books later, the Virgin range had already established its own central continuity, not to mention its notoriously tough, 'adult' style, which a) I couldn't keep up with (I was doing a regular book review column by then, so only had chance to dip into the Doctor Who range every now and again - even though I was still religiously buying the books every month), and b) to be truthful, I didn't much like, because I felt it had moved away from what I always loved about Doctor Who, which was the combination of scary stuff, action adventure and quirky British humour, and had moved more into the world of hard sf, which I wasn't that interested in.
When the BBC took the franchise back off Virgin after the Paul McGann TV movie in 1996, however, they asked David Howe to compile a list of writers who might be interested in writing for their new range, and because David knew me from horror conventions and through magazines he was working on, like Starburst and Shivers, he called me and asked if I'd be interested. And obviously he caught me at just the right time - between books, between contracts, whatever - because I said yes. And I loved writing The Bodysnatchers so much that - probably after writing another horror novel - I proposed another, which became Deep Blue. I think at that time I had it in mind to work my way through the Doctors (I'd still love to write a book for every Doctor, but I doubt that's going to happen now), but then we had a bit of a disaster with Deep Blue, because BBC Books employed a freelance editor they'd never used before, who made an awful, awful hash of editing the book. It was such a terrible job, in fact, that I called Jac Rayner, who was then on the editorial staff, and told her that I'd rather give them back the money than see my book go out in such a dreadful state. This was in the week between Christmas & New Year 1998, and the book was due out in February or March, and so was imminently about to go to print. Jac hadn't seen the edited version of the manuscript at this stage, so she read it and, like me, was horrified at the awful hash the freelance editor had made of it. We therefore had a week between us, working long, long hours, to thrash the manuscript back into some sort of shape. I can't remember why we didn't just use the original manuscript, but there was some reason why we couldn't. Anyway, the book was finally released in a version I was semi-happy with, but it never really recovered from the editorial savaging it had received, and subsequently wasn't that well-reviewed. So I think that put me off writing Doctor Who for a bit, plus I suspect that my other writing work was a lot more lucrative, and that at this time my kids were growing up, which meant we had to move to a bigger house, and pay bigger bills, and so I basically just had to prioritise.
I was asked several times over the next few years whether I'd be interested in doing another book for the range, but I was always offered specific ingredients and given a specific deadline - for example, I'd be asked to write a fourth Doctor steampunk novel for the October slot or whatever - and the offers always came at a time when I was already racing towards a deadline, and so I'd have to say no. But the interest never went away, and was sufficiently piqued by the new series for me to drop Justin a line one day, just to ask, "What are the chances...?" And to my surprise and delight I received a very positive and enthusiastic response - and here we are.
How did you, personally, respond to the new Doctor Who when it came back to the screens in 2005?Oh, with immense excitement and enthusiasm. I was massively excited by the TV movie in 1996, and - although it had a lot wrong with it - felt a sense of crushing disappointment when that didn't lead to a series. Then for a week or so I was equally excited by the announcement of The Dark Dimension, and again felt sickeningly disappointed when that didn't happen. So when it was announced, late in 2003 I think it was, that Doctor Who was definitely coming back as a BBC series in 2005, it was like a dream come true. Like most fans I scoured magazines and the internet for the tiniest snippets of news, and devoured whatever information I could glean. That 18 months or so between the initial announcement and the transmission of Rose was absolute torture. In some ways the wait after knowing that it was coming back was even worse than most of the previous fifteen years had been.
When that day, 26th March 2005, finally dawned, it felt almost surreal. Despite all the incredible hype, I couldn't quite believe that the show was finally returning as a proper BBC series. Of course, my kids were big fans of the original series by this time, and so they were bouncing off the walls with excitement too. We were literally counting down the minutes that day. Even my wife - who was never a fan of the original series, though likes the new series, and wept along with the rest of us when Rose left - got in on the act by baking a Dalek cake.
We watched that first episode in a kind of enraptured daze. And we all absolutely loved it. I know it was a set-up story, and that the whole anti-plastic thing is a silly throwaway solution, but I felt - and still do - that Russell had pitched it absolutely perfectly. It felt to me like a show that had naturally and healthily evolved. It still retained - and continues to retain - the spirit and essence of the original series, and yet it embraced all the positive aspects of what a modern drama needs to be successful. It was fast and witty and sophisticated, and the production values were second to none. I thought Eccleston was fabulous as the Doctor, and Billie Piper was an absolute revelation. It felt really special, it felt like event television, and to Russell and the rest of his team's credit it still does. In my opinion he's barely put a foot wrong in the past three years.
