Write about a time you broke: The law.

642 This post contains some law breaking. The above photograph above wasn't posted with the permission of the copyright holder, I just searched for a picture of movie Dredd on Google Images and grabbed this from an Ars Technica article.  Fair use doesn't come into play because it's not there for the purposes of criticism.  Saying that I wish the helmet wasn't quite so large probably doesn't count.  Perhaps if I recommend that you all go buy the Dredd film which is remarkably cheap right now on Amazon, it might count as a promotional usage, but I'm not sure.

Which is the problem with being online now.  We're all skirting on the edges of criminality, if not falling straight in.  YouTube is awash with material not uploaded by the original copyright holder and we've all watched it at some point.  It's impossible not to without incredible diligence.  Plus, given how protective corporations are of their material, its often assumed that there's a kind of approval that some of this material is out there.  The BBC often embeds third party videos of their own archive material on their own website.  What are we to make of that?

Write about a time you broke: A heart.

642 None that I know of, not really, and not on purpose. But that's the point isn't it? My relationship radar is so appalling I wouldn't have seen the signs to begin with. There's one occasion when I've realised that there might have been something there after the fact, months after I last spoke to the person, and that's probably for the best.  That was around twenty-five years ago.  Since then?  Haven't any idea.  Imagine if someone who reads this blog actually gets back to me and says, "Well ..." Shiver.

Remain in Light (Short Trips: Snapshots).

Prose The main theme of Snapshots is how the Doctor affects the lives of the incidental people he meets, those who witness his heroism. Remain in Light offers the first person recollections of Anton, who's staying at a friend of a friend's beach house and is startled when the Doctor calls him and asks him to retrieve a body bag from the beach containing an unconscious Lucie who he's then tasked with reviving. It's a killer opening which you could well imagine as a teaser in the Moffat era which then leads into neat little story about how some people seem to exist as myths and fairy tales and anecdotes rather than a real human being. One of the silent characters on The Archers, Nile's first wife Maris on Frasier or Tino in My So-Called Life.  Despite the brevity of the pagination, Eddie Robson captures the sense of place, Malibu in the 1980s superbly, aided by musical suggestions throughout as through he's constructing the soundtrack album for a film version.  On a couple of occasions, the lyrics of tracks subtly mirror the on page action without making it thuddingly obvious.    While reading, I asked Alexa to play each track as it was suggested and was amazed to discover a few songs which sound about as plausible as John Smith and the Common Men but are entirely real (and that the talking hockey-puck could understand what I was saying).  This was the first prose adventure for Lucie Miller and she's right there on the page - you can hear Sheridan voice behind every word, especially when the contemporary references come crashing in.  Also full marks for the Sugababes reference, Mr Robson, gold star.
Placement: Before The Young Lions in the slowly developing Short Trips mini-season.

Write about a time you broke: A bone.

642 Medically, I've been pretty lucky. Apart from this anxiety disorder which is dragging on, water infections, root canal and some rubella in my teens and many, many colds, the only occasions when I've needed to visit the hospital have been for a hernia operation and after a bully punched me in the face at school for some stitches.  Despite also having had my hand trapped in the door of a private hire taxi and a skidding motorbike knocking me over (after the rider was involved in a hit and run), none of my bones have broken.

What must it be like?  Shock followed by excruciating pain, I suppose, and in the very worst cases the ability to see something which is supposed to be supporting some vital physical function on the outside of the body.  With my disposition it would probably be the worst thing which has ever happened to me, as these things usually are, even though plenty of other people seem to take it in the their stride, at least after the event, even though some of them find it very difficult to take an actual stride then.  Rest assured if I am unlucky in the future, you'll hear about it.  A lot.

Tweet the story of your life.

642

Born, nursery school, primary school, secondary school, university, PMSA, Liverpool Museum, Walker, RBS. NatWest, Liverpool Direct, university again, other things (won't tell). Not married, no kids, hernia, anxiety disorder. Lots of films, Doctor Who, Shakespeare and blogging.

— Stuart Ian Burns (@feelinglistless) November 13, 2017

Bafflement and Devotion (Doctor Who Magazine #289).

