Here's an anecdote that you may or may not find relevant further down. When Steven Spielberg first set out to make Jaws he originally planned to have a whole lot more shark in it ("I gotta have more shark, baby!"). The problem was that the damn shark just didn't work. This meant Spielberg had to scrap a load of shark action and instead come up with shots that suggested the shark but didn't actually show it (things like the infamous fin moving through the water).

For my money this is one of the reasons why Jaws is so great: it's not just about a rubber shark, it's about the threat of the shark, the image in your mind's eye of that shark, the potential of the shark. Now, fast forward to Jurassic Park, where Spielberg had the freedom to put as many dinosaurs on the screen as he wanted and you'll find a monster movie that's far less effective .

When the Buffy production team started work on Season Six they weren't just embarking on a new series, they were moving the show to a new broadcaster (UPN). With the move came more money (nearly twice as much per episode, I gather) and more freedom in what they could show on screen (finally, for instance, you could have Tara and Willow actually kissing, and you could talk about them having sex rather than use the metaphor of casting magic spells together).

Consequently, it's not without reason that some fans refer to this as 'season sex'. While previous years had their fair share of bonking, it was pretty much always off camera or, at the very least, left as much to the imagination as network standards prescribed. This year it was full on - and most of that was Buffy on Spike, or vice versa.

Buffy & Spike

While I do believe that the S&M relationship the two characters embark upon is crucial to their development, it probably didn't need to be anywhere near as blatant as it was. My wife made the very good suggestion that the relationship could have been just as effectively conveyed, perhaps more so, by just leaving it at Buffy and Spike fighting constantly. You could happily read an S&M metaphor into that, or just accept that these two just really like hurting each other. Either way it still moves the characters in the intended direction.

The dramatic peak of this particular plotline is the attempted rape scene in Seeing Red and it's a scene I've never been fully comfortable with. True, it shouldn't in any way be a comfortable moment and I understand the filming of the scene was meticulously planned not only to make certain it was uncomfortable to watch, but also to ensure that the audience is allowed some degree of empathy with Spike (otherwise we just wouldn't want him to come back from Africa at the end). To that degree it's a well-constructed, well-filmed scene that does what it needs to do.

But this is Buffy. It's a fantasy show. It's most definitely a fantasy show that has never, ever been scared to deal with real-life issues (which is one of the reasons why many people admire it so highly) but it's always dealt with those issues through metaphor.

Whenever I think about Season Six I'm always drawn back to one of my favourite scenes from the show, and one of its finest uses of metaphor. It's the moment in season 4 where Spike attempts to bite Willow only to discover that he's been implanted with a chip that makes it impossible for him to harm humans any more. That it effectively turns him into an impotent vampire is hilariously explored in the ensuing "that's never happened to me before" exchange between the two characters. This makes it obvious what the writers are aiming for while never once removing us from the basic scenario of a vampire attempting to feed off his victim. In short it's still about the vampire, and the impotence is more of a subtext.

To have Spike literally attempt to rape Buffy somehow flies against the spirit of the show. It's no longer about the vampire and the Slayer, it's about a profoundly troubled relationship and a spurned lover. Even worse, to have the Slayer seemingly unable to fight off a single vampire in her own bathroom makes you wonder if she just got lucky all those other hundreds of times. Yes, they have the scene where she gets drop-kicked into a gravestone, so we know she's hurt her back, but how many times has she been flung against walls, pillars, concrete blocks, etc?

I think the reason that the scene is so upsetting is not only because it's a rape scene but also because it's a moment where the writers betray the premise of the show in order to make their story happen. It jars is because you have the nagging sense at the back of your mind that you're not really watching Buffy The Vampire Slayer anymore. The beauty of the series is that you don't need to have a vampire actually trying to rape a character: a vampire biting his victim is the perfect metaphor for that.

For Seeing Red the writers wanted Spike to do something that even he would find so appalling that it would compel him to go and fight to regain his soul. But, I have to wonder, if a soulless vampire is already suffering a paroxysm of guilt then what exactly is his soul for anyway? It's not like people who already have souls never commit rape. Having the attemped rape almost seems like taking the easy way out dramatically speaking. Few things are more horrible than rape, so it's an easy choice to use rape if you need a truly disturbing scene.

While doing some background reading for Season Six I learned that neither Sarah Michelle Gellar or James Marsters were happy about the various sex scenes, with Marsters being particularly upset over the rape scene (see here and here). I think this is quite telling. Gellar had been the lead actor for the show for over five years, while Marsters had had been a semi-regular since the start of the second season: both actors were intimately familiar with the characters they were playing, and yet both judged the sexual content of season six inappropriate. Nevertheless both were overruled by the production staff.

It might be that they were simply uncomfortable with having to perform relatively explicit scenes (though I'm not at all convinced that's the case) but if they genuinely thought that the sex scenes were inappropriate either for the show or for their characters then I find the idea that their concerns were ignored to be as good an indicator as any that Season Six has some fundamental problems.

Big Bad: Willow

Is Willow the real big bad, or merely a means to provide a more dramatic conclusion to Season Six? You can imagine that ever since The Wish, and its semi-sequel Doppelgangland, the writers had been itching to turn cute, cuddly Willow into deranged, evil Willow again. (Of course, by this point we'd long ago had half a season of Angel being evil, so doing evil Willow for more than a few episodes would potentially get old really quickly.)

Let me just make it clear that I think the end of season 6 is a blast: evil Willow is both fun and nasty; Giles' entrance at the end is made out of pure awesome; dramatically it's also probably one of the best finales they've done. In addition it leads to a very noteworthy conclusion in that it's not Buffy who saves the world, it's Xander - and he doesn't save it by fighting, he does it by talking. Given that Xander is frequently made out to be an irritating prick this is a big deal for the character, and it's entirely logical that he would be the person who could talk Willow back down to humanity. It also dovetails nicely into the 'real world' sentiment of the season: the one character with no supernatural powers or features whatsoever is the one that saves everything, and through entirely human means.

But that's not to say that the way in which we get to this finale couldn't have been handled a whole lot better. On viewing Season Six this second time around one thing that became even more apparent was how clumsy the whole addiction storyline was. Clearly the idea was to present a clever metaphor for teenage drug addiction by having Willow become addicted to magic. The problem is that having Willow become addicted to magic means it's not a metaphor for addiction: it's actual addiction, and the way it was presented wouldn't have looked out of place in something like The O.C. or 90210, but that's not what we tune into Buffy for.

Really, the fact that Willow's addicted to magic is almost secondary. Structurally the strand is also pretty dire. Over the first 8 episodes or so we see Willow abusing her magical powers in various ways, possibly building up to something really interesting. Then, over the space of just three episodes, she quickly spirals out of control, finally realises the error of her ways after almost killing Dawn, and goes cold turkey. Abruptly, and not a little unconvincingly, we're back to nice, timid Willow.

I have to wonder how much more interesting it might have been if Willow had simply continued her inexorable downhill slide throughout the season, or maybe even peaked mid-season in such a way as to make the Trio seem the least of the Scoobies' problems.

But no, that was never to be. Clearly the plan was always to pull Willow back from the brink, pretend that she's normal, and then find some dramatic pretext to push her wholesale back into the abyss.

