Hollow Hills

There’s now a trailer, cover, blurb and cast list up for The New Counter-Measures: The Hollow King an audio drama I wrote due for release from Big Finish Productions in January 2019.

It’s an Earthbound 1970s science fiction adventure featuring characters spun off from a 1980s Doctor Who serial, though no knowledge of that is expected or required. It stars Karen Gledhill, Hugh Ross, Pamela Salem and Simon Williams as a team investigating the strange and unusual and this is the third play I’ve written for them (you can find the first two here and here).

We often talk about The New Counter-Measures as being an audio in the style of the globe-trotting ITC film adventure series of the late 60s and early 1970s though, to tell the truth, I’ve imagined this one slightly differently. I thought it’d be fun to think of it as an episode of the 1970s TV series Thriller, which is set in a slightly skew-whiff England as an American tourist might imagine it or a UK TV company might present it when trying to make something you could sell to America and show at home.  
A lot is still on film (though mostly mute), but whenever you go into the village pub or the local lord’s country estate where all the dialogue breaks out you’re definitely on video in a studio set…
Anyway, that is sort of the world of this play. Don’t worry we’ve not sound designed it to feel like a video and film mix, there’s no out of place US guest star and people do talk outside. It's just there’s slightly more chance of sparring dialogue over large tumblers of whisky than you’d get in The Champions. 
It’s rural England with top 1970s concerns laced through, UFOs, the counter-culture, quaint folk tradition and scary analogue synthesisers.

Major influences include Sutton Hoo, an episode of Project U.F.O. I adored in 1979, the gloriously eccentric musician and writer, Desmond Leslie, a rather lovely festival of ideas I was invited to in 2016 and the sub-genre of 70s British film and TV we’ve come to call Folk Horror.
I hope I’ve managed to serve both our cast’s beautiful way with dialogue (they can all land a gag superbly) and audio’s power to disturb.

This play was originally planned for the second series of The New Counter-Measures released last year but around the start of March of 2017 the writers working on scripts were told one of our stories would be bumped to make way for a late addition to the box set. We later found out this would be a story featuring the Doctor Who adversary, The Great Intelligence. Big Finish's executives had just negotiated permission to use it and dropping it into The New Counter-Measures set would allow Big Finish to mark the 40th anniversary of its first TV appearance.

Once our first drafts were in it was decided my play (it's the closest in tone of the four initially planned to an Intelligence story), should be the one held back for recording in series 3. I thought that’d be that for a while until I got an email on holiday in the July of 2017 asking if I could do a second draft to get my play ready for recording with the others after all. So, over a couple of days swapping notes with script editor John Dorney, that’s what I did.
I think, reading between the lines, getting my play studio ready was just to give flexibility in case anything dropped out late in the day. No one wants to hire actors for a week and not fill all their time!

Unfortunately, the sales of the second New Counter-Measures box last year weren’t quite strong enough to automatically greenlight a third, so unusually my play’s ended up being released on its own. I’m delighted it has because if it hadn't been squeezed into that recording week it could very easily not have seen the light of day at all.

If you’re clever, and I suspect you are, you might spot a couple of elements in the play that we’d intended to pay off down the line in further stories. It’d be wonderful if one day that can still happen.
Fingers crossed. I’d love to think that there could be more adventures if this accidental one-off sells well enough to make them viable.

Things you may have missed...

Since I was last here (previous post excepted) a few things have happened, often despite me, but I've also managed to do a bit of work in between them.

Matthew J Elliott and I have written and recorded a few more riffs for Rifftrax- Hangar 18, Planet Outlaws and Snowbeast (and as I mentioned in the last entry we've more ready to go). I think we've hit quite a nice vein now and I'm very excited about the upcoming riffs which I think include some of the funniest work. Do not feel you have to pop in here and tell me if you later disagree.