Prose It's March 2000, just under half way through the gap between the TV Movie and Rose and what many of us think of as the Eighth Doctor era. It's a year since I began reading Doctor Who Magazine regularly and I'm still generally baffled by anything written about the spin-off media, only really listening to the McGann audios amid catching up on the television stories. So this short piece of meta-fiction from Paul Magrs in which his creation Iris Wildthyme considers her own existence in relation to the Doctor would have passed me by as "interesting even though I don't understand much of it".  Now it's a fascinating glimpse into where the franchise was in that moment, optimistically ploughing forward away from television, servicing its diminishing fanbase but recently given a shot in the arm by the launch of Big Finish.  Meanwhile, DWM's in an unimpeachable phase, mixing articles consolidating the history of the programme, a comic strip at the peak of its powers (this issue has The Grateful Dead, part 3) with experimental pieces like this.  Iris and the Doctor are travelling on her bus shaped TARDIS to destination unknown, revealing through conversation elements of Magrs's own biography and how they relate to Iris as an entity and how she exists as a parody of the Doctor himself, experiencing unseen gender twists on his own adventures.  He's in his befuddled post The Ancestor Cell amnesiac version, slightly surprised to find memories of new adventures entering his mind as though these spin-off stories hadn't always "happened", that his own personal biography is in a constant state of flux within which Iris too has been inserted.  Amongst the new memories is Magrs's own Stones of Venice which shows this was written when everyone assumed the audios (and comics!) "happened" during the Greenpeace gap until that became blatantly absurd.  As always, we're reminded of how much of an influence Iris and Bernice Summerfield must have been on River Song.  Surely there has to be room in some future boxed set for three of them to meet up?
Placement: Because of the metafictional elements, I'm inclined to put this in the miscellany, so I will.

Now tweet the plot of the original Star Wars.

642

Farmboy stumbles into mercy mission defending a rebellion against a totalitarian regime by communicating the plans for their ultimate weapon. Han shoots first. Luke unknowingly flirts with his own sister. Two robots persistently argue about everything. It's a very strange film.

— Stuart Ian Burns (@feelinglistless) November 11, 2017

Phoenix (Indefinable Magic).

Prose Doctor Who does Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them, pondering what might happen if that sort of book was granted sentience and went about trying to rewrite reality to reflect its contents. A perfect Short Trips concept, too small to sustain a novel but visually interesting enough that you would love to see it on screen.   The plotting is fairly simple, a bystander listening to the Doctor exposit on his foe before defeating it, but James Goss provides a few twists on the formula as he reveals the nature of the The Bestiary of Legendary and Magical Creatures and it's uncanny animals.   One of the features of Goss's writing is to misdirect his audience and take full advantage of the media within which he's working and arguably, despite what I said earlier, this story simply wouldn't work on audio or anything else.  Notably, for the purposes of this project, he has one of the adversaries seemingly allude obliquely to the Time War, as it was assumed to have happened when the book was published in 2009. 
Placement: Since it's ambiguous as to whether this is actually him, I've bunged it in "Almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the Eighth Doctor."

Boil down Hamlet, Shakespeare's longest play, to a tweet (140 characters).

642

Ghost tells grief stricken Prince his father was murdered leading to slow, methodical revenge on the perpetrator with some major sacrifices.

— Stuart Ian Burns (@feelinglistless) November 11, 2017

Organism 96 (Tales of Terror).

Prose BBC Books's seasonal anthology publications continue with Tales of Terror, stories set in and around my birthday. Having done Christmas and Halloween now, perhaps they'll branch out into other holidays, although Big Finish already covered a few of those back in the day, not that most of us can afford to buy those collector's items now.  Organism 96 is Paul Magrs writing his first full on prose Eighth Doctor story in over a decade and it has everything you might expect from his stories.  A whimsical adversary born of mythology (albeit with a scientific origin), some hard core fan references and lashings of meta-fictional subtext.  The Doctor's enjoying a cruise when the ship takes on a passenger, an old lady, who isn't who she seems to be.  It's just the sort of simple premise which works well with these short trips.  The story's largely told from the point of view of a one off companion, Marie, one of the ship's entertainers, and is the sort of character who'd be played by a famous singer who can act or vis-versa in a television version.  Magrs's version of the Eighth Doctor is perfection.  Magrs was one of the key architects of the character back in the day (through his first novel about him The Scarlet Empress) and although this isn't some great continuity deep dive, this is very much the same man who originally appeared in those old novels.  So rare to find an Eighth Doctor story not set during the Time War now.  Superb. 
Placement:  My guess is pretty early, perhaps in the Greenpeace gap but it could be anywhere.  I've contacted Paul Magrs to see what he says [update: he "liked" the tweet so I'll leave it there].

Write last year's fortune cookie. It got everything right.

642 Everything else is horrible but you'll come out unscathed. Just keep your wits about you.

Write yesterday's fortune cookie. It got everything wrong.