Sadly that pretext was the death of one of my favourite supporting characters: Tara. Generally I don't object to a character being killed off if it serves a genuinely useful dramatic or emotional purpose. There are many perfect examples in Buffy: Jenny Calendar, for instance, to show us not only that Angel is *really* evil, but also that Giles is more than just a mild-mannered librarian; or Joyce Summers, whose death gave us one of the greatest episodes of the series and a new path for several of its main characters.

In contrast, the death of Tara is blatantly engineered for the sole purpose of serving Willow's character path. If I can put my mock writing tutor's hat on for a moment... (pay attention) character should serve the plot, that's to say that everything a character does or says should ideally move the plot along. The characters become a function of the plot, which means they are there to react to and enact the various plot points. Naturally as a writer you will need to manoeuvre characters in certain ways in order to tell the story you want to tell, but this should always be invisible, you should never make it appear as though your characters are being manipulated.

The problem with Tara dying is that it's clearly designed to have a specific effect, which is to turn Willow mad, and it doesn't really have any other notable dramatic value. The writers split Willow and Tara up, and keep them separated through most of the season, but then finally and conveniently reunite them only for Tara to get killed off in the following episode. It's cruel to the characters and to the viewers who may be invested in those characters, but it's also far too structured to truly convince.

It's bad enough having guns in Buffy (somehow that just seems so very wrong, even though the writers insisted that they wanted Tara to die a 'human' death) but as we all know there is no way on earth that bullet could have ever struck Tara - if they had to have Tara being shot could they not have at least studied the basic laws of physics first?!

To save me going on: for more thoughts and questions about Tara's death, including how the writers managed to fall headfirst into the dreaded 'dead/evil lesbian' cliché you should read this excellent essay: The Needless Murder of Tara Maclay.

My final grievance is that the writers were obviously planning Tara's death to be a cataclysmic event, and yet they undermine it by having Buffy take a bullet as well. Which one is meant to be the big deal here? Are we supposed to reel in shock over a supporting character being slaughtered or are we supposed to be on the edge of our seats because the effectively immortal, supernaturally empowered lead character has also been shot? As it is the episode closes on Willow' eyes turning black, so does this mean we're supposed to be moving on to evil Willow already?

It's a surprisingly poor show from a team of writers who, as we know from experience, are frequently capable of brilliance. Here's hoping that they managed to learn from the mistake of Season Six, as I get ready to plough into Season Seven.

Season Six of Buffy The Vampire Slayer has a fairly unique status for me. Not only does it mark the time of my life when I fell in love and met my wife (yes, I did mean to say it that way around) but it was the first season of Buffy that I actually watched on a week-by-week basis.

I came late to the Buffy party, joining in the fun sometime between season 5 and 6, and caught up with most of the earlier seasons on DVD. Hence, right from the outset, my viewing experience of Season Six was different.

While DVD gives you the luxury of cramming in an entire season as quickly as time and your own fervent fandom allows, it's a different story with TV broadcasts. For starters you're stuck with just the one episode each week, which really changes the way you digest the season as a whole. You need each of those single episodes to deliver your complete fix for the week; if the story doesn't progress in a major way you feel a bit cheated; if that week's episode sucks you can't move straight onto the next potentially great episode to wash the bad taste out of your mouth.

So, on my first painfully drawn out viewing back in 2002, Season Six undoubtedly had its highlights but overall I found it significantly lacking. I was never sure whether this was just down to watching it one episode per week, or whether the season was a genuinely lesser affair. Reading through the fan commentary of the time didn't really offer much illumination: you'd find that every season was the worst since the last according to at least some people, and this spanned all the way back to Season Two.

As with all the Buffy DVD sets I got hold of the Complete Season Six pretty much as soon as it first came out, but I'd never mustered sufficient interest in watching it all over again. The main stumbling block was down to me thinking it would just end up being painful, that there were too many low points of the season to endure all over again. On the other hand I've always been curious to see how it holds up in retrospect and particularly when viewed in a compressed period, over a single week or so.

The turning point came when we couldn't find anything interesting to watch in the House of Cawthorne one night, so we turned to Season Five of Buffy, specifically the final clutch of episodes where the Glory storyline (Gloryline?) really starts hammering towards a rip-roaring finale. We enjoyed that sufficiently to launch immediately into Season Six (and we're now ploughing through Season Seven too, but more on that another time).

So, second time around, viewed in quick succession, how did Season Six fare? Well, more details below, but the short answer is that it was a lot better than I remembered, but still had exactly the same flaws that I remembered from 8 years ago. Dramatically the season works well, each character develops in some way from start to finish, but some of the development is so ham-fisted you'd perhaps rather they hadn't tried. Watching the season through, and knowing where it's going to end up, you get to see all the signposts and see how carefully a lot of the season-long themes and through-lines were planned out. Unfortunately, while that may make the full season hang together better than it might have done so on first viewing, it also exposes the possibility that many of the obvious mistakes were always part of the plan.

Let's go through some of the key themes, plot points and noteworthy moments of the season.

Highlights

Before I go any further I want to acknowledge that there are some episodes of Season Six that are at least as good as anything that the Buffy team has ever produced. Firstly, Once More With Feeling: an awesome achievement which probably deserves its own blog post, so I'll say nothing more on that one (except to mention that it's probably one of my favourite episodes of anything ever).

As it happens the following episode, Tabula Rasa, is also a firm favourite. I'm a big sucker for episodes of any show where you get to see the characters acting against their usual nature, or are placed in a different scenario (usually alternative universes or memory loss does the job). It's something of a light-hearted episode that nevertheless manages to end up at an absolutely crushing, heart-rending place. Quite possibly the most heartbreaking closing moments of the season.

Finally, while many episodes throughout the season contain their own highlights, there's really only one other episode that fully stands on its own merits and that's Normal Again. While this does broach the 'alternate reality' scenario to a degree, it's really the bold self-referential nature of this story (dare I say 'postmodernism'?) that really impresses me. Not only does it intelligently question the entire logic of the Buffy universe, but it even dares to suggest at the end that the whole series might, after all, be nothing more than the imaginings of a disturbed young girl.

Dawn

No discussion of Season Six can really go by without at least a mention of Dawn. Through no fault of Michelle Trachtenberg's it has to be said that Dawn was definitely one of the low points of the season. Having spun an elaborate and intriguing backplot in order to bring Buffy's sister into existence at the start of Season Five, the writers quite clearly found themselves with little idea of what to do with her once that initial storyline had concluded.

Presenting her as a mirror for Buffy's neglect of her own life was a fair premise, but all we really ended up with was a spoilt and whiny teenage girl - quite possibly a very accurate presentation of one, but annoying to watch nonetheless. Furthermore, as seemed the case with a lot of the season, Dawn was inconsistent: whole episodes would go by where she seemed a perfectly normal person, only to become intolerable as soon as a script demanded a 'Dawn' moment ("Get out, get out, get OUUUTTTT!!!").

Big Bad: The Trio

So who's the Big Bad this season? We've had ancient vampires, snake demons, a Frankenstein monster type thing and a full-on god - now the only way is down. Actually, that's possibly a little unjust to the nerds who, at least on first assumption, seemed to be the big bads - or arch nemesises(?) - of Season Six.

