The Many Hands

After Heritage, I spent a year trying to get a second Doctor Who book published. I came up with around five different synopses, two of which got as far as "They're great ideas: as soon as a slot comes up, we'll let you know". But a slot never did come up, and I got disillusioned: I wrote one final synopsis to get all my magnificently fannish ideas out of my head (called The League of Extraterrestrial Gentlemen) and then resigned as a Doctor Who writer. In my head. Shortly afterwards, the PDAs and EDAs folded, seemingly making my decision permanent.

Then, in July 2007, Justin Richards got in touch completely out of the blue and asked if I was busy. For no particular reason.

There followed a frantic couple of days where I pinged a lot of story ideas at Justin, and he whittled it down to two that he asked for Cardiff's approval on. Cardiff - also known as Gary Russell - settled on a zombie adventure set in Edinburgh 1840. Which quickly changed to 1749 when I started writing the synopsis and found out that I'd got the date of the draining of the Nor' Loch wrong.

The original synopsis was submitted on 30th July, and (after a couple of minor alterations - such as truncating the original title of The Many Hands of Alexander Monro because it wouldn't fit on the spine!) agreed at the beginning of August. Which gave me a little over two months to actually write the thing.hidden link

On the 18th of August, I got the chance to visit Edinburgh to aid my research - in particular, to visit St Cuthbert's Parish Church and take the Real Mary King's Close tour. Any photographs you find in this section of the website come from that visit, and show the real places feature in The Many Hands.

As part of the publicity for the three new Doctor Who books that were published on Thursday 10th April, I also got to attend a signing at the Forbidden Planet London Megastore on Shaftsbury Avenue with Justin Richards and Mike Tucker on Saturday 12th April. I arrived a little before the start time of 11am and had a good nosy around the store: so good that they lost me until Justin and Mike marched out of a back room ready to start.

I had a great day, signing copies of The Many Hands and Heritage for all the lovely people who turned up, and then popped around the corner for a quick pint with Nick Wallace and a mutual friend. Thanks to everybody who turned up, and to FP for asking me.