642 You will be clear in focus, strong in argument and unflappably calm.

642 Tiny Things To Write About: Introduction.

About 642 Tiny Things To Write About is a book created by the San Francisco Writer's Grotto and contains six hundred and forty odd prompts for those who are short on inspiration for something to write about.

After spotting the book at the shop in the old John Rylands Library on Deansgate in Manchester, I realised it was just the thing I needed.

This blog has stagnated. I know. You only need to look at how monosyllabic the subject matter's been for the past few weeks to see that. Assuming I've even posted here at all.

Partly it's time. I'm not sat at my own computer half as much as I used to be, preferring to watch films or read or walking.  Lots and lots of walking, mainly to work and back.  Oh and working.  A lot.

Health.  The anxiety ebbs and flows and I'm currently in a bit of an ebb.

But it's also inspiration.  I'm feeling a bit drowned out, with so many other voices with a clearer message or indeed point making me feel a bit irrelevant.

So to try and get my brain cells firing again, I'm going to work my way through all six hundred and forty two prompts and post the results on here.  Daily.  That should be good for at least two year's worth of content.

Let's see how this goes.

Suspenders.

TV Yes, indeed:



Bloody love everything about this, from the multi-coloured highlights across the t-shirt and coat to the boots to the piercings. It feels contemporary and old fashioned and above all alien.  Also, my fear was that the tradition "Edwardian" idea would have been carried over from her male incarnations and Jodie would have been stuck in a ball gown.  Of course the re-design of her new TARDIS is an abomination, but you can't have everything.

Dead Man's Hands (IDW Graphic Novel).

Comics A cursory glance through this volume might suggest that Eighth appears throughout. But the floppy haired gentleman is Oscar Wilde, pitched up in the town of Deadwood in the Old West, as a zombie Wild Bill Hickock is threatening the local townspeople, with Calamity Jane convinced that he's not himself.  It's the mother of all celebrity historicals, with Thomas Eddison also appearing for good measure.  As Eleventh Doctor comics stories go it's an entertaining romp, capturing his and Clara's essences superbly and writer Tony Lee navigates the Doctor's usual opposition to fire arms in a place where everyone carries them more successfully than in tv's A Town Called Mercy.  Wilde at some point ends up borrowing Eighth's clothes, so imagine my disappointment on reading the story properly to discover that the "real thing", although not actually, only appears on two panels during a matrix projection sequences deflecting the blame for the Time War:  "I wasn't the cause of the Time War!" he says, "You can't place that weight on my shoulders.  You don't understand.  You can't understand.  What I had to do ... I did everything in my power ..." Cue sideways glance to the War Doctor (who has nothing to say for himself).  Interestingly, despite the 2013 publication date, Mike Collins depicts him in his TV Movie form.  This was the final run of stories before IDW lost their license to produce the Who comics, so they decided to mark the occasion with cameos from all his previous incarnations, albeit in digital form.
Placement: "Almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the Eighth Doctor"

Supremacy of the Cybermen: Prologue (Titan Comics)

Comics This is a single page fragment of narrative tucked in at the back of fourth issue of Titan's Fourth Doctor limited series, Gaze of the Medusa. He's back and it's £2.39 - which considering the £7 odd pounds The Lost Magic audiobook cost for his not real appearance across about ten words still isn't the most expensive cameo I've witnessed this week. In what looks like a homage to now apocryphal Bill Potts preview Friend from the Future, Eighth and his comics companion Josie enter a random corridor and a cliffhanger which finds them confronted with Cybermen who seem to want their help. It's an interesting enough moment that you'd want to read what happens next but maddeningly, according to the TARDIS Datacore, Eighth doesn't appear in the ensuing event series, an effort which does however find room for Melanie Bush and Rassilon.  I can see that this is supposed to be just a cute bit of marketing, but if I hadn't been paying attention I might have headed off into the main series on the expectation this would be explained there but been disappointed.  Plus it's just another tease that we might get more Eighth and Josie stories in the future.  Perhaps, for the purposes of this project the most notable element is that the artist Lee Sullivan also drew some of Eighth's earliest comics adventures in Radio Times twenty-years ago, the first story of which also featured the Cybermen and there's something of his approach to drawing them in evidence here.  Placement: Before The Lost Dimension cameo.  I'll stick to the publication order.

The Lost Dimension #8 (Titan Comics).