I also wrote a book. A whole book on a single four episode Doctor Who story. Seriously, it's longer than the script and the novelisation. The Black Archive 16: Carnival of Monsters comes from those excellent people at Obverse books and is full of analysis of the story and its themes, thoughts on empire, class, race, language, writer Robert Holmes' life and how it may have influenced his work, and important things you didn't even know you didn't know about the production, like the proper order it should have been shown in and how very, very different the first script was.

For Big Finish I wrote an episode of Survivors, the post-Apocalyptic story of people trying to be decent and thrive in a ruined world which I was quite pleased with. I tried to follow the 1970s series tone quite faithfully, and also had fun populating an insular village entirely with family names from a local 19th century census in pursuit of a genuine small town feeling. That was already written when I mothballed the blog, but hadn't been announced.
That was followed by my Doctor Who Short Trip The British Invasion which had been announced but wasn't scheduled at the time. That was a joy to write and research, all the history and geography is true and everything I say about the alien menace is defensible(!). It's also blessed with a rather beautiful reading from Wendy Padbury.

 

After that came a further episode of the Doctor Who spin-off The New Counter-Measures which comes out next year after being recorded in July 2017, an episode of the revived 1980s Hard SF police series Star Cops, and a Doctor Who Early Adventure- An Ideal World. I'll probably talk more about all of those later.

I've also audio edited and sound designed some projects for them again- three of their Short Trips Doctor Who stories, How to Win Planets and Influence People, Mel-evolent and the forthcoming The Devil's Footprints.

It probably looks more like the sum of an afternoon's work to you than 20 months but you can only take the work you're offered and only do it if you have the time!

Matters arising...

There's a few of these, I'm afraid.

Number one, I've been writing a fair bit recently which means there are things I need to beg you to buy, things to reassure you are in the pipeline and things to darkly hint at that I haven't actually finished yet.
Anyway, there are two Doctor Who spin-offs (in the very loosest sense of those hyphenated words) that I've been involved with out now.
They're both built around female supporting characters from Doctor Who, but when they're at the centre of their own stories they inhabit quite different universes.
The first of these is the Iris collection I mentioned last time edited by Paul Dale Smith.



You can buy that here or go and read Paul talk about it in detail over here. It's a very quirky, British kind of literary fantasy that enjoys messing about with the nature of fiction. It's playful, it's weird, it gets dark now and then and it also gets very silly.

The second is Vienna- Series 3. Vienna's an audio science fiction series about a once ruthless assassin and bounty hunter who's become something a little more morally complex. She's the titular Vienna and is played with great wit and cool by Chase Masterson who some of you may work for her Star Trek appearances.
Vienna is Jonny Morris' baby, but this third series he kindly invited three other writers to work with him as script editor. He came up with a clever series arc and some basic situations and let us fly with them.
One great thing about Vienna for me is how it manages to feels a very natural melding of those great Robert Sheckley and Philip K Dick era literary SF books and the big action SF movies based on them (except Freejack which is the most monstrous wreck you could possibly make out of Sheckley's Immortality Inc.). There's action, satire, spectacle and a willingness to follow through on hard SF concepts. Vienna's always been interesting about identity, and that's something I've wanted to play with in my story, as you will discover if you buy it...



You can do your buying here, or read Jonny mentioning this as one of his many things coming out here.

Pipeline and as yet unwritten projects definitely involve more Doctor Who, submarines, a RiffTrax Presents release recorded last year, some short fiction, the Festival of Britain and a lengthy piece of factual writing. More later...

Number two, I'm running the Hadrian's Wall Half Marathon again this year- but this year I'm going to be faster. Training's going well and my weight's coming down nicely after quite a sedentary period in 2015.
I'm seeking sponsorship again too, for three charities this year.
They are the Cystic Fibrosis Trust and Invest in ME as before, and the Sheffield Hospitals Charity. The first two have supported friends and people in positions like them and the latter is to assist the hospitals who are helping my wife walk again after her severe leg injury in January 2015. There's a lot the hospitals do that isn't covered by core NHS budgets, and I want to support anything that makes that work easier for them.
If you can sponsor any of these causes you'd make me very happy indeed, and probably make me run quicker. There's a sponsorship link here.

