Simon Guerrier's Blog, page 93

Graceless on the wireless

All this week, BBC Radio 4 Extra are broadcasting my original sci-fi series Graceless. You can listen to each episode, for free, on iPlayer up to a week after broadcast. Here are some handy links to each episode:

1.1 The Sphere
1.2 The Fog
1.3 The End
2.1 The Line
2.2 The Flood
2.3 The Dark

Abby and Zara were created to search for the missing pieces of the Key to Time. But having completed their mission, they're on their own in a universe that can be dangerous and unpredictable... They have special powers - they can teleport anywhere or when, and they can get into people's heads. But more often than not, that only gets them into more trouble...

The series stars Ciara Janson, Laura Doddington and Fraser James, with a guest cast including Colin Spaull, Patricia Brake, David Warner, Michael Keating, Derek Griffiths, Michael Cochrane, Joanna Van Gyseghem and Susan Brown.

You can also buy both series from Big Finish, as well as Abby and Zara's earlier adventures in the TARDIS. Speaking of which, here's a lovely illustration for that first adventure that Brian Williamson (yes, the chap who does AAAGH! ) produced for Doctor Who Magazine. Cor.
Ice Warriors, the Fifth Doctor and Amy in
The Judgement of Isskar
Art by Brian WilliamsonI'm busy writing series three of Graceless at the moment, which should be released next year.

50 Kisses - longlist

Delighted to have made the longlist for the London Screenwriters' Festival's 50 Kisses competition. Mine is one of the 508 of 1,870 two-page scripts to get through the first stage, with the winning 50 announced at the end of the month.

The wheeze is that the 50 winning two-page scripts (each one set on Valentine's Day and including a kiss) will get made in August and September, and then a 100-minute movie of all of them stuck together is released on Valentine's Day 2013. A great idea, and good fun to write - however my one ends up doing.

Very pleased to see chums Natasha Phelan and Eddie Robson also get longlisted. And is that the Neil Penswick who wrote Doctor Who novel The Pit?

AAAGH! The Big Clonk!

The second part of the AAAGH! story that began last week. This one featured in Doctor Who Adventures #276 and may owe a little to 2010 episode The Big Bang .

As ever, the script is by me, the art by Brian Williamson and the editing by Natalie Barnes and Paul Lang - who gave kind permission for me to post it here. Paul - who came up with AAAGH! in the first place - is leaving Doctor Who Adventures. Thank you for everything.

The Plotters - a new film by the Guerrier brothers

"The Plotters" is now up on the Virgin Media Shorts website. Please retweet (with "The Plotters" and the hashtag #ShortsLucky13), share, generally shout to the world...

I'll do a full making-of post when I have some time (that will likely not be until the year 2150 AD), but here is a full cast and crew:

"The Plotters"
Written by Adrian Mackinder and Simon Guerrier
Based on an idea by Adrian Mackinder and Hannah George

Directed by Thomas Guerrier

Produced by the Guerrier brothers

Adrian Mackinder - Guy Fawkes
Barnaby Edwards - Robert Keyes
Nicholas Pegg - Robert Wintour
Will Howells - Ambrose Rookwood
John Dorney - Robert Catesby
William Hughes - Thomas Wintour
Jonathan Hearn - John Wright
Anthony Keetch - Everard Digby
Dominic Fitch - The Interrogator
Simon Guerrier - Policeman

DOP: Sebastian Solberg
Gaffer: Oliver Watts

1st AD: Natasha Phelan

Art Department: Simon Aaronson and Gemma Rigg

Make-Up: Chantell Jeanetta

Visual Effects Supervisor: Alex Mallinson

Colourist: Otto Burnham

Sound Design: Matt Snowden

Music: Matthew Cochrane

Costumes supplied by Angels

Runners:

Piers Beckley
Adrian Bentley
Håvar Ellingsen
Charlotte Lungley
Jéanine Palmer

Filmed on location at the Jerusalem Tavern, London, 2012.