Does your book fit into a particular slot in the series, e.g. between any two particular episodes? I think I'm right in saying that all three of the September books take place somewhere between 42 and Human Nature.
Given the timescales involved in getting the book to press, it must have been written, at least in part, before "Smith and Jones" reached the screens. What sort of 'backstage' access were you given, in order to (for instance) get the character of Martha right?The books were deadlined for April, so the three of us were invited over to Cardiff in mid-January to see rough cuts - in the case of Gridlock a very rough cut - of the first three episodes. It was very, very exciting. We all had to live with the secret of the Macra for the next couple of months. Naturally my children pestered me incessantly for details, but I told them nothing!
The American setting of your book - was that an idea of yours or part of a 'shopping list' you were given? I ask partly because I tend to associate this type of 'invasive' horror story with America anyway - possibly because the only horror writer I ever paid much attention to was Stephen King, but also because that kind of 'takeover' body horror brings the whole communist/McCarthy era of SF/horror to mind... also, does this 'suburban America' setting make it more difficult to evoke the ethos of the parent TV show than, for instance, something set in modern London or Cardiff might permit?I was given no shopping list whatsoever. The whole thing - for better or worse - was my idea, and I was commissioned on the strength of a 2-page synopsis.
As far as I was concerned, it had to be small-town America because Halloween plays a big part in the story, and Americans celebrate Halloween far more than we do. Even though our own Halloweens are becoming more Americanised, it's still a much bigger deal for them.
I think rather than Stephen King, I had a more Ray Bradbury kind of feel in mind when I came up with the idea, and most particularly his novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. I like the idea that referencing Something Wicked... in Forever Autumn gives a rather neat joint nod to both Bradbury and Shakespeare, who of course Martha had recently met at the time the novel is set.
But there's a whole slew of influences in the book. When I was picturing my imaginary town of Blackwood Falls, I was thinking of small town America as depicted in such movies and TV series as Back to the Future, Buffy, John Carpenter's Halloween, Eerie, Indiana, and even Happy Days.
As for whether I've evoked the ethos of the TV show or not, I guess only the book's readers can judge. But my own personal opinion is that Doctor Who as a concept can lend itself to any environment, be that Victorian England, a jungle planet at the edge of the known universe, or a space station in the far future. As long as you've got the Doctor and his companion there to anchor it, then the surroundings and events just add colour and flavour to the central core - if that's not mixing too many metaphors. And it's not as if Doctor Who hasn't done different aspects of America before. There's been The Gunfighters, the TV movie, and most recently, of course, Daleks in Manhattan.
From Hell It Came! In terms of using 'animated plants' as part of the main scare-factor of your story, were you at all apprehensive that that's something Doctor Who's not terribly renowned for doing well? For every 'End of the World' there's a 'Mark of the Rani' or 'Terror of the Vervoids'... No, largely because I don't think of my aliens, the Hervoken, as animated plants - unless of course you're referring to the tree, which isn't really animated? To balance your argument out a little, though, I would mention The Seeds of Doom - one of my favourite Doctor Who stories ever.
Halloween is, of course, a staple of the horror story but not one I recall Doctor Who doing directly before (though it must have done somewhere... surely!). Was that part of your initial pitch or idea - that 'Halloween' is as identifiable a concept to the broadest audience as Christmas or Dickens or Shakespeare, and therefore you're continuing the very 'approachable, user-friendly' ethos of the TV show?Yes, it was certainly part of my initial idea, and as you say, it seemed such an obvious concept to be given a Doctor Who twist that I couldn't believe it had never been done before! It was great for me, of course, because it meant I was given full rein on the Halloween iconography.
How does writing a Doctor Who story differ from devising your own horror story from the ground up? Are your required to rein yourself in a bit in terms of what 'scares' you think you'll be permitted to get away with..?It seems an obvious thing to say, but you have to be aware that your main target audience for Doctor Who books are 10-13 year old kids, so obviously you don't have sex and swearing, and you don't have excessive gore and violence. Such elements are not difficult to excise, however. Having watched thousands of hours of Doctor Who over the past forty years, the tone and mood and parameters of the show come instinctively to me. I didn't consciously have to think about what I could and couldn't include; I just knew. Having said that, I did write one scene which was vetoed, and that was where a series of metal blades suddenly spring from a clown's big white gloves in the manner of a tiger unsheathing its claws. Justin's main reservation was not that the blades were big, nasty pointy things that could rend and tear, but that they were metal. So what I did was to have the fingers elongate into sharp-pointed claws, but for them to remain white like the clown's gloves, and that was deemed okay. It's that fine line between depressing, real-life violence and fantasy violence.