Number three, the National Media Museum is under fire again. It is losing vital funding, staff, and collections, and the Science Museum management that should be working to make it stronger seems intent on stripping it of its assets, broad appeal and curatorial expertise, making it a shadow of the organisation it once was. It feels like a closure by stealth to be honest, and it makes me angry.
I worked at the Museum under its previous name and what's being done to do it at present feels like an insult to its audiences and all those people I worked with.
There's some background here, and petitions you might sign if you'd care to here and here, but I'm afraid signing petitions isn't going to win this battle. This is just the beginning of a long hard fight against philistinism in high places.

Right, that's my bits done. Any other business?

11 Months Later...

I notice I've not been using this blog at all.
Sorry, Twitter seems to have absorbed a lot of my spare "writing things on the internet that hardly anyone looks at" time.

So, what's been happening?

Well, I've had a slightly rotten five months because my wife had a really nasty injury on holiday in January that's put life a bit on hold while she's been recuperating. She's had it worse, of course, she's had me nursing her. Luckily things seem to be getting on track now and there are jollier things in life happening. For example, there are things I've written to plug shamelessly.

So, since we were last here together, two Rifftrax Presents titles with Matthew J Elliott have been released, Scared to Death and Warning From Space.

It seems to be quite an American phenomenon "riffing". Basically, it's talking over films in a manner that hopefully won't spoil the movie for anyone watching it, so you're trying to make jokes in the gaps, so viewers won't miss any plot. We seem to be the only British people doing it, which makes for an interesting balancing act, doing things that make us laugh while trying to keep a largely US audience happy.
I think we're getting better at it. We're working on a fourth title at the moment which I'm rather enjoying.

I've also written another Obverse Books Iris Wildthyme story, which will be out this Autumn. This one's for the hugely talented and ridiculously patient Paul Dale Smith, who trusted me to write a story based on a very vague and partially worked through pitch, and make sense of it as I went along. I think we got there.
That's for The Perennial Miss Wildthyme which sounds like it's going to be a fun collection. It's set in a strange Northern town called Samhain, where all sorts of unlikely beings and events jostle together under slate-grey skies.

I think my story is going to be titled Self Possessed. It's called Doppler Shift on the pre-publicity material, largely because the starting point was doing a sort of homage to Alan Garner's Red Shift, but it's drifted off quite a way from that.

Finally, I've a couple of things happening with Big Finish Productions, as yet unannounced and have just had a Doctor Who play for them released. It's in a collection of Companion Chronicle plays set in the William Hartnell era of Doctor Who, with the other plays written by the brilliant Martin Day and Simon Guerrier. Martin is writing for Carole Ann Ford as Susan, Simon is writing for Peter Purves as Steven and I've done one for Maureen O'Brien as Vicki. Great talents to be working with. You can check out further details here.

Because it's in a set with a shared sleeve, my story, The Unwinding World, doesn't have its own cover, so for those who fancy one, I think it should be something like this.

It's a bit rough and ready and missing all the lettering and so on, but there you are. I'm sure you can do better and I'd love to see your versions.

New things...

Hello, how are you doing? I'm pleased. Particularly if you just contrarily ignored the accepted social form and told me you weren't doing well. I'm all the more pleased for not having heard it.Anyway that's the niceties out the way. It's time to return to the one sided business of me telling you what I'm up to.

Number 1:
The Alchemists is out there and being reviewed. The response is far more positive than I'd feared. There's a lovely review on Amazon.co.uk, nice ones on Sci-fi Bulletin and Doc Oho Reviews, good ratings on Goodreads (I didn't tell you I've dipped a toe in Goodreads, did I?), and some others scattered around that are more measured. It was always thus.