Comics Titan's Doctor Who output is largely a mystery to me. I see them on the shelf in Forbidden Planet, dozens of stories starring recent and older Doctors and with everything else in which
 my disposable income is otherwise invested tend to leave them there. The covers seem to indicate that they're continuity heavy, with numerous multi-Doctor stories and cameos from the show's recent history which I tend to prefer in small doses.  Much like Big Finish, I've decided to keep to the Eighth Doctor contributions and dip into the rest, so here we are with his cameo at the close of a many issue event which features 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th, their respective comic companions, his biodump daughter Jenny Who and everyone else you might imagine.  Probably much like trying to dip into Game of Thrones in the middle of the third season, there are too many new characters to really get a handle on, but there's some rather lovely artwork and writing of the respective incarnations.  Eighth has little more than an extended cameo, volunteering to defend the collected companions of the various Doctors while they're off saving the universe.  It's the Time War incarnation and his comics companion Josie appears, wondering why the Ninth Doctor knows her name.  Although he provides some vital exposition at an important moment, Eighth's participation largely amounts to him standing around making presentational hand gestures and giving someone I assume to be Kate Stewart a hug.  Hopefully this won't be the final outing for this version of the TARDIS team.  Placement: After the Titan Comics series, I guess.

The Lost Magic (Twelfth Doctor Audio Original).

Audio Being an Eighth Doctor completist does take you to some strange places. The Lost Magic is the third installment of a four part arc across four audiobook cds featuring Twelfth and a couple of teenage companions from the United States co-written by George Mann and the author of this installment Cavin Scott. It's a quasi-historical set on the eve of the Spanish Armada in which the Doctor investigates why the astrologist John Dee knows High Gallifreyan and is "inventing" anachronistic technology years before it should exist.  Given everything, I think you can probably guess what kind of entity it might be.  The area around Plymouth is wracked by time winds and Eighth cameo happens when the Doctor finds himself at the epicenter of a storm which forces him to degenerate backwards through his incarnations.  Here's a transcript of Eighth's entire cameo:  "Another flash and he was young, long hair flowing freely in the wind: "Need to win back control."  Back in the day, there was a (probably) made-up rumour that one of the Christmas specials would feature just such a storyline with Tennant and McGann playing through large portions of the action.  If only.  Clearly this doesn't really count as an Eighth Doctor adventure.  He still has all the Time Lord's experiences and memories through to Twelfth, so although he looks like him and talks like him (I suppose), it's not really him.  But like I said, being an Eighth Doctor completist does take you to some strange places.  The real star of the cd is Dan Starkey, an expert and exciting reader who's rendering of some of the Doctors is extraordinary.  But much like Fraser and Pat, Dan's imitation of Peter is eerie in places, exactly the right area of whichever planet his Scottish accent is from.  If only he'd managed to sneak in a "Don’t forget to click below to subscribe to the Official Doctor Who YouTube channel."
Placement:  New category!  "Almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the Eighth Doctor".

Flashpoint (Big Finish Audio Short Trips).

Audio These Short Trips and the Companion Chronicles have often wrestled with how to justify their subject being the narrator. Often the companion in question is making an audio recording or relating the tale to a listener, sometimes unseen depending on the casting budget. But on the odd occasion we're simply meant to assume either of those is the case without an in story reason. A diary is being updated or it's a lecture. That's the case with Andrew Smith's Flashpoint. No reason is given for Lucie Miller to be relating this tale which makes it all the more intimate because we feels as though it's being tailored for us. Smith offers what amounts to the companion side of an adventure with Eighth's contribution purposefully a mystery, as Lucie finds herself stranded on an inhospitable planet, protecting a youngster from gangsters who mean to capture him. Quickly events take a turn for The Snows of Terror (The Keys of Marinus episode 4 in decimal currency) but the results are far more exciting and a greater level of decency.  Towards the end there's a risky piece of character business which if it had been included in the original run of stories would certainly have had ongoing consequences.  But what really lifts the material is Sheridan's performance, and it is a performance as every beat sounds like its being spontaneously related by Lucie who turns master storyteller, spinning as much tension as possible out of the tale, her whole arsenal of emotion on display.  Wow.  Placement:  With the other Short Trips in the early seasons.

The Time War 1.

Audio Much like the Clone Wars in Star Wars, the Time War arguably works best as an abstract concept. When the nuWho Doctors list some of the incidentsx, the nightmare child and whatnot, our imaginations are sparked as to what that might mean. But inevitably human curiosity with an appetite for licensed material forces somebody to decide what a Time War might actually look like and somewhat inevitably similar to the Clone Wars, it's like any other war albeit with much larger stakes, the whole of history rather than some nation states and portions of land.