To do another all-powerful supernatural villain would have been repeating the last five years (and how can you top having a god as the big bad?), so it makes sense to try something different. Buffy has always been big on the nerdcraft, and there's a central theme of 'real life' throughout Season Six, so having a group of ultra-nerds as the primary antagonists through the season seems a winning idea.

In truth you could argue that real life is the big bad of the season: all of the characters have more 'real life' problems than ever before, and for most of them it's winning the battle against those that becomes the real victory by the final episode. In this case you'd want a relatively small-scale villain to provide both a tangible threat and some comic relief. You'd also want a villain that doesn't distract too much from the 'real life issues' of the season.

For the most part it works. The nerds are funny and the nerds are also dangerous (some more than others). Unfortunately, Season Six tries to have its cake and eat it. The Trio - ostensibly comprising real people as opposed to gods, demons or vampires - never becomes a genuine threat until its members really start to dabble in the supernatural. Worse than that, The Trio is reduced to shotgun status by the time the actual season finale is upon us.

I think it's a fair point that Buffy is all about the demons and vampires, so we probably would feel a bit short-changed if the season finale ended up, for example, with Buffy foiling a gang of dastardly bank robbers. However, I also think it's a case of bait and switch to have one big bad predominant throughout the season, only to make the finale about a completely different villain. This is certainly one reason why I suspect 'The Trio as big bad' concept hadn't been given as much creative thought as it deserves.

Overall

It generally seems to be felt that blame for the failings of Season Six should be directed at writer and executive producer Marti Noxon. I have no evidence whether or not Noxon really was to blame, although Joss Whedon was famously forced to come to Noxon's defence on the matter.

What we do know that Whedon had his hands full with Firefly and Angel (Season 3) at the time, so he was more hands-off than he had been with previous seasons. For most previous seasons he had at least written and/or directed a handful of episodes. For Season Six he only directed one, the musical, which probably took up most of his time during the early production stages of the year. For the first time he didn't write the season finale (immediately suggesting he had less personal investment this time in where the season was heading), and it was one of only two seasons for which he didn't write the opener (the other was Season Five). However Whedon does claim he had full creative oversight of Season Six, so we have to assume all the storylines were developed with either his input or his approval.

Personally I think the season suffered simply because Whedon wasn't available to dot the i's and cross the t's. There's an anecdote concerning an early episode (The Pack, I think) which required a fat schoolkid as an extra for one scene. The director of the episode had sat the fat extra on a bench with a candy bar in his hand. Then Whedon comes along, takes the candy bar away and has the kid eating an apple instead: his reasoning being that just because the kid is fat it doesn't mean he stuffs himself with candy at every opportunity. It's a very simple change, but its avoidance of cliché and effort to do something a little different illustrates exactly the sort of detail that sets Buffy apart from other shows.

I believe Season Six lacked this off-the-cuff input because Whedon was simply not there to weed out the clichés and the literals, things that wouldn't have made it into the show previously slipped through this time around. In turn the year suffered from a severe lack of the sort of clever metaphor which is one of the show's most noteworthy strengths.

And for more on the 'death of metaphor' see my next post...

Update: for more worthwhile discussion on Season 6 check out this page on Whedonesque: http://whedonesque.com/comments/24137

At the end of last year, buoyed by the warm reception for short story Graves (and also encouraged by the fact that I'd actually managed to finish writing a damn story) I pledged to write an Easter story. I figured that giving myself four months' notice would be enough of a heads-up and that even I would be able to churn something out by April.

Yeah, I was wrong about that.

I did start the story. I planned it. I wrote about half of it. And then I stalled. Along the way I had a few changes of voice, came up with some better ideas than I'd originally had, but something wasn't quite gelling. As the end of April loomed it became abundantly clear that I wasn't going to finish the story, at least not in any satisfactory manner. Also, with my parents due to fly over for a long awaited visit over Easter I knew I wouldn't get much of a chance to sit down and write for much of April (in fact, as it turned out, my parents were stranded with us for the entirety of April due to a pesky volcano that wouldn't stop spewing).

So it's been a week now since my parents flew back to England and while that wasn't exactly a cause for great celebration I was looking forward to getting stuck into some writing again. Of course, instead of doing that I've been doing other things such as drinking wine and watching Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

Part of the reason for this procrastination is that I wasn't quite satisfied with how the story was turning out, but at the same time I didn't really know what I was going to do with it once I put my writer's hat back on. In truth I still don't know, but today I rewrote the first paragraph in a bid to kickstart the writing process again. I often find myself agonising over first lines, and first paragraphs - they're the crucial hooks, the precious few words you have to draw the reader in, to set up your stall and to get the mood just right. I might still have it wrong, but you tell me - does the following make you want more?

Katarina walked down the road to Brendan's house. She carried the box carefully in front of her, holding it with both hands to make sure she didn't drop it. It was already starting to get heavy, but she didn't mind. She loved being out at this time of year, she loved the air; it was warm and bitter and full of mischief. Also it would be getting dark soon. The change was always good: the change from light to dark, from warm to cold, from alive to dead.

Colour me surprised. Sometime over the weekend of March 13 2010 the total downloads recorded for my short horror story, Colder Still, passed beyond the 1,000 mark. How many of those 1,000 people have actually read my story I have no way of knowing, but it's exciting enough that the story is readily available and that more than 1,000 people have demonstrated enough interest to at least download it.

It was published (i.e. uploaded) almost exactly a year ago, so it's taken a while to get even this far. I can't claim to have done any great promotion for it, other than a few pleading mentions on Twitter. In fact I fully expected to see a few downloads within the first week or so and then pretty much zip after that. Nevertheless, over the past year downloads have continued quite steadily and show no signs of slowing down (1,135 downloads as of my last check).

It's always been my intention to discuss the process of writing my stories - whether you want to know about it or not - and reaching 1,000 downloads is enough of a cue for me to start talking  about how and why I wrote Colder Still. I do want to say up front that if you haven't read the story you should stop reading this right now as there will be spoilers. Instead, if you're so inclined, go over to smashwords.com and download Colder Still.

Ready to go on? Okay, so most of my stories (or, at least, my ideas for stories - many of which remain unwritten) come from the tiniest sparks of inspiration. It could be an idle thought, a 'what if', or some random image that pops into my head while I'm halfway between sleep and wakefulness. In the case of Colder Still it was a dripping tap.

Seven years ago my wife and I lived in a small unit in Maylands (Perth, Western Australia). One night I was lying in bed and could hear the tap in the bathroom dripping. As it went on I started to think of the water as something sentient that was trying to escape from the tap, slowly and patiently, something that would finally creep out of the sink, ooze its way over to me and eventually trickle its way down into my lungs. I should probably add that I wasn't overly concerned about this possibility - if I was I'd have just gotten up and turned the tap off - but I enjoyed where the thought process was taking me.

Although I started dwelling on this very slight concept of the water having a purpose, or a function, I couldn't get into the idea of it having any sort of consciousness. This left me with the basic thought that the water would have to be, somehow, under someone else's influence; a kind of remote murder weapon perhaps. But how do you 'program' water? The obvious way, to me, was that you ingest the water yourself and subsequently the water absorbs its programming directly from you (a process of osmosis, if you like). We're already leaning towards a revenge scenario, but how much more interesting is it if the only way you can exact your revenge is through your own death? Now the water could work as some sort of potentially unstoppable virus, propagated by hatred from one person to another, each one dying in turn and condemning the next maligned soul to a watery death.

