gallifreyrises

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Who doesn't love River.

But it always entertains me when the camera pans to 'The Time Traveller's Wife' when Clara's hunting down all the hidden TARDIS keys. I was given aforesaid book a very long time ago by a guy who was breaking up with me, and I wasn't happy about it (who is). Sounding very heartfelt, my soon-to-be ex proclaimed, "This book explains a lot about me."

Yeah, okay. Read the book. Still don't know what he meant by that.

River Song moodboard because I’m in love with her (who isn’t tbh)

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Getting a handle on this Tumblr thing. The blog is for writing utter shite about Doctor Who, mostly, and occasionally for plugging my fiction writing, which is hopefully not shite.

Doctor Who fics:

Long scary novel about broken TARDISes:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/63713713/chapters/163389127

Short story that started life as something else:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/68184016

Original published novels:

This is about horses, veterinarians, wild places, and mental health. Think Black Beauty meets an Irvine Welsh novel:

https://amzn.eu/d/dtE2NeP

This one is about miscarriages of justice in New York City (I beat you to it, 'Criminal Record,' but if you liked that, you'll like my book):

https://amzn.eu/d/b2Qh0JM

This is about a New York police detective with PTSD, a prequal to 'Overturned,' the above one.

https://amzn.eu/d/a2m3MWf

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Jesus.

I will spend three months writing a thing and two years editing it. Well, novels anyway. That includes the 150k word fanfic. How do you not edit? My first drafts are pure shite.

But I am a great copyeditor. Send stuff my way if you want all your commas in the right places.

people who edit their fics scare me. what do you mean you don't just get possessed by a writing spirit and then throw it to the wolves (the freaks on the internet)

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Isn't that basically the plot of The Office? Both American and UK versions.

A UNIT spinoff but it's in the style of The Thick of It. The sci-fi elements are kept at an absolute minimum. It's literally just the most stress inducing office environment you've ever seen. Broken printers. Massive irretrievable data losses. Peter Capaldi cameos as actual Malcolm Tucker and it's never acknowledged or explained. Someone get Kate a fucking Fanta.

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The real question, though, is can I keep my horses on it? Can it make me a track system?

Obsessed with this TARDIS content. There are an infinite number of rooms, and one of them is where the doctor keeps Amy's model tardis. Another is the swimming pool. She's powered by a mechanical tree of life that lets her mold her architecture to its whim. It protects the people it loves even when it's in danger, and traps the ones it doesn't inside itself. She taps into the heart of space and time and is subject to the laws of thermodynamics. It's powered by a whole entire dying star. She also plays host to a couple of zombie critters. The zombie critters are her doctor and his companion. It's doing everything it can, even as it's actively dying, to protect her doctor. Just this once it wants to be saved. Truly the character of all time.

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I like answers. Cheers for that. :) I saw presidentdisaster's post earlier the day, before heartshaven's, and then went on a whole thing in my head, wondering if SpyMaster was indeed some other pre-Missy regeneration, because the only Master regeneration we've actually seen in NuWho was Yana into Saxon Master. But all these people have TARDISes, so anyone can show up, at any point in space or time. Not necessarily in the order that we see them, stuck as we are in our sad little 3D space where time only goes one way. Indeed, we only know Nine regenerated into Ten, Ten regenated into Twelve, Twelve into Thirteen. and so on, because we saw it. If SpyMaster had never been Missy, then that would explain why he was still a mad raving sociopath.

Alternatively, he could be a nihilistic mad raving sociopath, because his/her attempt to 'turn good' obviously ended in an epic of a clusterfuck. So if he came after Missy, as per heartshaven's EU info, then you can see how he could have a lot of pain and rage and self-loathing, coming from his/her hefty contribution to aforesaid clusterfuck: all her waffling over whether she'd betray the Doctor or betray her previous incarnation (if Missy had waffled less, then the Twelfth Doctor and Nardole might have survived that shitshow), and maybe all that fried their brain, and when he became the SpyMaster, he was like, "Oh, well, fuck it."

