They Should Have Called the Magazine Ian

Doctor Who Magazine 448 is now out in the UK at least (though I see at least one Australian seems to have already got access to it), with contents including Ian Chesterton, Ian "Chunky" Gilmore and a few words from me, as part of a feature by Cavan Scott on Big Finish audio-drama Counter-Measures. Amusingly, we writers seem to have said a few quite similar things, so poor Cav has had to create a couple of relay quotes of us almost continuing the same thought at one point.

It also contains the code to freely download an audio drama I wrote for Big Finish last summer called The Revenants (the individual episode titles for those curious are, rather prosaically, "The Marsh-Wains" and "The Wissfornjarl").

Brilliantly, there are already some listener created covers appearing!

The one above by Nick Giles is my current favourite.

Gratifyingly, response to the play seems to be broadly favourable so far, though obviously you can never please everyone. A few listeners seem to found the story a bit straight-forward, a couple of others seem to have missed the implication of the ending so I've clearly not got everyone on board, but hopefully there's a good few people in-between who felt neither short-changed or under-informed.
It's deliberately quite leisurely and 'literary'- William Russell is such a lovely reader it's daft not to try to use that, and I tried to slightly mimic the slow-building almost John Buchan style of David Whitaker's first person Ian novelisation Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks, and, I hope, reflect some of the style of early TV Doctor Who which I always feel is much more about suspense than action.

I'm really pleasantly surprised to read some people found it scary, particularly as I was yelping like a complete wuss at the film The Awakening last night, a really rather controlled and old-fashioned ghost-story. I've never thought of myself as a spooky writer so it's particularly nice to see I've caused a few shivers down spines here and there.

I'll talk more about the story in a few months when everyone who wants to hear it probably will have (apparently it can take around 3 months for Doctor Who Magazine to reach all the countries it sells to), but as a tiny taster I'll let you know now that I spotted halfway through writing that there was potential for a small continuity clash with an old Doctor Who prose story that's now out of print called Set In Stone. For that reason I tweaked a late speech slightly so it fits with the events of Set in Stone if you know it but hopefully still makes sense if you don't. I doubt most people would care about this or even notice usually but I'm always aware that the people who do notice really do care a lot so it's worth seeing if you can address these issues where you can. Expect more tedious stuff like that in early September.

You should buy the magazine, you know- me, Glen McCoy and Neil Gaiman all sharing our wisdom in a single volume. That's special.