Still, you can't write a story about water alone. I needed a framework and it just so happened that I'd been reading Band Of Brothers around the same time. While I wasn't particularly looking to write a piece of historical fiction, some of the imagery from the book inspired me, as did the sense of other-worldliness that comes from being at war. Where my memory gets fuzzy is exactly how and why I ended up with a cross-generational tale. I would guess that I wanted to explore that old mainstay of fiction: the Mysterious Object (or, indeed, Sinister Memento) that is found in the closet or cupboard or elsewhere. That leads naturally enough to a father hanging onto a memento from the war.

One other point now consigned to the mists of forgotten memory is why the characters turned out the way they did, specifically the father and son. I can guarantee that there's nothing in there that resembles any familial relationship of mine. However, drama works best when dealing with conflict rather than harmony so it's, again, a natural step to have a father and son who hate each other, and that, in turn, leads nicely to the story's conclusion. Also, we're talking revenge here, and while there's a small cast of characters in the wartime scenes, there's a contrasting sense of intimacy (however antagonistic) in the contemporary scenes. Why introduce needless characters when you can be economic and stick with just the father and son?

In review

As mentioned I wrote this story seven years ago, while sitting in a wiltingly hot apartment in Maylands, usually while my wife trotted off to her bar job. I don't recall how long it too to write, but let's say a month. Once it was written I made a passing attempt to find a home for it but, in truth, it was too long for all the short story publications and competitions that I found so I just let it sit there on the hard drive. I read it through a few years later, made a few changes, and then consigned it to digital purgatory once again.

Sometime last year I started to get interested by some of the new self-publishing options available, as well as the freedom that the rise of the ebook allowed. I thought as a trial of sorts I'd dust off Colder Still and upload it to Smashwords, which seemed a very promising online publisher at the time (and still does). I can't exactly claim the rest is history, but over the past year I'd had a bunch of people read the story, who would never have done so otherwise, and I've even been lucky enough to get some nice comments and feedback.

Reading it back I'm surprised by how much of the story I still like (I usually groan when reading back anything I've written from more than about 6 months ago). I'm pleased that several of the wartime supporting characters come to life in ways that weren't entirely planned, such as Malone and particularly McWhirter. There are also a few scenes that remain with me many years after I first envisaged them, like the unseen death of Weathers and the water trickling its way, unnoticed, into McWhirter's mouth. I'm also frequently surprised to find the the main character actually dies less than halfway through the story.

One of the things I'm still not entirely happy with is the length. Although it's the right length for the story itself, it's still too long to be a short story, and too short to be a novella. At one point I considered trimming it down to try and make it suitable for magazine specifications, but there would have been nothing left! I've considered expanding it but, as interesting as the main concept is, I don't think I can usefully take it any further than I've done already. I'm not about to add a death every 20 pages, or pad out the exposition to interminable lengths, or turn out something that would end up being a poor imitation of Ringu.

So I'll probably just leave it as it is. Either way - I hope you enjoyed it.

It's not often that I find myself writing reviews these days. This is partly because I just don't watch as much stuff as I used to, but mainly because very few films or shows excite me enough that I want to spend the time writing about them. It doesn't mean everything I've watched lately has been rubbish or boring - quite the opposite - but something has to be profoundly original, or momentously awful for me to feel that urge to start tapping away after the credits have rolled (let's face it - it has to be nothing short of a revelation). Another deterrent comes from watching a lot of episodic television: do I try and review every single episode, or try and encapsulate all the highs and lows of an entire series in a single review? Either way, it's a fool's errand if you ask me.

That said, here I am, about to start writing about a single episode of Doctor Who, one of the longest-running series' on television - but what an episode: one that boldly changes everything, while ensuring that everything remains just the way it should be.

Now, where was I?

I've been an enormous fan of Doctor Who from a very young age, and I've been an equally enormous fan of the revived show. It's fair to say, nevertheless, that I've also been pretty critical of the Russell T Davies era: while Davies did a pitch-perfect job of retooling the series for modern TV audiences, his own scripts often got mired in an overexcited mess of poor logic and wishful thinking. Sometimes this extended to the series overall, for instance having two consecutive companions falling in love with the Doctor. At other times, certain episodes reached such depths (gadget, gadget!) that I wondered if we'd all been collectively brainwashed into our  general enthusiasm for Who.

(Sidenote: having read Davies' book, The Writer's Tale, I learned that he really does question every beat of his scripts, but I also see how his writing-by-the-seat-of-your-pants method resulted in such bollocks as Last Of The Time Lords and Journey's End. Either way, The Writer's Tale is a terrific read, whether you're a fan, or a writer, or both.)

Of course, there were also plenty of things about 'new Who' that worked. David Tennant brought the classic mix of dark and light back to the character and, perhaps more than anyone, ensured that Doctor Who remained essential Saturday afternoon viewing for new generations. The show was also more grounded than it ever was: for the first time we believed these were real people flying in the TARDIS and the emotional journey of the characters has now become a key element of each series. Also, the occasional poor episodes were more than balanced out with a handful of truly great stories. While Davies wrote several of these highlights, it was Steven Moffat who consistently turned out excellent Who scripts. I think it's safe to say, therefore, that the announcement of Moffat as Davies' successor in the showrunner's seat was met with a universal sense of 'Squeee!'

Who was that strange little man?

However, even with 'squeee' there's still room for nervousness. Being a show-runner presents a vastly different set of responsibilities from those of a contributing script-writer, but Moffat can claim key positions behind several successful series' (Press Gang, Coupling and Jekyll). Furthermore, you have to reason that the BBC would hardly hand over one of their crown jewels to someone if they weren't absolutely certain they knew what they were doing.

We also had a new Doctor to look forward to. With Tennant having firmly claimed the role as his own, even in the wake of a relative heavyweight such as Christopher Ecclestone, it seemed almost inconceivable that we might have Doctor Who without him in the title role. I recall watching his regeneration at the climax of The End Of Time with a genuine sense of heading into the unknown. We knew who the new Doctor was, his name had been announced almost a year earlier, but hardly any of us had any clue who he was.

Several familiar names, whether truthfully or not, had been connected to the title role in the wake of Tennant's departure, but the casting of Matt Smith was something that pretty much no one would have predicted. Personally I was excited by the news, apprehensive to be sure, but really intrigued by the prospect of seeing someone of whom I had absolutely no preconceptions playing this character that's been a part of my life (on and off) for more than thirty years.

I usually do my best to retain an open mind when any new casting is announced for Who (I hated Catherine Tate in The Runaway Bride, but was prepared to give her a second chance in Series 4, and I'm glad I did) and if I had any concerns about Smith they were almost entirely blown away by his post-regeneration scene. In fact, between January and April of this year only one thing gave me any cause for concern and that was the 3d trailer released in February. I won't say much about it because it's clearly not representative of the series we're about to enjoy, but it certainly seemed alarmingly bland and tacky at the time. To a lesser degree the 'half-finished/primary-school-font' look of the new website didn't seem exactly encouraging either. But these are minor niggles.