Same elements too.  Battle Tardises for Tanks.  Massive weapons designed to speed up the natural evolution of a corner of space with devastating consequences instead of H-bombs or something even worse.  Morally ambiguous decisions which cause a people to become just a shade different from their enemy with civilians caught in the crossfire.  Narratively the ability to tell war stories within the Doctor Who universe which have consequences and can't simply be forgotten once the TARDIS doors are closed.  The Doctor can't leave this mess behind.  It's his people.  However much he wants to avoid becoming entangled, it's impossible.

Up until the anniversary special, most of us guessed the Eighth Doctor had a pivotal role in ending the Time War, that the destruction of Gallifrey was once again at his hand, having already previous done something similar in the BBC Books.  RTD assumed as much and noted how unfortunate it was that having destroyed his home planet once, having worked to hard to resurrect it, he would be forced to destroy it again.  Lance Parkin's AHistory even speculated that they were the same event from a different point of view and even included the same description of the explosion from The Ancestor Cell in his Tenth Doctor novel The Eyeless.

Now we know that he's more of a conscientious objector, keeping to the fringes of events as much as possible, helping out were he can, trying not to become directly involved, ultimately having to regenerate into a figure with a more flexible moral code in order to justify taking part.  That allows for acres of flexibility, so that as we've seen in the short prose, comics and one off stories, we're able to enjoy the kinds of Doctor Who stories we're generally used to, albeit with the slightly melancholy undercurrent that we're seeing and hearing the Eighth Doctor's final battles.  Although they're unlikely to ever tie-in directly with Night of the Doctor, these are still the last of his days.

Although this boxed set was originally going to stand alone, we now know it's to be one for four in the standard formation, with annual releases, which means this story won't be finished until 2019.  I'll be in my mid-forties by the time this is over.  Big Finish are now pushing hard on these Time War releases with a Master and Gallifrey boxed sets coming soon.  Hopefully they won't all be tied together directly -- there's only so much money in the world.  Given The Doom Coalition ended on a cliffhanger, we have to assume that there'll be some other story set in that era which will run concurrently, although that hasn't been confirmed.  Yet.

Placement:  In the "behind the scenes" material, the producers suggest all of this is happening near the start of the Time War but for various reasons it feels more bedded in and even though they're also clear that it won't be tying in directly with the regeneration episode, I'm bunging it before - unless something in a later story suggests otherwise.  Once this era is really brimming with adventures, hopefully a clearer structure will reveal itself.

The Starship of Theseus

The set opens incredibly strongly with this clever evocation of what the Time War means for the fabric of reality.  McGann's in effervescent mood, with a tiggerish performance we haven't heard from him in nearly a decade, bouncing brilliantly off new companion Emma whose deliberately in the Sam, Izzy or Lucie mould.  But those listening carefully will be unnerved and after numerous shocking twists we're plunged straight into the war.  There's not a single predictable element in Dorney's script, the listener wrong footed throughout.  One for the ages, as good as the Eighth Doctor audios have ever been.

Echoes of War

A welcome addition to the I, Dalek genre of story (see also Dalek, Jubilee, Into The Dalek and Asylum of the Daleks), this asks whether an individual is inherently evil or if its their memories and experiences which cause them to be that way.  Nick Briggs relishes to chance to give his favourite monster some individuality and you genuinely care about its fate by the end.  Matt Fitton's descriptions of time shifts around his protagonists recalls Justin Richards's short story Natural Regression, as well as the imagery from George Pal's film adaptation of The Time Machine (or Besson's Lucy if you'd like a contemporary reference).  Why do I feel like I've said some of these things before?

The Conscript

From Lord High President of Gallifrey to grunt.  It's startling to find this Doctor discarded into a lowly position in contrast to how he's treated in the other boxed sets but Fitton makes full use of the opportunity to show how the Time Lord copes with trying to exist within a rules based hierarchy.  Not very well.  There are plenty of laugh out loud moments as the Doctor is forced to navigate a Full Metal Jacket scenario, recalling military anti-heroes like Hawkeye or Yossarian.  As a whole the boxed set manages to feel like a unified story with four discrete parts more successfully than some installments of either Dark Eyes or Doom Coalition.

One Life

Rather like Moffat's tv work, at just the moment when we might be expecting an epic battle, instead we're given a much smaller, more intimate story.  Not for the first time, Who recycles one of its more emotional television moments in audio form but more ambitiously than might have been possible on screen.  As with his award winning Absent Friends, Dorney transplants the realistic tone of a Radio 4 drama into a science fiction scenario, on this occasion utilising a flashback structure to increase the poignancy.  A really strong conclusion to one of the best Eighth Doctor boxed sets in years and a great continuation of this new epoch for the character.