Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made Of

I love Donna. I also love Rose, and back in the day I was pretty cool with Martha. It got me into all kinds of trouble. It seemed that I had to pick my ship and hate all the other ones. I even got banned from a couple of communities for writing very gentle fics about how the Doctor could have deep feelings for more than one person.

Ship wars are very interesting. One reason I'm not all that active in the Donna-centric communities is that you come up against so much Rose hate. It's spoiled a lot of otherwise brilliant fics for me, and it seems to be getting worse as time goes on. I've even heard it suggested in some quarters that in some way Rose was responsible for what happened to Donna, which I can only interpret as a way the writers deal with their entirely understandable feelings of disgust at RTD. Rose was special to RTD, RTD shafted Donna, therefore it was Rose's fault.

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No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!
Pray you, undo this button: thank you sir.
Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,
Look there, look there!

King Lear, Act V

I’m about to leave for Stratford again and a two-week summer school looking at Shakespeare’s sources, that vast primordial soup of myth and culture he drew from to write his plays. The majority of stories he dipped in and caught up were refashioned almost beyond recognition. And at the height of his powers, with literary London and a mass audience in the palm of his hand, he wrote King Lear, the bleakest and most chaotic of all his tragedies.

He could have undone the button. Made it all come out all right. By the time the audience got to Act Five and the death of Cordelia, they’d had more than enough. Why ramp up the angst? What was going through his mind? What useful purpose did it serve?

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"I won't agree it was rubbish because I enjoyed most of the episodes, but I can agree it could be improved. Having Owen eviscerated and dragged through the streets of Cardiff in the next episode would be a great start, as would ditching this idea of the rift. It's not needed."

(from a discussion on the Guardian TV Blog, about a year ago).

I guess everyone's entitled to their opinion, but blimey.....

I'm feeling incredibly written out right now. It's not that surprising considering how productive I've been. And how intensely I've been into DW fandom for the last 16 months (it really is that long).

Part of me feels I have the ability to take my writing up a level but I don't know whether fandom is the right place to be doing that or whether I need the stimulation of something different. There are times when I feel I can't face one more DW story, not because there aren't some brilliant writers out there, but because I've read so very many. Or maybe I need to start working with a BR or two again.

I find beta readers very helpful to work with and I've had some great ones - I think the reason I stopped working with them from about Time Crash onwards was that in many ways my stories are a kind of diary of my reactions to the stuff I see on TV. Time Crash, VOTD and Torchwood S2 all inspired me in similar ways. Maybe I should keep my responses to myself a bit more until they coalesce into something definite. I'm getting very bogged down in TW right now, and Jack's character especially. He seems to be completely different in every episode and sometimes I practically hate him. Is this meant to be enigmatic, or do the writers just not communicate very well?

Of course, you don't have to follow canon if you don't want to, but I do prefer at least to try to write IC. TW seems to be torn between going for self-contained stories or a narrative arc. There are so many plot threads left hanging. I won't spoil people by going into details but if you've been watching you'll be able to think of a few. As far as the team goes, it seems to be much better on character than S1, with the notable exception of Jack. In his case, we seem to be getting depth but little clarity.

So part of my writing burnout is TW related - I just feel a bit stuck until we get the finale and see what's resolved, what's left hanging for DW to take up and what's left hanging, period.

As far as DW is concerned, a part of me wants to avoid fandom altogether. The fan wars last year were a very unpleasant eye-opening experience which I would hate to repeat. I can't imagine they'll be any better this time around. And I want to try and enjoy the whole series on its own terms, not as a build up to a finale which might not even deliver in the way I'd personally want it to.

I often wonder whether I miss Rose as such, or the Doctor as he was when she was with him. I think it's probably the second. Above all, by the end of this series I don't want him alone, I don't want him sad and I do want him to be able to move on without lying to himself or to other people about how he really feels. I think Victoria Coren expressed my feelings perfectly in her comment on the Oscars in last Sunday's Observer:

Don't let them make you feel stupid for wanting light with your shade and hope with your tragedy. They haven't hung on to a deeper truth that we've forgotten, they've failed to see a deeper truth that we've learnt.

They scorn sweetness and optimism because they don't feel it, therefore they're blind to it, therefore a glimpse of better nature in narrative will strike them as sappy and bourgeois and misconceived. Frankly, they need to go on more picnics.

I hope the POTB have taken that sentiment on board. If they haven't, there's not a lot we can do about it by now.

 

This is so going to stir things up, I'll probably hide under the desk a day or two after I've said it, but after many hours of writing myself into, out of and through it, looking at it from every possible angle I've come to the conclusion that, for me anyway, Jack/D/R is an OT2.5.

