Back From the Dead

Back when I first heard about Virgin wanting to publish their New Adventures, I came up with an idea. Not a complete, fully-formed idea - it was just a couple of images really: a house in a village called Little Sarfield in the snow, keeping itself warm by sinking roots deep into the earth; the Doctor as a bald adept in a Tibetan monastery; Ace with yellow eyes and her kitling stalking the night.

Almost as soon as I started thinking about them, they were out-of-step with the NAs, and so I had to come up with another idea: the actual synopsis has sadly been lost, but I can tell you that it featured another dark and brooding house in Little Sarfield and a young vampire called DaleDamon who helped the Doctor and Ace in their final showdown with the Evil from the Dawn of Time^® known as Fenric . . .

But the images of that first story stayed with me and gestated. At the same time, I discovered the internet.

Almost the first place I found was alt.drwho.creative, a newsgroup where fans would share their stories. I started by posting a drabble, and then slowly worked up the confidence to publish my master-work there.a new look

Back From the Dead (or BFD) was posted in eleven parts to the newsgroup between 16th May 1999 and 12th January 2000. Each episode was posted pretty much as soon as it was written, with more than one of the short interludes being written to give myself a bit more time to finish the longer stories.

I was pretty pleased with the results, I have to say: so much so that I began thinking of a sequel. But by then the BBC had taken over publishing the Doctor Who books, so I thought I'd just send them the synopsis of the first story and see what they thought of it: it was a story called Heritage . . .