Right away in my British Authors class, we discussed what makes a hero. Mrs. Branson wrote the characteristics on the chalkboard as we high school Juniors could think of them and call them out. This led to an assignment to write a short story, 1 or 2 pages, about a hero using the characteristics we'd decided on. Instinctively I knew the majority of the class, if not all of them, would hear 'hero' and put 'super' in front of it. I felt the need to be different. I went to study hall and eagerly started writing my first draft, telling the story of a young man and his girlfriend who try to do the right thing and end up in trouble.
It was also eleven pages long.
When you go to review something like that, it can get a little attention. We broke up into little groups to read each others works and mine obviously took a little longer. Mrs. Branson stated that she'd only asked for a page or two and therefore that's all of it that she'd read, which was fair enough. Hearing about what I'd done, other students asked to read it after it was complete. I saw no harm in that. The second draft was a little longer storywise but was shorter in page length, I think nine pages, due to better penmenship. I got an A as well as a note saying that she'd read the whole thing, despite her good-natured statement that she wouldn't in class. I typed the story up on the school's mainframe, printed a few out, and passed them out to whoever was curious.
People liked it. Could I do any more? As it turned out, yes I could.
I wrote a number of short stories. I returned to a Bill Gaines influence but, instead of MAD magazine, was referencing his EC (Entertaining Comics) led stuff, as I had just started getting reprints of that. As a result, there were a number of twist endings, people dying, or turning out to have never existed, things like that. They were all generally short and had no titles. Other assignments for British Authors would get released to the group as well. Things were going well, and I was learning to use the Macintosh computers in the lab for a better looking output.
It erked me a bit that everything was so short. Ten typed pages was a lengthy tale at that point. Something longer, more grand in its storytelling would feel more... skillful I guess, show that I had something to tell. A longer story had started at one point, but it wasn't working out and I'd stopped work on it. I rewrote what I had and started over. This time it seemed to work. It just needed a clever title...
'Alien Invasion: 1991'
Set about three months into the future when it was released, the story was set at our school, in our classes, with myself and my friends in it. When the aliens attack, the gray blobby Klack'tu, I come across as heroic, helping lead the charge against them, although everyone in the team gets to do something.
Near the end of what would probably have been the third act, I am seperated from my friends. The auditorium I love so much as part of Stage Crew has been used as a feeding and breeding ground for the aliens (they eat humans in order to asexually reproduce and have started feasting on the staff and students). At the moment, it is empty. The battle is far off, near the lunch room, but I am drawn here, to one of the pillars that holds up the balcony in the auditorium. Now that I'm looking for it, the keyhole set into it is obvious and I know the key that I've had all my life fits into it. I am right. A door opens and I walk inside, into an area that is bigger on the inside than the outside.
I am the Doctor.
It's all very complicated and somewhat stupid but I am the Eighth Doctor, taking over from McCoy. While I don't believe I knew it at the time, the original run of the show was already over and here I was seeking to continue it. The Doctor had been exiled to Earth again, caught in a Time Storm on the way, and regenerated as an infant which would grow up to be me. After learning all this, the Doctor saves the day. As if there was any doubt.
In part because my friends were in it, part because it was a long story, and part because I'd hand out stories before a history class that most students slept through, this was well received. I continued. (I also found that I could write during that history class while still paying enough attention to the teacher to interact with him, multitasking!) Slowly but surely the random short stories faded away and there was only Doctor Who for me to write.
My audience grew even further with the first story released in my senior year of high school: 'Psychotic Reaction'. A night setting up for a stage production goes horribly wrong as my buddy gets bonked on the head, goes crazy and starts killing the rest of us off. In the end, the Doctor shows up in this alternate universe to save the day. This got handed out to everyone in it, including the teacher that gets messily dismissed within the first few pages (Kids: Don't do this now. I was blowing off steam towards a teacher I didn't often get along with. If you do this today, you will go to counciling, maybe worse). The audience grew ever larger. It got reprinted a couple times and I was introduced to people, at least a couple times, as 'the guy who wrote THAT story'.
I considered ending the series with my graduation from high school but didn't as I had enough friends still there, my brother was attending the same school so he could pass stuff out, and I would stop in on my way home from work to use the computer lab because (1) they'd let me and (2) I didn't have a computer at home yet. I'm glad I didn't as the best stories in the run (my opinion) came after I'd graduated.
But in 1994, realizing this audience was going away, I regenerated the Doctor and returned his companion back to school in a rather abrupt fashion so that everything was 'back to normal'. Another reason to quit the series was that by this point I hated the first season of Doctor Who I'd written as a junior. The stories were clumsy and poorly told. I also didn't like the idea of me actually being the Doctor anymore as the mix between me and Doctor didn't always seem very ... Doctory.
I still wanted to write but wasn't quite sure what I would do next or for whom. I was really trying to find something fun to write that wouldn't be fan fiction that I could try to market, you know, for money. What and how and everything else eluded me.
Maybe to get the ball rolling I could rewrite 'Alien Invasion: 1991', you know, just for fun. And there's this whole Internet thing, there seem to be people on it that like Doctor Who.
Hmmm.....
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