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Post by selimpensfiction on Apr 2, 2020 20:12:13 GMT
Hi folks. FYI, over on Twitter, @irenewildthyme is organizing a listen-along of the Paul Spragg memorial short trips. Forever Fallen & Landbound on Sunday April 5th at 3 GMT. Last Day at Work and Best Laid Plans same time the following Sunday. Ben Tedds, Harry Draper and I will be live tweeting along.
@bentedds42 @bowtieanimation @selimpensfctn
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Post by constonks on Apr 2, 2020 20:49:53 GMT
Hi folks. FYI, over on Twitter, @irenewildthyme is organizing a listen-along of the Paul Spragg memorial short trips. Forever Fallen & Landbound on Sunday April 5th at 3 GMT. Last Day at Work and Best Laid Plans same time the following Sunday. Ben Tedds, Harry Draper and I will be live tweeting along. @bentedds42 @bowtieanimation @selimpensfctn theotherjosh - have you seen this? (It almost seems ridiculous to me that there are already FOUR of these!)
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Post by selimpensfiction on Apr 2, 2020 22:09:46 GMT
Hi folks. FYI, over on Twitter, @irenewildthyme is organizing a listen-along of the Paul Spragg memorial short trips. Forever Fallen & Landbound on Sunday April 5th at 3 GMT. Last Day at Work and Best Laid Plans same time the following Sunday. Ben Tedds, Harry Draper and I will be live tweeting along. @bentedds42 @bowtieanimation @selimpensfctn theotherjosh - have you seen this? (It almost seems ridiculous to me that there are already FOUR of these!) Thanks! Was just going to do this.
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Post by theotherjosh on Apr 3, 2020 3:22:51 GMT
Ooh, I have not! Thank you very much for the heads up! Time to dust off the Twitter account. I am the ridiculously named Charles Boogerjuice (@cboogerjuice)
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Post by Deleted on Apr 4, 2020 21:44:25 GMT
Retweeted by the official Big Finish account!
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Post by Deleted on Apr 12, 2020 11:53:19 GMT
A reminder:
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Post by mark687 on Apr 12, 2020 13:12:02 GMT
"Live" Interview with Ben and Harry moderated by Alfie Shaw (Beware sound not quite in sync partially at the start) www.youtube.com/watch?v=beYWcNKamTcPlus maybe something else after 5:30PM (UK Time) Also Regards mark687
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Post by butler on Apr 17, 2020 13:55:39 GMT
Was thinking about this contest (fingers crossed it runs again this year) and writing in general and suddenly realised something completely obvious:
There is little to be gained from showing a character learning something if the reader already understands it.
It may be obvious, but it was a complete head-slap moment for me. Every time I've ever written a scene where the Doctor established their credentials to a skeptical newbie, no matter how much I edited and re-wrote that scene it would always drag when I read it back to myself. I could never put my finger on why, but now I get it: It drags because the reader already knows all that stuff. Once they start reading that scene they aren't sharing an adventure any more - they're mentally tapping their foot at the end of the page, waiting for the POV character to catch up with them.
"Yes, yes, he's really an alien. Yes, it's a really a time machine. Yes, it's bigger on the - look, can we get on with it? I could be playing Animal Crossing right now."
Thank goodness I can stop trying to make those scenes work now and just avoid writing them entirely.
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Post by nucleusofswarm on Apr 23, 2020 14:03:51 GMT
If you want to write and are stuck, try this from Thunderbirds writer Danny Stack:
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Post by butler on May 1, 2020 5:37:39 GMT
I can't remember where, but I recall reading comments from Paul Cornell a while ago that he believes Doctor Who stories should follow the "vintage" rule (my term) - that is, they should fit exactly within the time period of the show in which they are set. So, for example, you wouldn't show the Doctor talking about regeneration or Gallifrey in a First Doctor story as those concepts weren't established until later - even though, from the point of view of the modern canon, the Doctor would definitely have known what they were back then.
I'm curious what other fan writers think about the vintage rule. I mostly agree with it, but I think there are times when the only way you can explore an interesting idea is to break it.