I can imagine (though not actually write) them having the most wonderful time as a threesome. And I find D/J absolutely beautiful and totally right. The one I can't get my head around is Jack and Rose without the Doctor. I have read some fantastic fic about it and what I'm about to say is absolutely not a comment on the quality of those works. But my reaction to the pairing is always detached - kind of, okay that works in the context of the story, but I personally don't ship them.

No, that's not quite accurate. I think Jack and Rose love each other to bits as friends and there's clearly sexual chemistry between them. Also, Jack's a character who tends to express himself sexually, sometimes to the exclusion of other forms of intimacy. For me (and it's a personal opinion which I don't automatically expect anybody to share if they don't want to) the issue is the nature of the D/R ship. And that comes down to the way I read the Doctor as a character.

I see him as a very vulnerable person who clings to Rose as a lifebelt, even more so post-Doomsday (assuming it happens). So much so that I think he'd be almost too demanding for her to handle long-term without some release. It probably says something about my own attitude to physical relationships that the release wouldn't be sex with another partner, for her, but for the Doctor to have a second partner .

For me, the centre of Rose and Jack's life isn't their love for one another, but their love for the Doctor. It's the deepest bond they share. And they offer him different, but complimentary, things. Rose is the nurturer, the one who brings him down to his emotional core. Jack has gone through so much of the same kind of pain as the Doctor and understands why he approaches things the way he does. Together, Rose and Jack lighten him up and give him friendship and a wonderful grounding. If either one of them, alone, was in a relationship with him, it wouldn't be as complete. We saw Ten/Rose exclusively in S2 - enough said. And although I imagine Jack/Ten having interludes of fantastic physical and emotional closeness from time to time, they both understand each other's defence mechanisms too well for that to become a permanent relationship without Rose's presence.

I don't imagine Rose having any problem with Jack and Ten having a physical relationship, quite the reverse in fact. She loves them both deeply and would rejoice at them getting something they so clearly needed. Particularly as she'll eventually age and die. But I think Ten would be too emotionally vulnerable to handle Rose sleeping with Jack. It's just the way I see him. He wouldn't admit it, he'd say it was fine with him, of course, but it wouldn't be, and therein lies the danger. Rose would know that, and even if Jack didn't agree I think he'd accept her decision.

The interesting thing is I've never read a single reading of the threesome that reflects my own. Maybe people are scared it sounds anti-gay or narrow-minded or something, but it's not. I'm fine with the slash and the OT3. It's just a matter of how I see the characters and it'd be interesting to see if anyone else understands or agrees. Of course, there may be people who feel angry with me for casting Rose in the sacrificing female role, because I'm sure that she'd enjoy a relationship with Jack enormously if she didn't feel it was hurting the Doctor too much. It's just, I think she would.

I said a while back that writing fiction is like climbing a sharp edge on a mountain; it's fine if you just take it a step at a time, and focus on what's right in front of you, but the minute you look down and see what you're doing, you get vertigo and can't go on.

I think I gravitate to skits and parodies because you can hide behind them and say you weren't really trying to do anything original, just paying homage to the source. It gives you a get out.

I don't know whether borrowing characters in fan fiction increases this feeling of vertigo, or whether it's even worse if you invent your own. There's probably nothing truly original to write about anyway, at least as far as people are concerned. We're all using the leftovers from something.

I spent so much of today wrestling with my latest work and then I watched Torchwood and it all seemed to blow right out of the window - not that I've ever written TW as such but I've touched on it at times - and I just thought, how could I possibly ever have the audacity to do this?

Last week I watched because I was intrigued, I wanted to see where Jack had ended up and what sort of shape he was in, and whether he'd mention the Tardis, yada, yada. This week I watched for its own sake. It all looked a bit too stylish and sexy last week. I wasn't convinced there'd be room for any character development beneath the posing. But it's settling down now, probably because tonight's episode wasn't RTD and therefore wasn't quite so set up to shock and provoke. It was really very well made and powerful, and left me feeling I couldn't wait another week to see where these people were going to end up. Eve Myles is awsome, I can't say more without spoiling it for the people who haven't watched yet.

There is a lot of DW reference but not quite in the way I expected - it isn't just thrown in, but clearly part of the show's mission is to explore some of the darker DW themes in more depth. What would it do to us if we could see the future? That kind of thing. Next week is some kind of Cyberpeople plot. Going back and looking at it in depth, in an everyday setting, is just so compelling, and a part of me doesn't want to add to the myth, but just to enter that process and see where it takes me. Whereas with DW there is always more to be said than you see on screen, and a certain amount of comedy mileage to exploit as well.