Several of these new series novels, and yours is no exception, have used children or teenagers as leading characters - possibly as part of the effort striving for maximum 'audience identification'. Was that something on your mind when you started to tell large chunks of your story from the POV of the group of teenagers - that that sort of age group would form a core part of your potential readership?
Astonishing as it sounds, actually it didn't. I was aware of my target audience, of course, but I'm honestly not that cynical when it comes to my writing - in fact, there have been times in my career when I've felt as though I ought to have been more cynical in my decision-making, in terms of supplying publishers and readers with what they've wanted from me.
The reason I used kids as major characters is because I wanted to convey the approaching excitement of Halloween, which is a staple theme of the story, and that is best done through kids rather than adults. I've actually written a lot from the point of view of children and teenagers over the years, and that's because children see the world differently to adults - to them it's a wondrous place, full of excitement and possibilities. They have their emotional dials cranked up higher than us world-weary adults - a bit like the Doctor in some regards - and that's always fun and refreshing to write.
Were you required to co-ordinate with the other two writers in the development process of your book? There always seems to be effort made behind the scenes to ensure that each of the three novels in any given set is distinctively different in setting, tone and theme from those released alongside it...We weren't required to do it, but we made a decision early on that we would read one another's work in progress, purely so that we could offer advice and encouragement to each other, and so that we didn't inadvertently find ourselves either overlapping or contradicting one another.
It was odd actually, because when I found out that Mark was going to be one of the other two September authors - Paul's name wasn't announced until a couple of months later - I looked him up on the internet and dropped him an email, having never met him before. He quickly sent back a long, chatty, enthusiastic and thoroughly lovely response, and I decided straight away that here was a guy I was going to get on well with. As it transpired, we quickly discovered that as well as both being Mark M's we were also both born in or near Chesterfield in 1963, and that we both now lived in or near Leeds. Very weird. But what was even more odd was that a few days later I was shopping in Primark in Leeds with my wife when I walked past a man who looked remarkably similar to the photo of Mark I'd seen on his website. I looked at him and he looked at me, and a kind of recognition passed between us. A couple of minutes later I saw him standing on his own while his partner, Mike, was at the tills and so I approached him and asked him if he was Mark Michalowski. And of course he was! How strange was that?
And then Paul came on board, and we all met up in Cardiff for the screening and found that we all liked one another enormously. It's great. I feel as though I've made two really good friends through this commission. That's the magic of Doctor Who! It brings people together.
Oh, and I should add that when we went to Cardiff, the BBC put us up in a hotel the night before, then we watched the episodes in the morning, and then Paul & I were due to travel back up north on the same train. However the weather was so horrendous that all trains were cancelled, so we ended up finding a hotel and staying in Cardiff another night. And because we'd only packed for one night, we suddenly found ourselves short of clean pants and socks. So where did we go to get extras? Yep, you guessed it - Primark!
I get the impression from the text that you've enjoyed writing for this Doctor. How do you find he compares to his predecessors on television? Did you find translating his performance from the screen into prose a difficult or different process, compared to the Doctors you've written for in novel form before? I absolutely loved writing this book, and I found the 10th Doctor an utter joy to write for. I love his wit, his sharpness, his energy, and his occasional dark, sombre moments of absolute deadly seriousness. I was worried before I started that I wouldn't be able to make him witty enough, or that his essential Tennant-ness wouldn't come across on the written page, but given the constraints of not being able to see the often very subtle mannerisms of Tennant's performance, I have to admit I'm pretty happy with the end result - and those who've read the book seem to think I've got him fairly spot on. Of the other two Doctors I've written for, the 8th was probably the hardest to write, as my only reference was the TV Movie - and that, of course, is a regeneration story, which is never the greatest yardstick. What I tend to do when I write for a particular Doctor - and of course the other one I've written for is the 5th - is I watch an episode or so of their performance every day before I start work, so that I have their physical presence and their way of speaking and moving fixed in my head. Interestingly I actually found, watching season 2 of the new series, that the most useful episode to watch in terms of nailing the 10th Doctor was Fear Her. I know it's not the most universally loved story, but Tennant is fantastic in it, largely because the part of the Doctor is really well written, not least because the Doctor gets a bit of everything to do. In Fear Her he's witty, he's authoritative, he's cavaliar, he's anti-establishment, he's sombre, he's empathetic...he has a huge emotional range in what is ostensibly a simple and rather sweet little story.
But to answer your question more simply, if I write a line of dialogue, and I can hear the Doctor saying it in my head, then I'm happy. If I can't, then I change it.