One disappointment a couple of people had is that it wasn't a play about Doctor Who fighting the Nazis and it wasn't darker in tone. I understand, that but in the end I wrote the play I could and a grim piece about fighting the Nazis wasn't the story I felt I could write. Most of the reasons why are about Doctor Who.
Firstly, in a Companion Chronicle for Susan alone (and there are sensible historic and dramatic reasons for making her the solo companion), I couldn't really make the early Doctor the straightforward hero that kind of story would require.
Secondly, the Doctor Who licence is for family appropriate entertainment (the treatment of the Suffragist and Suffragette prisoners in the play The Suffering is the example I'm always reminded of, of real awful history that needed toning down to be acceptable for Who), so any more brutal content, and it's a brutal history, would be tricky to cover. There is darkness in The Alchemists of course, but most of it is beneath the surface. There are things our unworldly narrator sees and reports without understanding that are awful...
Thirdly, I personally feel Doctor Who has presented a bit of a cartoon World War II in recent years that I'd not be entirely comfortable about adding to. For me, and for the flavour of Doctor Who I was writing here, David Whitaker's mention of the impossibility of killing Hitler in the prologue to The Crusaders novel sat better than his comic TV appearance in 2011's Let's Kill Hitler. I wanted to deal with real history on a more human scale, and all the history in the play is true. Even the somewhat bizarre and fantastical McGuffin was a real plan to save Germany from post-World War I ruin. My gut feeling is if you want Doctor Who against inhuman Nazi monsters, you already have the Daleks.

Number 2:
A little over a year ago, a writer friend of mine died, sillily young, and we've put together a book in his memory and to aid people with Cystic Fibrosis, the condition he lived with which led to his early death. You'll be able to buy it as an ebook here soon, with a hard copy available after that.
It's a book written by people he knew, liked, had worked with and others he'd not met working in the same realms of mind-bending fantasy, whimsy and creepy that he did. Not surprisingly, there will be a few names in there Doctor Who fans of a more literary bent know.

It's called Storyteller- A Found Book and it's for Matt. I've written one story and I like to feel I had a small hand in another because I brought the authors together.
The notion behind it is rather fun, it's a whole list of "other titles you may enjoy" from the back of a genuine old book, except now those titles have had to detach themselves from their old stories and make themselves new ones from scratch. Here's the content listing...

Strangers from the Sea –  George Mann
Moon Eyes – Stuart Douglas
Grandad with Snails – Nick Campbell
Seal Morning – Cody Quijano-Schell
Put Out More Flags – Sarah Hadley
The Hanging Tree – Cavan Scott
Honey in the Horn – Mark Manley
The Devil’s Children – Richard Wright
Harlic – A Story of a Grey Seal – Simon Bucher-Jones
Doctor Syn – Ian Potter
The Samurai’s Daughter – Andy Smillie
Black Mischief – Elizabeth Evershed
The Unicorn Leacock – Orna Petit and Jacqueline Rayner

Everyone's written these stories for nothing and it's for a great cause.

Number 3:
Just over a week ago I recorded a piece with Matthew J Elliott, the British writer of American radio, mystery fiction expert, and quickfire gag man who I've come to know through a mutual friend. It's for the US company RiffTrax and should soon be available from their website, I'll let you know when it is. It's a comic commentary to accompany a movie. If you know the series Mystery Science Theater 3000 you know the kind of thing it is already. If not, think of it as a director's commentary almost entirely composed of gags, that sit on top of a film but doesn't prevent you following it. It's an extra layer of enjoyment, which to be honest this particular film needs. It's an odd little piece called King of Kong Island which includes many peculiar pleasures and delights but you really do need a bit of help if you're going to watch it all the way through.

Number 4:
I have been announced as doing some more Doctor Who! Next year, I have a 4 episode audio adventure coming out for the wonderful Maureen O'Brien and Peter Purves, and a really smashing guest cast which is yet to be revealed (though one of them has actually announced their involvement on Twitter). It's called The Bounty of Ceres and is an attempt to imagine the 60s TARDIS crew in something approaching the hard SF of Arthur C Clarke. Writing it, I deliberately imagined which bits would have to have been done on film or using Kirby Wires or would just have looked awful on the TV budget of the day. Then, I wrote them anyway, knowing on audio they'd look amazing. You can pre-order that one here.