Am I people? Do I even look like people?

So, finally, it's April 4. With apologies to Moffat et al, let's face it: I'm not going to wait two weeks to watch Doctor Who 'legally' on ABC, I'm going to watch it as soon as I can, and so are thousands of other fans around the world.

Where do I start?

How about at the beginning. The teaser sequence was nothing remarkable, but still a perfect bridge between the old and the new, following directly from the End Of Time, and setting up the episode to come. There's very little there to alienate brand new fans (a strange man, spaceship crashing - plenty of other sci-fi stories have started exactly the same way), while new fans will know exactly where they are. It's exactly what it needs to be.

Opening Titles

Now we go directly to pretty much the only black mark of the new series: the awful new title music. I'll say right up, I love the title graphics - they lack the epic feel of the previous graphics, but I always expected the new sequence to reflect the classic Tom Baker time tunnel and they do exactly that, with added creepiness and claustrophobia. And lightning! And fire!

But, oh dear, the music. If it hadn't been for the versions used during the Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy eras I'd have thought it impossible to screw up the Doctor Who theme. Nevertheless, it seemed to get worse and worse with each year of Davies's tenure. While Murray Gold's original version was almost perfect, the 'drum'n'bass' spruce up used for the last couple of years was a terrible misstep. I'd really hoped that the promised new version of the theme would lose the drums, but it seems to be the one thing they kept! The weediness of the main refrain brings to mind the McCoy theme and, perhaps worst of all for such a musical signature, comes across as something of a damp squib amid the rest of the mix.

While I've only watched the episode in full once, I've watched the title sequence at least a dozen times - on each pass the music has grown on me a little bit, to the point where I quite like what Gold is trying to do but have ultimately settled at point where I can merely tolerate the new version of the theme. I'll make no bones about it, though, I will always think of this as one of the worst versions yet (and since just about the only constant criticism of the new series has been the theme I know I'm not alone).

Smith

Arguably the most important aspect of the new series is how Matt Smith would handle the title role. We'd heard from Steven Moffat and various others how brilliant Smith was, we'd gotten a taste of his performance in The End Of Time, but beyond that The Eleventh Hour was going to be the real proving ground.

It's a no brainer: he was brilliant. I'd been thinking what an overwhelming task Smith was facing - not only carrying one of the BBC's most popular shows, but taking over from one of the most popular Doctors. Most of us would have crumpled into a heap in the corner, but Smith opted to show us that one of the oldest shows on television can be brand new yet again. Many people have been saying that Smith 'is' the Doctor, and it's not really hyperbole: he's managed to encapsulate the energy, unpredictability, genius, compassion, irritability, comedy, mystery, and everything else that has come to make the Doctor what he is over the years.

In a strange way he's also done David Tennant something of a favour. While I've been trying to imagine what Tennant must be feeling, seeing a new person take over his former role, hearing people saying how brilliant the new guy is, I actually think he should be relieved. There's always a risk of typecasting with Who, especially when someone becomes so closely identified with the role as Tennant did, but everyone will now absolutely be seeing Matt Smith as the Doctor - he's taken the role over so confidently that there's barely even room for comparison with his predecessor - leaving Tennant largely free to carve a new post-Who career for himself.

The TARDIS

I don't have much to say about the new TARDIS. Although I like it and I'm pleased we once again get to see it as the central hub in a much larger ship,  I do get the feeling that it looks like a bit like a gameshow set. Having glimpsed some of the other proposed designs (courtesy of Doctor Who Confidential) I think a few of the alternatives looked much more interesting, but I'll be happy enough to see the design they eventually used on a weekly basis.

Moffat

For me what Moffat did with the new series, both as writer of the opening episode and as showrunner, is the real meat of the matter. Let's sum up: what did he have to do with The Eleventh Hour, the first episode of the new series?

• Introduce a brand new Doctor
• Introduce his own take on the series
• Introduce a new companion
• Re-establish Doctor Who, after a break for most of 2009, as regular Saturday afternoon viewing again
• Tell a great story worthy of Doctor Who
• Not fuck up any of the above

As far as I'm concerned Moffat has effectively handed us a new reboot of the show. For sure, it's something of a reboot every time you have a new Doctor but, with few exceptions, there's always some continuity with what's gone before (the same companions, for instance). Anyone could have missed the entire Davies era and still watch The Eleventh Hour and come away with a perfect understanding of what Doctor Who is all about. While Davies brought humanity to the show, I think Moffat has brought the magic back, and he did most of that in the first ten minutes of the episode.

It has to be mentioned that the opening of The Eleventh Hour borrows heavily from another Moffat script, The Girl In The Fireplace. In both stories you have the premise of a young girl meeting the Doctor fleetingly with his promised swift return not happening until years later. Instantly the Doctor inherits an almost legendary status (was he real or not?) entirely befitting the nature of a fictional character who has the whole of time as his playground. But why not steal such a perfect introduction? Doctor Who is essentially a children's show, so it's absolutely perfect that the first person the new Doctor meets is a child. It's also perfect that he crashes his TARDIS in the back garden in the middle of the night - what better introduction for such a haphazard cosmic wanderer than the strange man who appears from nowhere? We also see the same child praying for help to sort out a sinister crack in her bedroom wall - and who else should come to her rescure than the Doctor?

There's another side to this introduction, and I think all credit has to go to Moffat, Smith and the director for handling it so well. In almost any other scenario the prospect of a strange man entering a young girl's house, in the middle of the night, while the girl is clearly alone,could have the potential to be pretty disturbing. But not once is there even the occasion to think that there's anything untoward. The Doctor is, in many ways, a child at heart so he feels perfectly at ease with children and doesn't treat them any differently than he might an adult. Equally, the Doctor is a great protector, a saviour, so it's more important than anything for us to see that the child is not in the least bit threatened by him. These few early scenes do more than anything else to set up not only the key aspects of the Doctor's character, but to present the entire fairytale mythos of the show. Not only that but they're also some of the funniest moments Doctor Who has ever given us.

Moffat (with all due credit to the actors) continues the good work throughout the episode, not just with Smith's Doctor but with the new character of Amy Pond as well. Naturally, almost everyone else gets sidelined due to the need to establish the Doctor, but there's an interesting, new and different dynamic set up between Doctor and companion this time, and Karen Gillan does more than enough to show us that Amy Pond is going to be a hugely popular companion. Some people have criticized the monster of the week story, but I figured it provided the ideal mechanism for the real point of the story: show the Doctor saving the world, with no futuristic gizmos, in less than 20 minutes. As such, by the end of the episode we've seen everything the Doctor can do, but still can't wait to see more.

There's also a beautiful pay-off in the final scenes. The Doctor has saved the world, but we're still given plenty of time to spend with Amy Pond as her fairytale dream finally comes true when she, at last, gets to see what's through the TARDIS door. It brings the episode back again to the opening scenes: the Doctor saving the world is all in a day's work, but it's the journey that's the real delight. We start off wondering who this strange little man is, and by the end of the story we're about to head off into the wilderness with him. I have no doubt that Moffat wrote these scenes, being a fan himself, with every child's dream of travelling with the Doctor firmly in his mind. For a few moments there we are all Amy Pond.