Just seen 'Spyfall' last night (the first part). I wasn't surprised to find out that O was the Master, because I knew he was played by Sacha Dhawan, so when Sacha appeared on screen, I knew who he was long before he revealed himself to the Doctor and co.

But I have questions.

(1) After the 'The Doctor Falls,' the bootstraps are more like a tangle. Who regenerated into the O Master? Missy or the Saxon Master? Up until the end of 'The Doctor Falls,' we assumed that the Saxon Master had regenerated into Missy, but after both incarnations killed one another, who fucking knows.

(2) If Time Lords can identify one another psionically, and the Master generally knows what the Doctor looks like, even when they've regenerated, why the fuck does the Doctor never see straightaway that the Master is a Time Lord? Ten didn't know Professor Yana was a Time Lord until he more or less regenerated; Twelve thought Missy was an AI interface when he first met her; and Thirteen was all pally with this guy who she thought was an MI6 spy, and it sounded as though he'd run this con on her for a wee while.

Does the Master/Missy use some kind of telepathic block to stop the Doctor from realising he/she is Gallifreyan?

And *when* did Thirteen become friends with him? Not when she looked like Peter Capaldi, because the Master looked like Michelle Gomez and spent a lot of time in a vault in Bristol.

(3) He seems rather unrepentant, doesn't he? Like all of season 10 never happened. It was like Missy regenerated into him, then he came to and thought, "Oh, well, fuck trying to be good. That was pointless. I'll just go back to being a sociopathic megalomaniac."

[gallifreyrises]

Just seen 'Spyfall' last night (the first part). I wasn't surprised to find out that O was the Master, because I knew he was played by Sacha Dhawan, so when Sacha appeared on screen, I knew who he was long before he revealed himself to the Doctor and co.

But I have questions.

(1) After the 'The Doctor Falls,' the bootstraps are more like a tangle. Who regenerated into the O Master? Missy or the Saxon Master? Up until the end of 'The Doctor Falls,' we assumed that the Saxon Master had regenerated into Missy, but after both incarnations killed one another, who fucking knows.

(2) If Time Lords can identify one another psionically, and the Master generally knows what the Doctor looks like, even when they've regenerated, why the fuck does the Doctor never see straightaway that the Master is a Time Lord? Ten didn't know Professor Yana was a Time Lord until he more or less regenerated; Twelve thought Missy was an AI interface when he first met her; and Thirteen was all pally with this guy who she thought was an MI6 spy, and it sounded as though he'd run this con on her for a wee while.

Does the Master/Missy use some kind of telepathic block to stop the Doctor from realising he/she is Gallifreyan?

And *when* did Thirteen become friends with him? Not when she looked like Peter Capaldi, because the Master looked like Michelle Gomez and spent a lot of time in a vault in Bristol.

(3) He seems rather unrepentant, doesn't he? Like all of season 10 never happened. It was like Missy regenerated into him, then he came to and thought, "Oh, well, fuck trying to be good. That was pointless. I'll just go back to being a sociopathic megalomaniac."

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I've finished 11, Jodie Whittaker's first series as the Doctor. My very first impression of it is, 'pleasant surprise.' Jodie's three series have gotten so much negative PR that I feared that every episode would be as incoherent as the end of series fifteen, and none of them were, so that's good. Some of them were excellent, most were fine, and as with every series, there were one or two which were a wee bit weak, but not awful.

Whittaker herself is very much the Doctor, doing Doctory things like talking a lot, being a bit weird, thinking faster than everyone else and owning any room she was in. To make a very controversial claim, I might suggest that misogyny runs so deep in society that a lot of the hostility she recieved comes from the fact that she was acting like 'the Doctor' and not behaving in a particularly 'feminised' way. Quite the opposite. Just ask any female politician. I think she strongly channelled parts of Eleven and Nine. but was her own Doctor as well. Less so Ten and Twelve - she didn't bring as much surliness and the massively inflated ego into the character.