Right, I'd better go and make some other things for you to buy or not. See you soon!

Alchemology

Yes, Doctor Who - The Alchemists is out! I can hardly believe it, it seems a long time since I wrote it. This may be because it is.
Anyway, I thought some of you might be interested in some of the things I used researching it.
There's more than listed here, Wedekind's Lulu plays and Pabst's film of Pandora's Box for example which I think have a homeopathic influence on the play, but nothing a sane person could spot.
There's also a bunch of internet bookmarks on an old laptop, covering the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, old railway lines, the rise of the Nazis and how Aleister Crowley and Christopher Isherwood were connected amongst other things. All the kind of stuff I imagine gets you interrogated at airports...

Books
Germania, Simon Winder. An opinionated, personal and very readable guide to the geography and history of Germany.
When Money Dies, Adam Fergusson. All you ever wanted to know about Weimar hyper-inflation and a little more besides. 
Mr Norris Changes Trains, Christopher Isherwood. A fictional account of his life in Berlin.
Goodbye to Berlin, Christopher Isherwood. A slightly less fictional account of his life in Berlin.
Little Man, What Now?, Hans Fallada. A simply and poignantly told story of ordinary life in the Germany of the early 1930s.
The Wages of Destruction, Adam Tooze. A thorough, detailed examination of the economics underpinning Nazi Germany, which I found the opening chapters of very useful.

TV
Heimat, Edgar Reitz. A beautifully told saga of modern German history told through the lives of people in the fictional village of Schabbach. I just looked at a couple of episodes this time, but it's really a masterpiece of TV you should let roll over you.
Berlin Alexanderplatz, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. An extraordinary bit of television based on Alfred Döblin's novel of the same name, set in late 1920s Berlin. It's deliberately slow paced, and explodes into an astounding allegorical vision which not all viewers are quite prepared for at the end, but it does amazing things along the way
The Nazis- A Warning From History, Laurence Rees. A hugely important BBC documentary series, given incredible power by the first person testimonies it features.
Christopher and his Kind, Kevin Elyot. A dramatisation of Isherwood's biography, beautifully directed by Geoffrey Sax and starring Matt Smith as Isherwood and Toby Jones as Gerald Hamilton, the inspiration for Isherwood's Mr Norris.

Films
Kuhle Wampe, Bertolt Brecht. A short film dramatising the plight of the urban poor in Berlin and showing the radical alternative that many turned to. Made in 1931, it was invaluable for first hand social detail.
Doctor Mabuse- The Gambler, Fritz Lang. This film was made ten years before the period I was setting my story in, but I found it useful for tone. It's absurdly long by modern standards but it has two or three wonderful scenes and beautifully dramatises the paranoid notion of a shadowy figure mysteriously manipulating gambling, crime, economics and ordinary people for his own ends. 
M, Fritz Lang. Absolutely in the period I was using and again great for social detail. There's a constant sense of fear below the surface. If you've not seen it, you really should do for Peter Lorre alone.
The Testament of Doctor Mabuse, Fritz Lang. A sequel to both of the above, and a cracking dramatic ride, with some eerie special effects. The sense of a criminal underground and the accepted belief that it was organised is writ large in all these three films.
Cabaret, Bob Fosse. A 1970s filtered version of Isherwood. It's a loose adaptation of a stage musical adaptation of a stage adaptation of Goodbye to Berlin, so it's gone through quite a few transformations along the way. Still, an extremely moving piece of work.

Radio
The Chemist of Life and Death, Chris Bowlby. Hearing this was what set me thinking about using Fritz Haber as the key to the story. You can still hear it here on the BBC Website.

I think that covers most of it. I'll probably bore you senseless being more specific once the play's been out a while and most people who fancy hearing it will have done.