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Post by constonks on May 3, 2020 2:38:57 GMT
I can't remember where, but I recall reading comments from Paul Cornell a while ago that he believes Doctor Who stories should follow the "vintage" rule (my term) - that is, they should fit exactly within the time period of the show in which they are set. So, for example, you wouldn't show the Doctor talking about regeneration or Gallifrey in a First Doctor story as those concepts weren't established until later - even though, from the point of view of the modern canon, the Doctor would definitely have known what they were back then. I'm curious what other fan writers think about the vintage rule. I mostly agree with it, but I think there are times when the only way you can explore an interesting idea is to break it. I like it in certain examples - like in concepts not showing up too early - the First and Second Doctor should pretty much always say "my people", not "Time Lords", "regeneration" as a word shouldn't show up until Sarah's time, nor the word Gallifrey. But where do we stand on the First Doctor visiting a historically accurate period between 1960s and now? I'd aim for "maybe??" although I know it's been done, at least in the Short Trips. And I would also say personally I don't think writers should be bound by keeping things too traditional - An Ordinary Life never would have been made in 1965, for example, nor would the Sara or Oliver Companion Chronicles, but they fit very well within the First Doctor canon. Pure historicals stopped in 1966 (other than Black Orchid), but that doesn't mean the Tenth Doctor couldn't have one. It's a hazy line, for sure.
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Post by Jeedai on May 3, 2020 4:16:22 GMT
I figure there's an in-universe reason for maintaining the omissions of One and Two's backstories, and it's another bit of info that's not revealed until the end of Two's era. They're both fugitives from Gallifrey, and therefore have a strong motive for not letting tales of a runaway Time Lord get littered across history: It will draw the attention of other Time Lords.
Announcing themselves as a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey in the Constellation of Kasterberous would just be asking for the CIA to swoop in on them. So they are both cagey about revealing their alien-ness around people (This excuse also covers One's suggestion that he's only got one heart. He's covering his tracks in case someone comes looking at the mess he leaves behind at the end of the serial).
Extending that caginess to the individual doctors, One is sensitive to anything that might undermine the sense of authority he exudes, such drawing attention to the fact that under the skin he's vastly different from everyone around him. And Two just enjoys keeping everyone guessing about everything even when he doesn't have to, because he's kind of a troll.
One does acknowledge the Monk and Drefyus Master as members of 'his people'. But to an extent he has to cover for the their origins as well. If the CIA gets their hands on the Master or the Monk because of events the Doctor was involved in, they'll have a lead him too. Given that The Day Of The Doctor shows us that Unit got their hands on pretty much all of the Doctor's companions at one time or another to interview, this turns out to be much-needed foresight on One's part.
Three, by contest, has been caught and leashed by the people he had been running from. And among UNIT personnel can't just change the subject and run off to the next adventure. So he starts being more open about who and what he is, to the point that proclaiming it becomes the new normal.
But that shouldn't stop an adventure for One or Two involving regen or discussion of other rouge Time Lords, if it carefully gets the companions out of the way when the words are used. Such as the Tenth Doctor Adventures set where Ten doesn't speak Judoon *near Donna* to avoid contradicting The Stolen Earth. I would say when writing internal monologues or scenes from One or Two's POV, or scene with just One and Susan, or One and Two and another rogue, the words could come up quite naturally.
Actually, nix Susan. The First Doctor might speak to her in ways that reinforce the 'Never Talk About Where We Come From' rule.
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Post by Deleted on May 3, 2020 8:36:44 GMT
I can't remember where, but I recall reading comments from Paul Cornell a while ago that he believes Doctor Who stories should follow the "vintage" rule (my term) - that is, they should fit exactly within the time period of the show in which they are set. So, for example, you wouldn't show the Doctor talking about regeneration or Gallifrey in a First Doctor story as those concepts weren't established until later - even though, from the point of view of the modern canon, the Doctor would definitely have known what they were back then. I'm curious what other fan writers think about the vintage rule. I mostly agree with it, but I think there are times when the only way you can explore an interesting idea is to break it. I like the challenge of it as a writer. It's all about texture. A lot of the concepts we talk about today have their roots in prior time periods, but require a certain degree of puzzle solving to pull apart and stitch back together. Holography, for instance, was a concept that was picking up speed in the 1960s thanks to the laser, but the word "hologram" wouldn't have been as common as it is now. So... what do we call it? Well, maybe in that context