The pacing of the series made for quite a change from Moffat. It didn't have as many series-long story arcs and no two/three parters. Every episode was basically a monster-of-the-week, much like very early RTD series. I don't think that's good or bad; it's just a different way of organising a season, and I think it worked fine. He had the chutzpah to kill off likeable guest characters, so when Ryan's dad was about to be sucked out of the TARDIS in the last one, I thought, "well, he might!" But I guess it was a Christmas special, and they don't like to make those too dark. I think if it had taken place elsewhere in the season, that guy would have had it. That episode got queasily saccharine, but would not be the first Christmas special to go down that road. Looks some weird stuff happens in the next series. I'm switched on enough to the Doctor Who zeitgeist to have heard things. We'll see how we get on with them. Is it just me, or are Daleks a wee bit cute, in an exterminatey way?

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How long is the statute of limitations on this? Hopefully not too long!

When it happened in 'The Giggle,' I was reminded of some slightly ropey fanfics I've read (sorry, guys) where the author didn't want [insert favourite Doctor here] to die/regenerate, so they invented an AU where the Doctor split like an amoeba and their Doctor lived happily ever after with his love interest. Seems like RTD read those and wanted to have his cake and eat it too. But imagine how powerful and tragic the story would have been if Donna got 'her' Doctor and her memories back, only for shit to go down and for him to regenerate, then for the Fifteenth Doctor to take off in the TARDIS like 'cheery bye' and Donna just has to get on with life on Earth. Of course, RTD has shied away from landing his gut-punches in his first run, like giving Rose 'metacrisis Doctor' in her wee parallel universe.

There's a lot of incarnations of David Tennant running around! The man's like a planaria. When the Rani bigenerated, I thought, "For fuck's sake." Then wrote a long post on my Facebook page whinging that it takes all the terror and the dread and the weight out of regeneration. I had a line in my Doctor Who novel like, "Nobody wants to regenerate. It's just better than being dead." Or to quote Steven Moffat, far more of a Doctor Who authority than I will ever be:

"And anyway, did he want to go through it all again? To be torn down and rebuilt into someone else, just to see more of the universe burn. He remembered his old tutor, lecturing at the academy, telling them all about the change they dreaded so much. 'You will walk into a storm,' Borusa had said, 'and a stranger will walk back out. And that stranger will be you.' A stranger to himself, yet again. Why? What was the point any more?" (Moffat, The Day of the Doctor, 14).

how many years until we can tell people bigeneration isn’t canon or do we need a change of showrunner for that

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First draft mantra: it doesn't have to be good. It just has to be there.

You can write utter shite; you know you'll rewrite later, so those sentences can completely suck. Just put your foot down and go.

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How do you prolific fic writers do it? I started one that I was hoping would be a couple thousand words, but now I'm on 5k, not halfway through, and it's just a sketchy first draft so a lot of things require more expounding. I'm gonna spend the next six months editing the damned thing before it ever sees the light on AO3. Oh, well. On we go. Short stories? I'm clearly useless. But if you want a 200,000 word novel, that I can do.

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My nerdy car.

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My knowledge of maths and theoretical physics is pure rubbish, but as I understand it, the theory of general relativity adds time as a fourth dimension because of relativistic effects - how different observers percieve where and when an event occurs, relative to where they are to aforesaid event. The universe basically curves, like those big parachutes we played with as kids; your perception of time will be different than that of someone on Mendax Dellora, or at the other end of that spaceship that's halfway in a black hole. Large objects, like planets, distort space/time, like a bowling ball on the parachute. So the observed rate at which time passes depends on an object's velocity, relative the observer. Your 4.5 billion years in a confession dial is like two weeks on Earth. Things will move differently depending on your proximity to the distortion in space/time caused by the 'bowling balls.' I think that's the general idea, anyway.

Maybe we can make sense out of this, at least in the context of Doctor Who (the Journal of Theoretical Physics doesn't care what I think, thank god). We've been told that Gallifreyan dimensional engineering is basically folding space/time in on itself. So let's imagine that confession dial as a part of that parachute that's been wadded up into a big giant ball, all folded and skooshed up and mashed together. If you're the poor bugger in the middle of that giant wad of space/time fabric, everything around you (including time) will be moving at a different speed than it will be for people who are in parts of the parachute that are open or gently folded or compressed or whatever.