Promotional Messages

Hello, hello! Sit down, get yourself comfy! Reach for your credit card. It's been too long.
Today is International "Did You Know There Is Stuff You Can Buy?" Day, the anniversary of which is celebrated daily in most parts of the world.
But wait, that's not all!
There's also some free stuff (but nothing like as much).

Free thing 1: No Tomatoes
A BBC Radio 4 Extra repeat run of my BBC 7 (eeh, those were the days) sketch show commences on Tuesday the 26th of March.  Go here to read all about it with my name everywhere or here if you'd rather minimise my involvement but be one click nearer playing the episodes.
No Tomatoes can be listened to for free on demand on iPlayer radio anywhere in the world (each episode available for a week after transmission). Free! It is an excellent bargain at that price.

Free thing 2: A Trailer
Do you see how the amount you get for nothing plummets as you go down the list?
My Doctor Who audio play The Alchemists has a trailer, and you can hear it for absolutely nothing by clicking the "Listen to Trailer" button on this page (also an excellent page to buy it from). It's set in 1930s Berlin, involved a truck load of research and has nothing to do with the synopsis someone's put up for it on Wikipedia! They've quite intelligently extrapolated from the blurb but, erm, completely made their own story up (citation needed).
The Alchemists is now out in August, having been unlucky with a couple of delays since it was first announced however long ago it was. One was an actor availability issue that pushed recording back and the other was a last minute technical issue which meant the CD wouldn't be ready in time for the revised release date. It's all glamour, isn't it?

Not that dear stuff 1: Things by me on Amazon.co.uk
Look at this lovely list! There's lots of Doctor Who related stuff here- fictional, factual, passing quite near Doctor Who and waving, and the book I wrote on UK TV History focusing on the independent production sector, which is properly all grown up and not even a teeny bit about Doctor Who.
All the items are at marvellous competitive prices due to Amazon's policy of not paying the tax it should and only accepting stock at evilly discounted prices. I will of course get stuff all or next to stuff all for any of these purchases. Maybe, if you get some of this not dear stuff this way you should think about getting some of the stuff that actually helps smaller companies survive directly from them.

Stuff that will be pretty good value for money that you can't quite order yet 1: A short story
I'm writing a story set in Phil Purser-Hallard's City of the Saved Universe (which he maintains is mainly this Universe plus some stuff that hasn't happened yet). It's in a category all of it's own of original Science Fiction that waves at a Universe that nods and winks to the Doctor Who one. There's a bit of a preview here in lieu of Obverse Books, the lovely independent publishers behind it, managing to monetise your interest in it and bunging up an order page.

Stuff that was free as a download you need to pay more to get hold of in CD form 1: The Revenants
My audio drama that was given away with Doctor Who Magazine in mp3 form is soon to be yours to own in a format audiophiles don't dislike quite as much. It's being offered as part of a deluxe Doctor Who CD boxset. You can get the 2 CD multiple Doctor audio adventure separately cheaper, but for spending a bit more dosh it'll also come in really lovely packaging along with 2 CD documentaries (one about the adventure's making and the other about the history of Big Finish, the company that makes the Doctor Who audios) and my play.
This is however a limited edition so I suspect if you don't go for it this year it'll be tricky to get hold of in years to come. You can buy that here.

Stuff that is freely given and is thus valued as worthless 1: My Love to All of You.
No, really. I'm proud of you for getting this far down this litany of self promotion. Thank you.

There, that was nearly fun, wasn't it?
I've recently had some casting news on future plays which has made me very happy indeed, but I can't say much now. One of the people involved has mentioned it on the internet, but even I couldn't find it until I really hunted, so I suspect you won't either. I had the advantage of knowing their name. All will become clear.
I know people like to find out stuff in advance (and that's pretty much the only reason you've got this far down this list) but it's probably better to wait and avoid the anticipointment of piecing together something in your head that real life then fails to match. That person who made up their own version of The Alchemists on Wikipedia is going to feel very let down for starters...