we just use the term "light-image" or "kaleidograph" instead and explain that: Similarly, there are a lot of concepts that the show talks about during its initial years that would be familiar to anyone watching ten, twenty years later, they just exist under a different name. The First Doctor's use of "the fourth dimension", for example, is a good catch-all term for the time vortex, the Web of Time and/or the Laws of Time. Those first few episodes deal quite heavily with the Web, despite the name only finally materialising in the mid-80s; viz. Attack of the Cybermen. It's so snug a fit that I always have to double-check my memory because it sounds like something from the Second Doctor's days:It's that balance of learning all the rules in order to break some of them. One of the big stories to do that for those earlier tales is The Man in the Velvet Mask, where one of the major subplots is the First Doctor's upcoming Change. This is him at his most fragile until The Tenth Planet. He's barely clinging on for most of the story, trying to stave off the initial stages of what we recognise as his regeneration, yet it comes across as something fundamentally alien to us. Something out of a German Expressionist or Soyuzmultfilm picture. Dodo finds his half-skeletal body, sitting rigid in the console room, and is terrified because she thinks he's dead. We've never seen a renewal quite like this before. It's like watching an incense stick burn down to its base. The Doctor's not afraid, despite how terrifying it is from the outside, but he wants to do it alone. It strikes me a bit like classic film noir during the Hays Production Code period. You couldn't do this, that or the other thing, but filmmakers found ways to subvert those restrictions. Ironically, producing content that ends up twice as striking than if it were straightforwardly permitted. An added benefit is also that once you learn the texture, you can put it in a blender and create something wholly unique. Take the First Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki, and stick them in the midst of The Claws of Axos (with producer Verity Lambert and script editor Dennis Spooner). Take the Fourth Doctor, Romana I and K9, and stick them during The Reign of Terror (under producer Graeme Williams and script editor Antony Read).
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Post by constonks on May 4, 2020 5:07:23 GMT
But where do we stand on the First Doctor visiting a historically accurate period between 1960s and now? I'd aim for "maybe??" although I know it's been done, at least in the Short Trips. Of course, the day after I posted this, I came up with a potential First Doctor entry set in 1977...
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Post by Deleted on May 4, 2020 9:56:43 GMT
But where do we stand on the First Doctor visiting a historically accurate period between 1960s and now? I'd aim for "maybe??" although I know it's been done, at least in the Short Trips. Of course, the day after I posted this, I came up with a potential First Doctor entry set in 1977... *nods* Ideas are good like that. " Wait, wait, wait, wait--!" " A moment of your time. Have you considered...?" It's got me thinking: What are people's thoughts on stories like The Tenth Planet or The Enemy of the World, set in a future that has since been overtaken by the present? Is there a greater interest in bringing it closer to the fantasy speculation of the time or to the real-world events that have occurred since then? I reckon you can do both with a few retrofitted shenanigans, but I'd be interested to hear other writers' takes on it.
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Post by constonks on May 4, 2020 15:37:06 GMT
It's got me thinking: What are people's thoughts on stories like The Tenth Planet or The Enemy of the World, set in a future that has since been overtaken by the present? Is there a greater interest in bringing it closer to the fantasy speculation of the time or to the real-world events that have occurred since then? I reckon you can do both with a few retrofitted shenanigans, but I'd be interested to hear other writers' takes on it. Ooh boy, that's a big one. When 2018 was the future, it could be anything - rockets, underwater cities, aliens, robots, who knows! Now that it's the past, it's one thing. iPhones, Brexit, Donald Trump, TikTok. This goes for any future-set franchise that marches on past its "future dates", of course. Blade Runner: 2049 chose to ignore it and keep its 2019 as a world of spaceships and robots, Star Trek usually squints at its dates and pretends it makes sense (the Eugenic Wars of the 1990s come to mind). In the Doctor Who universe, where we have both Salamander's 2018 and Yasmin Khan's 2018, it seems to me that our "present day" means something. It's like a wave of treacle spreading one second into the future every second, sticking events in place. 2018 and its history is now as fixed as the events of The Aztecs. I call it "metachronology" but I'm sure the Gallifreyans have some other name for it. How does that work practically, if you're writing a story set, say, in 2019, with the Second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria? I think you pretty much have to set it in OUR 2019. You can come up with an explanation - maybe Salamander was torn out of history when he was thrown in the Vortex (or maybe he altered things himself when he landed in the 70s as per Titan Comics...) - or you can ignore it. But I think the days of Space Future 2000 in Doctor Who are long past. PS. What a lovely gif.