Over the past few years I'd looked forward to each episode of Doctor Who with a mixed sense of anticipation. As a fan I'm unquestioningly excited by the prospect of a new episode of my favourite show. As a critical viewer, and a sometime writer myself, I'm all too aware of the moments when plots have simply not added up, where the attempts at comedy have just gotten embarassing, the way that none of the Christmas specials have really been that special, and so on. I carried some of this to The Eleventh Hour, but I can honestly say that my expectations of the next episode are now completely unclouded. Moffat has done a superlative job at the helm of Doctor Who, and I am, once again, the giddy fan boy I used to be.

Imagine, if you will, a bathroom, but not just any bathroom: my bathroom. Now imagine, if your wits allow it, a basin. Above that basin picture a mirror. On that mirror envisage, above the height of your head, a cup held fast by the power of suction, a cup containing scissors and an ageing pair of nail clippers. To the right of the very same basin allow your mind to display to you a plastic, lidded receptacle (inside which receptacle you may project what you will). To the left of the basin, perhaps most critically, there is a shiny metal cup, into which might be posited a surprising array of toothbrushes and, indeed, tubes of toothpaste. To further blind your mind's eye I would also beseech you to outline a carelessly abandoned bag of toiletries alongside which you might identify a plastic tray containing soaps and other items pertaining to personal hygiene and domestic comfort.

Why should this sight be held fast in your already dizzied imagination? Well, dear reader, press on for in words lies knowledge, and in knowledge lies understanding, and in understanding lies satisfaction, and in satisfaction lies - ok, let's move on....

It was, as you may care to remember, a dark and stormy night, but all was well in the House of Cawthorne - no spectres had been sighted, no strange howls heard in the darkness, and no ice cream had been found afflicted by the Blight of Melt (indeed, no ice cream had been found at all). As is customary on these ordinary nights I took upon myself to retire to my bed at the usual hour, passing through the bathroom initially in order that I might clean my teeth.

The reader should note at this point in our narrative that on this particular, specific, individual night I did not, as I might ordinarily do, pass through the bedroom, through the interior door and into the bathroom. Instead, on this night, I made the fateful decision to pass through the main passageway, through the exterior door and thence into the bathroom. As will you discover this alternation of route may come to have deep significance concerning the events that subsequently transpired. Or it might have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with what happened next. Only you can decide.

This is how matters progressed from this point on: I cleaned my teeth; I retired to bed; I slept (for approximately seven of our standard hours); I woke up; I had breakfast. It was only at this point that I reentered the bathroom (entering via which door I fail to remember) with a view to, once again, cleaning my teeth. Imagine my horror, indeed nothing less than my deep, bone-chilling terror, when I made the discovery that I am about to relate to you, right here, right now.

My toothbrush. Was. No. Longer. There.

What followed was a period of great alarm and discomfort in the House of Cawthorne, a time when it seemed that common household objects could go missing on a mere whim, when nothing might be safe anymore. We tore the bathroom asunder, in a very real and theoretical, mostly visual, sense. We, lacking a fine toothcomb, used a combinaton of our fingers and eyes to scour the bedroom in the hope that I had carelessly abandoned the toothbrush to an uncommon location, perhaps atop the chest of drawers. Even the toilet and laundry were subject to inspection, and neither was our only child regarded as being above suspicion.

My toothbrush. Was. Still. No. Longer. There.

For the rest of the day the mystery was the sole occupation of my mind (except for wondering when it might be appropriate to have a second coffee, or how much tweeting was too much tweeting, and if I had made the wrong choice of pants for the office). Myriad possibilities abruptly seemed the very height of logic. Perhaps a passer-by, with a pressing need to brush his or her teeth, had silently entered our premises, availed him or herself of my toothbrush and subsequently departed (ensuring to remedy any damage caused by their illegal break-in during process). Perhaps my toothbrush, having attained a higher level of consciousness than any mere human could hope to achieve, had transported itself to an alternative dimension: a dimension where the brush was supreme and humans were nothing more than beasts of burden for the Bristle Lords. Perhaps it had fallen down the back of the sink - this in spite of the very real fact that our sink is embedded within a cabinet which is itself securely fasted to the adjoining wall with nary a micromillitre betwixt the two. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps...

Later that evening we again reviewed the situation:

My toothbrush. Was. Still. No. Longer. There.

My wife had valiantly embarked upon a solo hunt for the missing tool, had even voyaged to the store to purchase a brand new pair of toothbrushes, but still my toothbrush remained missing. It was a dark day in the House of Cawthorne, a day when not even the most innocuous household item appeared secure in its availability any more. Nevertheless, at times like this it serves no one to dwell upon the past hence I moved onwards and forwards and, as the evening pressed on, the time inevitably arrived upon which I would need to retire to my bed. Concomitantly the hour, nay even the minute, neared when I would have to enter the bathroom, mourn my missing toothbrush and betray those countless mornings and nights together by cracking open a new brush. In lachrymose mood I reflected on my missing friend - literally, in fact, for I was staring sombrely into the mirror. As one tends to do at such moments I cast my eyes to the heavens, or, in truth, to the bathroom ceiling. As I did so my sight grazed the cup fastened to the mirror containing scissors and an ageing pair of nail clippers. However, on this occasion the cup held one other item.

My toothbrush. Was. There.

Had my toothbrush devised a method of mental telepathy only for its capabilities to fall far short of its vision? Had an encounter with the red sun of Krypton granted it sufficient powers for a brief moment of flight? Had a schism in the space time continuum caused it to instantaneously shift in space and, possibly, time itself? Or had I simply put my toothbrush back in the wrong place the night before?

Why, these are mysteries, my friends, that we might never have the answers to. I bid you goodnight, and leave you with this reminder: watch your toothbrushes - yours could be next!

Recently I had to restyle a fairly elaborate web page calendar as part of my work. The original version was written in straight html, and the page would need to be rewritten at least once a year, so naturally I decided to recode it as a dynamic PHP page to save on future maintenance. One major feature of this calendar was listing the weeks of any given semester which was to be placed alongside a traditional calendar display. My approach was to write a function with the first and last dates as the key parameters, and then let PHP do the rest of the working out. The result is a simple script that will display a range of values for each week between a starting and end date - for instance, the date of Monday of each week, the calendar week, and so on.

The completed function is attached to the end of this article, but I'll break it down some of the key elements as we go. Firstly we need to make sure the dates are in a format that PHP can use:

$start_ts = strtotime($start);

$end_ts = strtotime($end);

The advantage of the above method is that we can provide the date parameters in almost any format and the strtotime() function will convert the date into a usable timestamp. I usually provide a MySQL formatted date (e.g. '2010-09-23') but you can use a string instead (e.g. 'September 23 2010' or even '23 Sept 2010').