Recent doings and Revenants (slight return)

Hello. Excuse the dust. I've been doing stuff.
First things first- I think some time ago I promised those of you who cared some background info on my Doctor Who Companion Chronicle, The Revenants once it was no longer a free download and the chances of spoilers had reduced.

It started with the brief to do something with Ian Chesterton missing his family and home, so from that came the idea of putting him just near enough home in time that he could feasibly end his adventures early and return to his old life. The idea of missing families suggested setting the story just after Susan left the Doctor too. This had the advantage of getting William Russell out of playing two womens' roles in the play.
A daft Brighton Rock and Hancock's Half Hour shaped late 50s/early 60s idea came next, and left sharpish. I've been intrigued for years by Piers Britton's notion of 60s Dr Who as a clash of Modernism and Edwardian styles and thought a story where Brighton Mods were science fictional might work but it was too silly to sustain. Anyway, The Space Museum is already 60s Who's definitive Teddy Boys versus Mods in Space story.

David, the producer, suggested going down a Quatermass line instead and the new storyline became essentially two thirds of my later Counter-Measures story, The Pelage Project. The major differences were a completely different climax, a hinted at origin story for the villain Temple which is only homeopathically in the finished play and a large section at a school. Exploring the utilitarian, indoctrinating schooling of Pelage was a natural fit for Ian, and could be done without child actors in the Companion Chronicles format.
Child actors are tricky- their working hours are limited and the really good ones are in constant demand. Write a child part for audio and you can easily end up in trouble- you may get an adult impersonator or a child who's not up to carrying the weight of story you've given them.
Anyway, after that plot went to Counter-Measures I had to come up with a new one for Ian. I had the idea of doing something playing with folklore and magic influenced by the writer Alan Garner and a book by Mollie Hunter that had scared and enthralled me as a child, The Haunted Mountain. The Haunted Mountain's story is set in Scotland and it set me thinking about using Scottish legends, which in turn reminded me of an amazing holiday around the archaeological sites of Orkney and Shetland.

They're beautiful, mysterious islands and you can easily get in touch with that part of you that's scared of weird stuff in the night up there. There's also a real sense of time layered on itself too. Time as a space or a landscape, not a straight line. Sounds a bit bonkers but there you are.
I decided to do a story that suggested Time on Orkney was a mess (and it was probably at least partly the Doctor's fault) with fairies and ogres and so forth creaking at the edges of it. The twist was they'd all be revealed to be different people's visions of the other tribes they interacted with in prehistory- slight, non-Iron working, tribes became fairies warily trading with lumpen thuggish incomers, ogres. The idea was we share traditions of both 'species' because we're descended from both tribes and our traditions have intermingled. On Orkney the word 'Trow' covers magical beasties of both descriptions, fay and brutish.
There's a lovely, atmospheric Radio Scotland programme called When Standing Stones Come Down To Drink about Orkney and Shetland traditions which captures a lot of the atmosphere I was after http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00wnlct. I hope it's repeated some day, it's well worth a listen.

Anyway, that idea was a touch nebulous, involved and undramatic, and, as David pointed out, was likely to be vetoed by the BBC for including fairies. Fairies basically exist and are as you saw them in Torchwood in the Doctor Who universe. Anything else is going to be a hard sell. David suggested doing something a bit like Joe Dante's Gremlins instead. That was when I decided to invent the Marsh Wains. They're Marsh Children really (I spelled the Scottish word "wean" the less common "wain" to try and disguise that). They're based on the real preserved bog bodies you find all over Northern Europe, but mine are much gloopier and creepier, with the whole still being alive and being entirely made of peat thing.