The AAAGH! of Fang Rock

Something special for AAAGH! in issue #275 of Doctor Who Adventures - the first of a two-part adventure! It owes a smidgen to The Horror of Fang Rock - one of my favourite Doctor Who stories ever. You can learn more about Rutans on the official Doctor Who website.

As always, the script is by me, the art by Brian Williamson and the editing by Natalie Barnes and Paul Lang - who gave kind permission for me to post it here. You can also read all my AAAGH!s. Next time: the conclusion!

Bidisha on Palestine

Beyond the Wall – Writing a Path Through Palestine is a short, haunting account of a trip Bidisha made there last year. I read it in an afternoon, unable to put it down.

From the rigours of even getting into the occupied territory, to the settlements that literally overlook the old market and rain sewage down on to it, to the starkness of the $3.5 billion wall enclosing the land, “the majority of it paid for by international donors” (p. 65), the glimpses are evocative and linger in the mind. The world and worldviews described are so rich and strange and eerie it feels almost like supremely crafted sci-fi.

Having read her newspaper columns (and worked with her on a documentary about black actors in Doctor Who), I'd expected Bidisha to be a bit more, well, vociferous. Yet the overall sense is of careful negotiation through a complex tangle of competing interests.

“[Ghada Karmi] explains the occupation's corruption of both its victims and its perpetrators, its generation of obsessive behaviours the acts of violence and destruction which can never be taken back and the ceaseless toxic back-and-forth of attrition. What should be feared are not just the actions of one authority and its weapons but the wider poison of these cycles, endlessly regurgitated, of grievance, frustration, claustrophobia, desperate uprising and vicious suppression, abuse and perpetual inter-reaction. I would add, too, that the saddest thing in all this is the life that Palestinian children must live, one of fear, pain, limitation and, as they get older, cynicism, despair, anger and (potentially) vengefulness.” 

Bidisha, Beyond the Wall – Writing a Path Through Palestine, pp. 110-111. 

That link offers another good quotation on the strategy of occupation. True, she's forthright in citing a breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention and has no time for the settlers, but she takes pains to critique both sides of the divide. You can feel her frustration at the position of women in Palestine. A trip to a school is telling, with large numbers of women taking classes but few willing to speak, and no women in the school management. There's fury, too, at the blatant sexism and misogyny, and horror when it comes from the British men in her own tour group.


But this momentary anger serves to highlight her general restraint, the plain style of reporting all the more effective without comment. Not easy or offering answers, but a compelling read. 

Horsing Around with Alan Cumming

A photostory from the Jackie annual '84, featuring a talking horse and Alan Cumming.

Cleaning Up icon

Mr Jackson (Mark Gatiss)
from Cleaning Up,
art by Red ScharlachDelighted by this artwork from the amazing Red Scharlach showing Mark Gatiss as Mr Jackson in my short film Cleaning Up . (Red also made me a badge of it and one of Archibald the space pirate badger for my birthday.)

Cleaning Up plays as part of "I wasn't expecting that!" at the East End Film Festival in London this Wednesday at 8.30 pm.

You can also watch my short film Revealing Diary free and online. And the amazing Guerrier brothers have shot a third short film, The Plotters, which I will tell you more about when it is finished.

AAAGH! and the Toyshop!

AAAGH! from Doctor Who Adventures #273Another AAAGH!, this time from Doctor Who Adventures #273 and featuring a monster from Rose , the first episode of "new" Doctor Who in 2005. (I still think of the Seventh Doctor as new, so am a little weirded out that next year's 50th anniversary jamboree means that Silver Nemesis is halfway.)

As always, this strip is written by me, drawn by Brian Williamson and edited by Paul Lang and Natalie Barnes, who gave kind permission to post it here. You can read all my AAAGH!s.

Next time: part one of a two-part AAAGH! Yes! I know! EXCITING.