Next we make sure that the end date comes after the start date, otherwise all sorts of horrible things are likely to happen:

if($start_ts > $end_ts) {

exit();

}

Now we use the timestamps we created above to define a few handy variables:

$total_time = $end_ts - $start_ts;

$total_weeks = round($total_time/604800);

$start_w = date('W',$start_ts);

$end_w = date('W',$end_ts);

The first line gives us the total number of seconds between our starting date and our ending date. The second line converts that amount of seconds into the number of weeks, there being 604800 seconds in a week, and rounds it to the nearest whole number of weeks. Our last two lines work use the 'W' parameter of the PHP date() function to give us the ISO week number (a value between 1 and 53) of the starting and ending weeks. Now that we have these values we can create a loop that will give us a whole slew of additional values pertaining to the intervening weeks.

We start our loop like this:

for($i = 0; $i < $total_weeks; ++$i) {

Our starting value is 0, our upper limit is 1 less than the total number of weeks (since we're starting at 0 rather than 1). Since $i represents each week and we want to increment by one week for each iteration of the loop we simply increment $i by 1 each time we go through the loop. Basic stuff.

Here we work out some variables for each week as we go through the loop

$w_ts = strtotime($start.' + '.$i.' weeks');

$w = date('W',$w_ts);   // ISO or calendar week

$w    = str_pad($w, 2, '0', STR_PAD_LEFT);

$Y = date('Y',$w_ts);   // year

$event_week = ($i+1);   // event week number

The first line works out the timestamp for the week by adding the appropriate number of weeks to the starting date (not the timestamp, you'll note). Say our event starting date is 'September 23, 2010', the string generated for the first iteration of the loop will be 'September 23, 2010 + 0 weeks', the second iteration will be 'September 23, 2010 + 1 weeks', and so on. Once again, strtotime() will convert the string into a usable timestamp.

On the second line we work out the ISO week number - this is useful if you want to display the listing generated by this function alongside a conventional calendar, whereby you can compare the week number value to the week number on the main calendar. On the fourth line we add a preceding zero if the week number is less than 10 (this is so the next bit doesn't fail on us). The fourth line calculates the year, in case we have events that run over more than one year, or that simply span through December and January. On the fifth line we just have the week number of the event itself, so the first week will be Week 1, the second week is Week 2, and so on.

For the last significant step I place all of this stuff into an array:

$weeks[$event_week] = array(

'title' => $title,

'calendar_week' => (int)$w, // cast as integer (optional)

'event_week' => $i,

'year' => $Y,

'mon_ts' => strtotime($Y.'W'.$w),

'sun_ts' => strtotime($Y.'W'.$w.'7')

);

I use the event week as the array key so I can quickly access details for, say, week 7 if I need to. The first four values in the array have already been covered (with $title defined, optionally, as one of the function parameters).

The last two elements give us the timestamp for the Monday and Sunday, respectively, of the particular week. This uses a slightly lesser known string parameter for strtotime whereby we specify the ISO week number of a year, and the number of days into that week (with day 0 being Monday). For the Monday of ISO week 23 of 2010 the string would look like this: '2010W23' (note that we don't need to specify a day value as the default is day 0, or Monday). For the Sunday we would use: '2010W237' (you can optionally separate the values with hyphens, e.g. '2010-W23-7', the most important thing is that the week number has to be 2 digits otherwise calculations for weeks 1-9 will fail). Also take note that this last option is only available in PHP5 and up.

And that's it - the completed script is available as a text file below. Bear in mind that you can set up any values you want in the $weeks array. For instance, I just return the timestamp for the Monday and Sunday, but you can return a formatted date if you prefer. Or you can return the Wednesday if, for instance, you have a weekly meeting that always falls on a Wednesday. If you want even more information for specific days within the week you could always use the getdate() function. I've not covered getdate() here as it's not all that useful when you're looking at weeks rather than specific days, but it's out there if you want it.

As ever, please let me know if you pick up any bugs in the script, have some suggestions to improve it, or generally find it useful.

(For my personal background to this article, and my own effort at writing some fan-fiction, please refer to my earlier post: Sacrificial: A (Star Wars) short story.)

As I discussed in the above-mentioned article my initial gut reaction to the thought of writing a Star Wars story was something along the lines of: '...mere fan-fiction? why waste my time on that?'. Obviously I ignored my gut and wrote the story anyway. Why? What could this endeavour possibly offer me when I've got plenty of my own stories crying out to be written?

Don't waste your time...?

Looking at fan-fiction as a negative (and ignoring any issues of copyright at this stage), the prevailing argument I've seen over the years is that budding writers should craft their own playgrounds instead of squatting in someone else's. There's sense in this: after all, virtually the first lesson that any budding writer will be taught is that character is the most important element in any good story. You can come up with a blinding plot, but if the reader has no interest in the characters then you may as well be writing a dish-washing manual. To use characters that someone else has already originated and fleshed out for you denies you the experience, not to mention the practice, of creating your own fully-fledged, multi-faceted characters.

To a lesser degree the same goes for exploiting an established universe, or using an existing dramatic situation. When writing original fiction, it's a given that all writers have to go through the process of creating backgrounds for their characters, working out histories for their locations, exploring possible conflicts and situations, etc. There's an entire process that goes on before a word even hits the page. It could be argued that taking an established fictional event bypasses this process, regardless of whether you develop it further. Again, the writer misses out on a crucial exercise - one which some might argue is actually more enjoyable than the writing itself. (Though I haven't countered the above argument in the section below, you could propose that what I've just written implies that historical fiction is nothing more than fan-fiction.)

Finally, there's the very practical issue that anything you write as fan-fiction cannot legally be published (but here's an entertaining tale of a douche who thought otherwise). It may well be that the feedback from dozens, hundreds, or potentially even thousands of other fans is all the recognition you need, but this is not something you'd ever be able to make a career of.

Surely all writing is worthwhile...?

It (almost) goes without saying that writing for TV or film is vastly different from writing for print (however, I always insist there are valuable lessons prose writers can learn from screenwriters, and vice versa: a good story is a good story whatever the medium). Nevertheless, a critical stage for any writer who wants to break into TV is writing a spec script or two. These are 'demo' scripts written for established shows that, in theory, prove the writer is capable of writing for characters and situations that have already been created by someone else. Yes, it's essentially fan-fiction, and the better you are at it the more chance you have of getting a job.

That's a fairly specific argument, although if you ever wanted to write 'licensed' fiction, or 'tie-in' novels on a professional basis I imagine a similar process would apply. In any event, my suggestion is that writing convincingly for characters that you haven't created yourself is a challenging exercise in itself, and arguably one that all writers should try out once or twice. You may find that it helps to broaden your own voice, particularly if you try writing for a character you would never place in one of your own stories.

Speaking a little more from personal experience, I found that writing my Star Wars story was undeniably more liberating than writing original fiction. For one thing I didn't need to get bogged down in backstory. I could safely assume that, because it was based on Star Wars, and based on a memorable event from the very first film, that almost every person who reads it would already know the backstory and be familiar with the character of Princess Leia. This meant that, aside from a few flashbacks for dramatic effect, I didn't really need to spend much time setting things up (either in the planning stages or in the text itself). I did still need to do some research of my own, but only for minor details, and only really to satisfy my own pedantry: the main background to the story is already well established in the public consciousness. The principal benefit was that there was little need for exposition.

I could argue that in really good writing the character and background should come from what the characters say and/or do, and shouldn't need spelling out, but that's possibly more of a screenwriting argument. In any case, exposition can be the equivalent of literary quicksand for both writers and and readers, so it's nice to be freed from it once in a while.