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Post by Deleted on May 5, 2020 6:25:59 GMT
It's got me thinking: What are people's thoughts on stories like The Tenth Planet or The Enemy of the World, set in a future that has since been overtaken by the present? Is there a greater interest in bringing it closer to the fantasy speculation of the time or to the real-world events that have occurred since then? I reckon you can do both with a few retrofitted shenanigans, but I'd be interested to hear other writers' takes on it. Ooh boy, that's a big one. When 2018 was the future, it could be anything - rockets, underwater cities, aliens, robots, who knows! Now that it's the past, it's one thing. iPhones, Brexit, Donald Trump, TikTok. This goes for any future-set franchise that marches on past its "future dates", of course. Blade Runner: 2049 chose to ignore it and keep its 2019 as a world of spaceships and robots, Star Trek usually squints at its dates and pretends it makes sense (the Eugenic Wars of the 1990s come to mind). In the Doctor Who universe, where we have both Salamander's 2018 and Yasmin Khan's 2018, it seems to me that our "present day" means something. It's like a wave of treacle spreading one second into the future every second, sticking events in place. 2018 and its history is now as fixed as the events of The Aztecs. I call it "metachronology" but I'm sure the Gallifreyans have some other name for it. How does that work practically, if you're writing a story set, say, in 2019, with the Second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria? I think you pretty much have to set it in OUR 2019. You can come up with an explanation - maybe Salamander was torn out of history when he was thrown in the Vortex (or maybe he altered things himself when he landed in the 70s as per Titan Comics...) - or you can ignore it. But I think the days of Space Future 2000 in Doctor Who are long past. PS. What a lovely gif.Thanks. Metachronology, that's a good way of looking at it. The "palimphest" view of the third axis: a) space, b) time and then c) you, the traveller. Everyone reacting to everyone else's interference. The present day in Doctor Who strikes me as one that's a smidge further ahead than our own. I'm thinking the laser guns from The Seeds of Doom. The technology is there, but it's not commonplace yet. You can hire out a hovertruck or car, but it's a specialty vehicle like someone purchasing a moon buggy from Cape Canaveral in the 70s. For the rest, it's kind of nice that a lot of Enemy of the World's worldbuilding doesn't need too much tweaking. Astrid's mention of catching a rocket could be updated by mentioning its a private airline service (a supersonic successor to Concorde? ) or putting a SpaceX in front of it. The World Zone Authority's the hardest part, I think it's meant to emulate the World Government idea floating around at the time, but maybe it's influence is less total than it first appears. An up-in-coming experiment in international cooperation than a full-blown status quo. Interestingly, the further our own society develops, the more probable some of those previously wild technological/cultural inventions become. We can see the connective tissue that might have led from X to Y. WOTAN, for instance, in The War Machines sounds as though it's talking about an AI-governed internet. One where the danger is complete domination by artificial intelligence. No human insight, oversight or even input.
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Post by Jeedai on May 5, 2020 8:39:07 GMT
But where do we stand on the First Doctor visiting a historically accurate period between 1960s and now? I'd aim for "maybe??" although I know it's been done, at least in the Short Trips. Of course, the day after I posted this, I came up with a potential First Doctor entry set in 1977... To keep the 'imagined future' vibe of the early show while also remaining accurate historically, if that's your goal, I'd suggest researching some late-70s items to decorate your 'sets' with that haven't lasted the test of time to become icons of the decade (for good or ill). Things that can come off as 'close but not quite' to the readers of 2020. That, or find way to describe icons like polyester leisure suits and disco shoes in a way that them sells them as strange and unique sights to the characters without pointing and laughing at them in the typical "Look at how silly and unfashionable they were!" parody style. The back-heavy lines of a Ford Pinto, or he discordant glare of a paisley tie. The same could go for the better-remembered examples of the era, like the forest of light and sound that is a video game arcade. Or, from the First Doctor's perspective, a noisy and tiresome waste of time, entirely too dark and crowded. To refer back to my first paragraph, how many people remember that video games often came out in sit-down coffee-table format back then?... Hmm, maybe a bad example. If any 60s-native companions are part of your story, then they'll be seeing something they've never seen before and seeing it without the pop-culture baggage we've piled onto the decade. Make the 70s another alien culture for them to explore.
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Post by Whovitt on May 5, 2020 9:14:08 GMT
I think the concept of trying to make it all fit went out the window when 2020 began. The Power of the Daleks is supposed to be set in 2020 (according to the original TV trailer) so I think that about puts paid to anything we might have been able to do to fix things
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Post by Deleted on May 5, 2020 9:29:22 GMT
Two words (and an awful lot of hand waving...)
Alternate History.
Does the Tardis not only travel forwards and backwards in time, but also sideways?
Just saying...
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