They're also looking for family, or a replacement for it, just like Ian and the Doctor. The core story is (and I realised this in horror, only when I came to finish it) pretty much that Steven Moffat tells in The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances. It is also a "broken spring" story. No real villain just a technological mistake that needs resolving.
The never-ending magical battle of the dead on Hoy comes from Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedin_and_H%C3%B6gni We're lucky that Barbara has read this. She is the world's greatest history teacher.
At one point I was going to have the Marsh Wains at the old naval base on Hoy. There's all sorts of exciting tunnels and oil and things there but it was too fussy for a story that's essentially an hour long two-hander. Janet's cottage was much more contained.
Janet's cottage is based on a croft interior from the Stromness museum and Janet herself is based on Janet Forsyth, a historical Spae Wife http://www.orkneyjar.com/folklore/witchcraft/stormwitch.htm. If the plot had carried on being about fractured time she almost certainly would have been her, and her miraculous rescue from Marwick's Hole would have been down to the Doctor's intervention. The Orkneyjar site above is terrific for lots of  Orcadian lore, actually. It's a really great resource. Go here after and then book a holiday.

The Wissfornjarl, sadly, does not exist. Similar figures do but him I invented, the name is just the Norse words for wise old chief. Similarly, the barrow the TARDIS is discovered in has not been found on Hoy yet. There are several broch mounds there and there could well be more, but we've not found them in quite the area I put Janet's home. Ideally, I wanted the TARDIS to be inside The Dwarfie Stane http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarfie_Stane but annoyingly the Neolithic engineers didn't get the proportions quite right for stuffing police boxes in.

The, as yet undiscovered, barrow is much more like Maeshowe http://www.maeshowe.co.uk/maeshowe/runes.html. This does raise a question though. The barrow would be likely to have been closed up about 5000 years ago (though there's evidence these days they were popped in and out of for generations), did the Doctor go back that far?
He might have done. He might be the sole reason Time is messed up on Orkney. He might be the sole originator of the myth of the Wissfornjarl. He might have lived the 5000 years between him and Ian and Barbara a day at a time or tried a speedier, technological approach to get back to them. On the other hand he may just have spent a few years or decades on Hoy. I deliberately left the options open for the listener.

One of the things I like in folkloric stories are the gaps for your imagination, and this is purposely one of those. All we know is that, while he waited, the Doctor read a selection of books he seems to know well in later years that it seems unlikely he did when we first met him! I think that book the second Doctor has with the sea weed creature listed in it is one of them.
Barbara's place in the modern day is a similar gap in the story. I think she's now dead and seeing her equivalent is part of what brought Ian back to Orkney. You don't have to think she's dead though, and I don't want you to either. If she is I'm certainly not going to be the one to tell you.

Second things, second- I've been writing some more for Big Finish in recent months. Another thing for Ian and another set slightly later in the first Doctor's era which I've done the first draft of but which has much more work awaiting (the secondary characters aren't quite there yet).

Third things, third- I'll be writing a marginally Who related but in no way Who story for Obverse books at the start of next year, but right now I'm going to write something with no series name above the title for a change and see how that goes.

Counter-Measures is go!

It's here at last, the first four instalments of science fiction thriller, Counter-Measures were released on Thursday!  It's a series of audio dramas from those lovely people at Big Finish that lives somewhere in between the BBC's 1950s Quatermass and 1970s Doomwatch series and, despite being a Doctor Who spin-off, it requires no Doctor Who knowledge whatsoever.  Our heroes are two scientists and an RAF captain who were caught up in bizarre alien goings on with the Doctor in 1963 and have now been reunited in a government funded team investigating the odd.  It's gritty and witty, action-packed and tense, has an utterly exemplary cast and sounds beautifully 60s. 

Here's an audio teaser...  The Big Finish Counter-Measures preview.

The series has had a gratifyingly great response so far, with lots of lovely comments already.  Mine (pictured below) is episode 3 and the whole boxset is eminently buyable right now, and as if 4 hours of top-notch drama isn't enough you get an hour of the creators talking about it on a bonus disc too.  Imagine!  Whole minutes of me chunnering with little thought or preparation but spoken aloud not typed.

You can be one of the series' eminent buyers right here!  Do it now, before the planet is doomed.  While you're there, you might also want to pre-order this, a Doctor Who story by me.  It's out next April so only order it if you think we're just a bit doomed and will make it to next year, or think we're so doomed you may as well just throw all your money away now.