There was, naturally, a slightly more mercenary aspect in my approach towards writing this fan-fiction. Since there's never any chance ever of this story being published, or being entered in a competition, or earning my any money at all, I wasn't prepared to spend too much time on it. However, neither was I prepared to compromise and write something that wasn't as good as I could possibly make it. What that minor conflict resulted in was me producing one of my quickest pieces of writing ever - 3400 words in slightly over a week, and a story that I'm fairly pleased with.

I haven't read enough fan-fiction to provide a quality gauge, but my suspicion is that most writers churn out their stories with little thought to editing and upload them almost as soon as the last word is typed. I suspect this because I'm guessing that most fan-fiction writers don't particularly want to be professional writers and therefore don't follow the usual procedures of writing a story. It was partly this theoretical stigma attached to fan-fiction - that it's rarely done well, so isn't worth doing well - which briefly stopped me from writing the story, but then the writer took over. It's likely that, as with all amateur fiction, there's a handful of truly brilliant efforts to be found, but you need to be willing to work through the rest of it to get there.

Does it need to be fan-fiction at all...?

When my wife read the story a key observation she made, which pleasantly surprised me, was that the Star Wars setting was, in the end, entirely incidental - the nature of the story was such that it could have easily taken place in the real word. As it happens, before I started writing I had briefly considered a non Star Wars scenario, but never gave the idea that much thought. I figured if I'd gone down that road the story would have taken a whole lot longer to write, and I also fancied the idea of dabbling in fan-fiction. I may still look at adapting the story (particularly if I ever get asked by Lucasfilm to remove Sacrificial from my site) but the upshot I took from my wife's comment is that even when you play around with someone else's characters you can still, perhaps without even realising it, tell your own stories. To a limited extent it could almost be a useful exercise to borrow characters from your favourite show, novel, comic, or film and use them to test out a scene you want to write. Freed from the constraints of creating characters you can instead focus on how the scene itself works.

To sum up the above, I do think there are good reasons to dabble in fan-fiction, and it can provide some useful exercises. I wouldn't suggest doing it too often, unless fan-fiction is all you ever want to write (and there's no shame in that). I certainly wouldn't suggest ever writing anything more than a short story: honestly, if you've got a fan-fiction novel inside you, then it's worth making it entirely yours and putting your own characters in it.

Also I wouldn't suggest ever writing a full screenplay prequel to The Thing, or trying to rewrite the entire script for Star Wars: Episode One, or even attempting a Highlander/Angel mash-up - no, that's not something that I would ever try to do ... not ever ...

Further reading

I did a fair bit of research on the topic of fan-fiction prior to writing this. Most of my efforts were directed towards trying to find the correct wording for a disclaimer to place on my story: it seems that fan-fiction is an enormous grey area legally speaking. Also, writers themselves (the published type) don't have a consistent view either. Most tolerate it, a few encourage it, a few actively try and stop it. My understanding is that George Lucas and Lucasfilm don't mind fan films, but take a slightly dimmer view on fan-fiction - or maybe they don't mind fan-fiction at all. This might be because there's only a few Star Wars films out there, but there's an entire publishing industry churning out Star Wars tie-in novels.

Finally, it's worth pointing out that fan-fiction can have it's pitfalls for the author - if you don't respect the author's right to their own creations then you might find yourself done out of a new book or two from that author, which is what happened in the case of Marion Zimmer Bradley.

My original plan was to write a lengthy post exploring the ins and outs of fan-fiction, with my own entry providing a sort of epilogue to the piece. However, I decided: sod it - let my story stand on its own. There's not meant to be any suggestion there that Sacrificial is such an evolutionary step in the world of fan-fiction that it couldn't possibly be diluted by any other content. To the contrary, I think the proposed examination of fan-fiction itself will probably be more interesting, and to include vague witterings about why I'm writing a story featuring Princess Leia would probably distract.

So I'm putting all those witterings here.

Sometime over the previous weekend (February 20, since you probably don't want to have to work out the date for yourself) I found myself half-asleep and pondering a specific scene from Star Wars (and by 'Star Wars' I, of course, mean 'Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope', just so we're clear). The scene in question was Leia being held prisoner on the Death Star while Governor Tarkin sets about showing off his new toy and destroying her home planet.

I often put far too much thought into these semi-conscious musings, which resulted in me wondering why Leia didn't do more to save her planet, other than telling a half-lie and doing little else than whining "Nooo" at a key moment. The answer is, before you say it, because that's how George Lucas wrote it, but these things take a life of their own very quickly. If they didn't then I imagine film history would have followed a vastly different path - but at least we would have been spared the prequel trilogy.

Now I have no interest in rewriting the scene as we already know it, and I'm not a great fan of revisionism or retrofitting - yes, Lucas, I'm looking at you. In any event, my train of thought expanded beyond the scene itself to wondering about Leia's guilt. We don't see much, if anything, in the films of her mourning Alderaan, or debating if she could have saved the planet. Neither do we see anyone else pay much mind to Alderaan, nor do we even come across anyone who's a bit pissed off that their whole planet has just been wiped out.

So, with all this buzzing around in my head my brain inevitably started working out the narrative possibilities. After a day or two it got to the point where, even though I didn't really want to spend valuable writing time on 'mere fan-fiction', the story simply wouldn't go away, so I sat down and started writing. You can judge the results for yourself - there are links below for either epub or pdf versions of the story.

I'll be discussing my thoughts on fan-fiction in greater detail in my next post, but one thing I did want to mention is that Sacrificial is probably one of my most efficient pieces of writing to date. I managed to write it in just over a week, which given my usual pace is nothing short of Olympic standard. It also tells what I hope is a relatively broad-ranging tale using just one location, two characters, and a time span of probably no more than about 20 minutes.

Hope you enjoy it. As always, all feedback, good or bad, is welcome.

To access the main RSS feed for this site look no further than http://www.edpriceishungry.com/rss/ (the previously available URLs http://www.edpriceishungry.com/feed/ and http://www.edpriceishungry.com/feed/all/ will also still work). At present the main feed is provided by Feedburner, but the above URL now automatically redirects to Feedburner, so there's no need to use any other link.

The formatting for the main feed has also changed recently. In a bid to offer the complete content of each article, with html formatting, in a way that should be compatible with most rss readers, the main body of the article has been moved to a new <content:encoded> element (and placed within CDATA tags). The summary for each article is placed within the standard <description> element. However, since most readers seem to show either the <content> or the <description> but not both, the summary is repeated at the top of the <content> element.

I've also reconfigured the feed so that any attachments to articles should now be available via rss as well. Strictly speaking the rss format allows only one enclosure element (or, attachment) per item (or, article) so in cases where an article has more than one attachment you may only see one turning up in the feed. We'll see....

For the time being I'm maintaining the separate 'by category' feeds, but it's likely that I'll also move those to feedburner in the near future. When that happens it's likely that the links to those feeds will change (unless I can figure out a viable method of providing an automatic redirect).

Apologies for the inconvenience to those few of you who have had to change your rss links recently. The Feedburner URL will still work, but for maximum futureproofing you may wish to use http://www.edpriceishungry.com/rss/ since that URL will now *always* work, whether redirected or not.