My Writing 'Career' - Restart - 1994 to 1997

This is when picking dates for these things gets extra tricky. I'm trying to remember stuff and not go back and check dates. There's a really good chance I'm going to mess this up bad. Oh well, that should keep things interesting at least!

Moving on, apologies aside: The Internet.

The World Wide Web and all its visual glory was yet ahead of most of us. There was just the Internet, text on a screen. I had gotten used to text on a screen from people I saw in class all the time. We had email in school. I still had access to an alumni account and we'd used it for a round robin story that my enthusiasm messed up. I'd been working for a major manufacturing concern for a couple years by this point and I barely had email at work. My desk had a terminal on it to connect up to a mainframe. I think our work room had just gotten a PC in it, just one, around this time.

I had saved up my money and bought a computer of my own, a Macintosh like I'd gotten used to using at school. With it, and the pre-installed AOL software on it, I was on the Internet at home. At the time, I was really the only Doctor Who fan I knew. Sure I knew people that were familiar with the show, most of whom would rather read my stories than actually watch the programme, but there was no one else around that knew the show, read about the show, thought about the show, to the degree that I did. I knew there were other people in the area that did, I knew fan clubs existed in the area, but they had membership fees and such and I couldn't justify it to myself. (I was soon to find some non-fan club fans in Milwaukee but that's another story entirely.) With the Internet, there were newsgroups where people would go to discuss Doctor Who or post their Doctor Who fiction. For that matter, there was a group on AOL itself that did the same thing. If I really wanted to rewrite 'Alien Invasion: 1991' to show myself how my skills had advanced since then, I could post it here. I wouldn't need to print it out, make photocopies at Kinkos, and find people to want to read it; they could just download it and read it if they wanted. It would be fun.

It was fun. I know, you were probably expecting a twist at this point, the collapse of the project, the crushing of my ego, but that's not what happened. I set some standards for myself, kept the basic concepts of the original (set in Milwaukee, the alien name and design), wrote it and posted it up. Most people that bothered to react to it liked it. I remember getting some criticism on it from one individual, nothing too bad, and was delighted when other people, people I didn't know, largely agreed with me when I politely rebutted. There was even some constructive criticism. I enjoyed it, perhaps too much. Before I'd even finished the story, I'd mapped out a season. I was back in.

Now, to a degree, this was a problem. My original plan was to move on, do some stuff that I'd made up completely so that I could benefit financially from my work. On the other hand, I hadn't thought up anything of my own yet and writing more fan fiction was better than writing nothing, so I continued.

I decided that this new series would be different but similiar to the one I'd already written (some slightly edited versions of my original series would also be posted for download on AOL with pages of explanation for characters I didn't need to discribe in the story because, well, originally they were people everyone reading the stories already knew). Taking some cues from the structure of other available fan fiction, this new series was meant to be novelizations of the show, stories that didn't appear on television in our universe, but did elsewhere. The stories I were telling were from Season 31 of Doctor Who (the last aired series of the real run was 27). The production of the show had moved to America (as rumours were saying was going to happen in real life) and was being made by me and my friends (essentially) as Python Lord Productions.

Of course, I was the Doctor. The important difference being that this time I was an actor playing the Doctor, not some strange set of circumstances that meant I was actually the Doctor.

The goal was to tell stories that could be part of the actual series, as if I was charting the future of the programme. I still wanted to have fun and that's how I ended up blowing it. Here's the twist where it goes bad.

The fifth story in the series was a crossover with a popular (at the time at least) manga/anime series called 'Ranma 1/2'. This would never have happened in real life. The story was a good one but it didn't fit in Season 31. It should have been separate. While I was able to post it to a anime fan fiction newsgroup and get more readers, it just wasn't right in that context. Worse yet I'd once again had too much fun and envisioned a 13 part side story continuing the crossover of which I completed 5 parts and partly wrote another 5 parts. Again, these were not bad stories, they do a lot of good for the characters actually, but Doctor Who fan fiction had distracted me from my goal of original fiction and now Doctor Who/Ranma 1/2 fan fiction was distracting me from writing Doctor Who fan fiction.

At one point, I envisioned the 'Season' series to run for five or six years. I wrote all of 'Season 31', finished one story from 'Season 32' and half finished another. That's it. The 'Teen Doctor' series I wrote in high school has 20+ completed stories in its canon; the 'Season' Doctor has 9.

I had messed up my own project. There were other things yet ahead.