How How the Doctor Changed My Life Changed My Life

Alex Mallinson's beautiful cover for
Doctor Who: Short Trips -
How The Doctor
Changed My Life.Five years ago today, on 19 June 2007, the BBC's official Doctor Who site announced the winners of a short story competition that I'd judged. The winning stories, all by first-time fiction writers, were later published by Big Finish as How the Doctor Changed My Life.

I wrote some general feedback on the more than 1,000 entries received, which might help would-be writers of Doctor Who stories.

The book we produced is now sadly out of print - and commanding a small fortune second-hand. But I'm really proud of it, and the hard work the writers put into it.

Anyone could enter who'd never been paid to write fiction before - they might have been paid for non-fiction and/or they might have written fiction for free. My hope was that it might encourage people who'd always meant to write to actually do it, and might even act as a springboard for writing careers. (My own first paid-for work of fiction was in Big Finish's first Short Trips book, Zodiac, in 2002.)

So what have the 25 authors been up to since?

Our overall winner was Michael Coen. Soon after HTDCML, he had a short story, “Ivory”, accepted in the Pantechnicon Book of Lies - but that book sadly never saw publication. “I’m still writing,” says Michael. “I’ve finished one ‘genre’ novel which I’ve sent to a couple of publishers with ‘open submission’ windows and I’m working on my second which is more mainstream. I still get a tremendous thrill from being a published author and haven’t given up on making some sort of breakthrough in the future.”

Simon Moore writes the world's leading 14 line rhyming review portal (as recently featured in the Guardian), and his historical murder mystery was in the long-list of 20 in the CWA's Debut Dagger competition for new writers. Simon tweets at both @asimonmoore and @sonnetreviews.

Mike Amberry's Doctor Who short story “Trial by Fire” was published in Doctor Who: Short Trips – Indefineable Magic (one of seven HTDCML authors to appear in that book). “Oyun” was published in the Mythmakers collection Pseudoscope. Mike has also written a novel “which I will be polishing up this year in the hope that I might interest someone with it. My current project is a short ghost story, even though I've so far failed to get the previous ghost story I wrote published!” He is on Twitter as @mikeamberry.

Stephen Dunn's Doctor Who story, “Once Upon a Time Machine” was published in Indefineable Magic. “Being published again proved - to me at least - that the first story had not a complete fluke. At the moment I am trying to in-doctor-inate my 20 month old daughter Anya Charlotte Eloise in the ways of Who. I have lots of Doctor Who short stories in my head, which I will be sharing with her when she is a little older.”

Bernard O'Toole was a winner of the BBC writers' room “Sharps” competition in 2008, which led to a couple of script commissions and helped get him an agent. He's reached the offers stage for radio drama a couple of times and has a feature script in development. “I constantly write spec scripts and pitches and still apply for competitions,” he says. “In recent years I’ve reached the final stages of competitions like Red Planet, the Alfred Bradley Bursary Award (BBC radio drama) and even Writers' Academy but haven’t landed the top spot. That said, every little victory keeps the moral up and the ideas flowing. It’s still good fun at the end of the day. HTDCML was a major thing for me. Like all of us brought up on the Target paperbacks, which during my childhood meant everything to me, to have a few pages of published Doctor Who prose was a major ambition. I glance up at it now on the book shelf as I type this and it always makes me smile. Good times indeed.”

LM Myles had a short story, “Missing In Action”, published in the e-zine Reflection's Edge, and another one, “The Better Part of Valour”, in the Bernice Summerfield anthology Present Danger. Her essay “Renaissance of the Fandom” was included in the Hugo Award-winning Chicks Dig Time Lords and she is co-editing Chicks Unravel Time – Women Journey Through Every Season of Doctor Who , due out in November. She is also on Twitter as @LMMyles.

Michael Montoure has written two anthologies of horror stories, Counting from Ten and Other Stories and Slices, and is co-writing the web series Causality . He's on Twitter as @Montoure.

Tim Lambert's story “Automatic Head Spin” appeared in online sf, fantasy and horror magazine, Allegory in 2011. “This has definitely given me a renewed sense that I must be doing something right,” says Tim, who's continuing to send out stories.