Classical mechanics, conversely, assumes time is a universal constant, moving at the same speed, regardless of the observer's position.

Quantum mechanics has made it all even harder to understand, cause some of it doesn't fit into Einstein's theories.

Never quite understood time being the fourth dimension. Shouldn’t it be the first? The most math education I have is high school calculus but speculating about things I know nothing about is fun. I can imagine time as an abstract concept apart from space, but I can’t imagine space without time. If I imagine a spherical sphere in an otherwise empty void, or a one dimensional dot, time is still assumed. The moment of my imagining is the moment of its existence, and its existence being a moment requires time. Start with one dimension, add one, you have two dimensions. Add another to make three. But I can’t add time because what, was it timeless before? So it can’t be the fourth, in order, it would have to be first, because to add a spatial dimension requires the foundation of time. I know this messes with the imagery of “higher dimensional” eldritch beings, but I, mere human, cannot imagine the absence of time. I can imagine paused time, all its distortions and translations, but not the absence. And since “what you can imagine” is often considered valid philosophy, I’m afraid I cannot exclude this from my interpretations of scifi

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Weird Questions for Writers (because writers are weird)

1. What font do you write in? Do you actually care or is that just the default setting?

2. If you had to give up your keyboard and write your stories exclusively by hand, could you do it? If you already write everything by hand, a) are you a wizard and b) pen or pencil?

3. What is your writing ritual and why is it cursed?

4. What’s a word that makes you go absolutely feral?

5. Do you have any writing superstitions? What are they and why are they 100% true?

6. What is your darkest fear about writing?

7. What is your deepest joy about writing?

8. If you had to write an entire story without either action or dialogue, which would you choose and how would it go?

9. Do you believe in ghosts? This isn’t about writing I just wanna know

10. Has a piece of writing ever “haunted” you? Has your own writing haunted you? What does that mean to you?

11. Do you believe in the old advice to “kill your darlings?” Are you a ruthless darling assassin? What happens to the darlings you murder? Do you have a darling graveyard? Do you grieve?

12. If a genie offered you three writing wishes, what would they be? Btw if you wish for more wishes the genie turns all your current WIPs into Lorem Ipsum, I don’t make the rules

13. What is a subject matter that is incredibly difficult for you write about? What is easy?

14. Do you lend your books to people? Are people scared to borrow books from you? Do you know exactly where all your “lost” books are and which specific friend from school you haven’t seen in twelve years still possesses them? Will you ever get them back?

15. Do you write in the margins of your books? Dog-ear your pages? Read in the bath? Why or why not? Do you judge people who do these things? Can we still be friends?

16. What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever used as a bookmark?

17. Talk to me about the minutiae of your current WIP. Tell me about the lore, the history, the detail, the things that won’t make it in the text.

18. Choose a passage from your writing. Tell me about the backstory of this moment. How you came up with it, how it changed from start to end. Spicy addition: Questioner provides the passage.

19. Tell me a story about your writing journey. When did you start? Why did you start? Were there bumps along the way? Where are you now and where are you going?

20. If a witch offered you the choice between eternal happiness with your one true love and the ability to finally finish, perfect, and publish your dearest, darlingest, most precious WIP in exactly the way you've always imagined it — which would you choose? You can’t have both sorry, life’s a bitch

21. Could you ever quit writing? Do you ever wish you could? Why or why not?

22. How organized are you with your writing? Describe to me your organization method, if it exists. What tools do you use? Notebooks? Binders? Apps? The Cloud?

23. Describe the physical environment in which you write. Be as detailed as possible. Tell me what’s around you as you work. Paint me a picture.

24. How much prep work do you put into your stories? What does that look like for you? Do you enjoy this part or do you just want to get on with it?

25. What is a weird, hyper-specific detail you know about one of your characters that is completely irrelevant to the story?

