What’s Next Around Here?

I’ve been wondering what to do with this blog, which has been adrift since I finished my “Dr Who From The Beginning” series.

I haven’t mustered that much enthusiasm for reviewing current Dr Who episodes, for two reasons:

1. There are at least five dozen other sites doing that, including numerous professional critics, which wouldn’t really bother me except for—
2. According to the stats, only around 3 people read them.

For those three of you, here’s my belated, quickie review of the last Dr Who two-parter, Under the Lake/Before the Flood (anyone else reading can skip the next paragraph):

I really loved part one, which set up a beautiful, classic Dr Who base-under-siege situation. I was equally disappointed by part two, which dropped that in favor of picking up and playing with the Timey-wimey Ball. The new series has done far too much of that and it was less interesting than finishing the adventure that seemed to start in part one would have been. And I positively and vehemently hated the part two teaser, where the Doctor breaks the fourth wall to tell the audience about the Bootstrap Paradox and then play electric guitar for no reason except that I suppose Steven Moffat thought that would be cool. Like the sonic sunglasses. No. Matt Smith made me believe bow ties and fezzes were cool, but Peter Capaldi is not selling me on the Doctor with electric guitars and sunglasses. That aside, what did we need that teaser for? The Doctor explains the paradox again, without breaking our immersion in the story’s world, when he tells Clara about it at the end. Wasn’t that enough? Seriously, the only thing that teaser did was inform us that the writer cared only about one thing, and that thing was not the story. So, I seriously hated that.

Now, back to the main topic of today post: what else would I like to do with this blog?

I had some very nice response to my picture diary of the Epic July Road Trip this summer, but I can’t be traveling all the time. I have some ideas for posts about writing, but now that I’m teaching with the Writer’s Path at SMU more of what I have to say is going into my classes. I do have an idea for a post or two that wouldn’t cannibalize the Writer’s Path classes, and will probably get around to them, but not enough for a regular feature.

That leaves my own fiction, and here’s the idea that’s been gnawing on my brain for a while: there’s a big chunk of my invented history that’s already backstory to The Child. The further planned books in “The Red Light and Shadow” series go forward in time from there, not back to that history. I’ve had a few people ask me if there will be a book talking about the Independence War, the Catastrophe, and the Dark Years that are all alluded to as past events in The Child, and they’ve been disappointed when I’ve said I hadn’t planned on it. The problem is that while I know a whole lot about those events and some of the people who lived through them, they’re not really structured as a cohesive story. I’ve thought about shaping some character’s story to happen during that time in my world’s history but haven’t got very far with it.

But— what about a series of blog posts? Some might take the shape of short stories (or short-short stories), others might look like news reports of the time, or journal entries— at this point I have no plan except for ideas of the kind of things I might do. There would definitely be characters whose lives I’d follow through those events, and the posts would slowly track, serial-style, through that part of my history. I can’t really promise that the whole series taken together would turn into a well-structured whole, more likely it would turn into an ongoing ramble, but who knows? Maybe some shape would come together as I go along.

The frequency of posts would likely be variable— writing on my actual novels has to come first— but I’d definitely keep the series going if once I started it.

So: I’m requesting opinions. Who might be interested in reading something like this if I started putting it out? Would I get more than the three readers of my Dr Who reviews?

—Keith Goodnight, Official Historian of the United Offworld Colonies