Richard Goff had not, at time of writing, responded to my email.

Caleb Woodbridge's Doctor Who short story, “Blessed are the Peacemakers” was included in Indefineable Magic. He is currently seeking publication for his first novel. He's an editor of the Impossible Podcasts and also writes A Journal of Impossible Things, a blog about fiction, fantasy and faith. He's on Twitter as @CalebWoodbridge.

Chris Wing says his next bestselling novel now has a tentative name - The Secret of the Spires – but “still needs to be written”. He is also writing Doctor Who stories exclusively written for his kids. He says that “Doctor Who and the Missing Girl was a hit amongst the two-strong audience a few bedtimes ago”. He's on Twitter as @chriswing1977.

Mark Smith, uniquely of the HTDCML authors, employed me – commissioning some articles for the Herald.

James C McFetridge's novel Unendlicher Tod is published in Germany this August, and his agent is currently pursuing publishers in the UK. It was also shortlisted in the To Hell With Prizes Award 2011.

Einar Olgeirsson has, at time of writing, not responded to my email.

Matthew James's Doctor Who short story, “Hiccup in Time”, was published in Indefineable Magic. You can read more of his stories on his website. Matthew says: “I have had a little more luck with short film scripts which I've put together for student film projects. I've done three of these and they've been fun. I'm now working on a theatre play which is proving interesting but difficult! Inspired by the student films I'm also putting together a short of my own but time to work on these projects and earn money in the 'real world' mean progress is slow. But thank you Simon, Neil Corry and Big Finish for giving me that one break! Lack of success has never stopped me writing before or since, but it is wonderful to know that some tiny piece of it is out there, published, in the best of all places - the Doctor Who universe.”

Violet Addison has been published in Faction Paradox: A Romance in 12 Parts , as well as the Mythmakers anthology Pseudoscope. This year, she appears in the World's Collider anthology, and has her first original audio piece, Walking with Dragons. She says she is “pitching like mad and entering every competition I can find. I'm still getting about ten rejections for every one thing that gets through though.”

Andrew K Purvis had a short story, “Go Fourth”, published and promises to finish a novel this year.

Nick May had, at time of writing, not responded to my email.

Steven Alexander has written a 100,000-word novel and taken part in more writing competitions. He's also writing for the Planet Skaro Audios.

JR Loflin's “Breath of Echoes” was published in the Mythmakers anthology, Pseudoscope.

Mike Rees' Doctor Who short story, “The Science of Magic”, was published in Indefineable Magic. His novel Broken Heroes is available to buy as a print version and electronic version, and you can preview the chapters at http://brokenheroesnovel.wordpress.com/.

Dann Chinn continues to write. The most solid evidence of this can be found at the recently-revived Misfit City music blog. He's also on Twitter as @dannchinn.

John Callaghan's story, “Have You Tried Turning It Off and Then Back On Again?”, was published in Indefineable Magic. He is currently touring in the two-person comedy musical We Won't Rock You and says his main creative focus is his solo music – such as featured in this video. “I'm finishing the new album I've been working on, on and off, for at least five years now,” says John. “I've assembled all the musical parts and now it just needs mixing. I'm not accustomed to being so busy, so I'm having to fit it in between rehearsals for Brighton and doing the odd remix and live solo show.”

Arnold T Blumberg's Doctor Who short story, “Mardi Gras Massacre”, was published in Indefineable Magic. Arnold has set up his own company, ATB Publishing, whose first book will be Red, White and Who: The Story of Doctor Who in America .

Anna Bratton has collaborated with Brittney Sabo, on a young adult graphic novel, Francis Sharp in the Grip of the Uncanny! “We received a Xeric self-publishing grant in 2010 and released Book One the same year. Currently, I am writing Book Two and noodling around with upcoming Doctor Who-related projects.”

The Doctor Who Short Trips books came to an end a year after the publication of How The Doctor Changed My Life, but production company Big Finish continues to produce audio Short Trips, and has run a number of writing competitions since I ran this one.