26. How do you get into your character’s head? How do you get out? Do you ever regret going in there in the first place?

27. Who is the most stressful character you’ve ever written? Why?

28. Who is the most delightful character you’ve ever written? Why?

29. Where do you draw your inspiration? What do you do when the inspiration well runs dry?

30. Talk to me about the role dreams play in your writing life. Have you ever used material from your dreams in your writing? Have you ever written in a dream? Did you remember it when you woke up?

31. Write a short love letter to your readers.

32. What is a line from a poem/novel/fanfic etc that you return to from time and time again? How did you find it? What does it mean to you?

33. Do you practice any other art besides writing? Does that art ever tie into your writing, or is it entirely separate?

34. Thoughts on the Oxford comma, Go:

35. What’s your favorite writing rule to smash into smithereens?

36. They say to Write What You Know. Setting aside for a moment the fact that this is terrible advice...what do you Know?

37. If you were to be remembered only by the words you’ve put on the page, what would future historians think of you?

38. What is something about your writing process YOU think is Really Weird? If you are comfortable, please share. If you’re not comfortable, what do you think cats say about us?

39. What keeps you writing when you feel like giving up?

40. Please share a poem with me, I need it.

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Jesus Christ, this PR thing is a bitch...well, most of the time. What a world we live in. I have this novel about horses, and mental health, and Glasgow, and I think it's pretty good, and it's getting some decent reviews trickling in. But you have to tell people that it exists, don't you? And 'cause I'm horsey, and I live in Glasgow, I'm already connected to these communities via socal media -- message boards and Facebook groups and what-have-you. That's awesome, right? I'll just tap into things I'm already involved with! Hah! If only. I've been knocked back a few times for putting up a post saying, "Hey, I wrote this book about our wee town," or "I wrote a horsey book that's super accurate and won't piss horse people off with wild inaccuracies" and obviously a link to it. The post gets declined or deleted for 'advertising' or 'spam.' But you see other businesses advertising in these online spaces, and you realise internet 'space' - as it were - even if it's pretty infinite, is totally comodified and sucked dry by capitalism.

Those other people advertising their shit? Paying for it.

In other words, we're already living in the Doctor Who episode 'Oxygen.' The very air you breathe is monetised, even though it isn't a finite resource (I know, I know...on a space station it kind of is, but....). The internet has totally gone that way. I'm a wee indie author trying to inform a community, who I think would be into my stuff, that my book exists. I'm hardly a business. I wish, but it's a catch-22; you have to make enough money to pay for the damned ad space, and how the hell do you that when you can't advertise? And how the fuck else am I gonna reach these people? In one case, I'd been a forum member since like 2010, posting regularly, and any moderator who could use a bloody mouse could see that I didn't just join the forum to spam them with my ads. I got a cold email saying "this was flagged as spam, we reviewed it, and have deleted it." Does my one wee post taking up a little bit of internet bandwidth to tell people about a book that's very much in their ballfeld really hurt anyone? Or is unfettered capitalism strangling the internet to the point where they genuinely think it does? I'm not sure if I feel like the guy in the suit, or if I feel like the Doctor, Bill, and Nardole, looking at him a vaguely horrified way after they've realised the future is a complete clusterfuck.

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I know this is mostly a Doctor Who blog, but in my other life, I write books that aren't remotely like fantasy or sci fi.

One of these days, I'm gonna rewatch and write a proper review of Peter Capaldi's 'Criminal Record' because one of my novels is about wrongful convictions, and how it's both a systemic and human failing of criminal justice...Kind of what that show did, only I tried to be really accurate with police procedure and not do anything too daft or ridiculous or inaccurate for the sake of the plot. Didn't have to - once you start reading about miscarriages of justice (and I read many cases), you see all the ways detectives and prosecutors fuck up far more insidiously than what we saw on that show. My most recent book is about horses and Scotland, based on the true story of a herd of feral horses in Northeast Scotland, and the management thereof has been....interesting. One of my horses came from this herd, so that's how I came across their totally bonkers story. Then I wrote a book, obviously the logical thing to do. My horse (not the one in this pic), however, remains a wee ex-feral weirdo.

Writeblr Summerfest Challenge: Buy, Read, Review!

One of the most powerful ways to support indie authors isn’t actually through buying their books. It’s leaving reviews.

Reviews help books get noticed in search algorithms, give potential readers the confidence to pick them up, and can literally mean the difference between an author getting their next sale...or not.

Some people find leaving reviews daunting but it's important to know that reviews don’t have to be long! Even a few sentences about what you enjoyed makes a huge impact.

This month, let’s not only read indie—let’s boost them!

Authors: Drop a link to your own published work in the notes or reblogs.

Readers: Share these books on your own Tumblr or other socials, tagging the Summerfest blog so we can see!

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I wasn't going to review individual episodes but I thought 'Demons of the Punjab' was so good that it deserved a few wee words.

The best Doctor Who episodes (well, for me) are the ones which either pull off a deft narrative sleight-of-hand, where you think it's about one thing, but it's actually about something else, or ones which completely disorient you, so you don't know what the hell is happening or where it's going. But in a good way, not in “A Reality War” way where the writers didn’t know what was happening, either. This was one of the former. At first, you thought it was going to be about the Doctor disposing of some dodgy-looking problematic aliens, like he/she has done so many times, and the India-Pakistan partition was in the background. But then, it turned out to be the other way around; Partition (or at least how it affected one family) *was* the story, and the aliens were in the background. I love it when Doctor Who subverts narrative expectations like that. It showed the Doctor's strengths and her limitations; she worked out who the aliens were in a clever, Doctory way, but she couldn't change history or save that guy. Fixed point in time and all that.

Must be pure dead awkward for Yaz to chat to her grandmother now. "So I have this mate with a time machine...." Does Umbreen remember those four weirdos who rocked up at her house in India in 1947, right before her husband was killed? Is that part of her timeline now? Probably best to not overthink the mechanics and implications of time travel. I think it was also brilliant of Chris Chibnall to take us to a shitty, sad, but important corner of history most of the UK and US audience won't be very familiar with, despite having significant ramifications on global geopolitics in the 20th and 21st centuries, like with both India and Pakistan being nuclear powers who occasionally lob missiles at one another. And the rest. We don't learn a whole lot about Partition. The history classes I took in high school (back in the US) barely gave it a mention, and I get the impression from my British friends that they don't learn much about it, either, even though it's part of their country's history because it was British colonial administrators who drew arbitrary borders, triggering conflict not just in South Asia, but in Africa and the Middle East as well. The British state school system doesn't seem wild about educating kids on the worst atrocities and civil wars that came out of colonialism, the ones that are happening right now included. My English husband only remembers learning about kings and queens and Shakespeare in his history classes.

As I watch this episode and others, it's become clear that Chibnall isn't afraid of unhappy endings (unlike RTD, and Moffat to some extent...if Chibnall had written 'The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wadrobe,' I bet he would have had the pilot husband crash into the channel). He seems more than willing to create very relateable characters, then kill them off by the end of the episode (I was sad to see Brett Goldstein go in the previous one). He doesn't hold back from showing how tragic Partition was through the microcosm of one family. He doesn't try to soften it or somehow use sci fi stuff to make it easier for us or the Doctor and her friends. I appreciate that. The only gripes I had with it were the Friesian horses in India in the 1940s. Friesian-type horses would not last for five minutes in that climate. Indian horse breeds are either lightly built desert horses, not dissimilar to Arabians, or small and hardy mountain/steppe horses, very closely resembling Mongolian and Kazakh breeds. The British brought in thoroughbreds, but I doubt anyone introduced a Dutch harness breed not known for toughness or stamina. They have very little of both.

Friesians are, however, ubiquitous in the film industry because they look spectacular and they are stoic enough to put up with anything, including the craziness of a film set. Companies that train and supply horses for film work have stables full of them. Someone on the production team probably thought it would look cool and scary if those guys galloped in on huge, powerful black horses with flowing manes. In reality, they probably would have galloped in on 14hh ponies.

But that's a universal problem with horses on film, not just a Doctor Who problem. You'd think everyone rides Andalusians and Friesians.