First Post Redux

Originally, back on June 9th, I was organizing this to be a separate blog on my writing, but it got lost in the wash of all the shit that hit the fan.

Some may be wondering isn't one blog enough for one person? Yeah, I suppose so for most people. But with the floodgates that opened over the past few months, I wanted to just set up a blog focused on my writing and the trials and travails as I try to get stuff on the page.

I start this blog with the Doctor Who logo because that has been my focus over the past couple of weeks. Writing that is.

Back in 2002, I started noodling with an idea for a TV series called The Traveller. I wrote quite a few pages of background, episode ideas and actual parts of episodes. In the background, I wrote the purpose of the series was:

Over the past while, science fiction television shows have fallen into what could be called uber-Star Trek. They are focused on the technical jargon & special effects and the rest is considered secondary. Characters are but just 1 1/2 dimensional and usually stolen shamelessly from other shows without thought.

Even the storylines are recycles, showing little originality or passion. And to make the plotlines impressive, the stories are multi-episode, filled with dozens of sub-plots so the viewers are quickly lost in a morass of stories. Continuity often becomes unimportant and quickly lost.

And the focus on special effects takes away from the story because the effects becomes the story. As one master in special effects once commented that the special effects should be seamless with the story. The less special effects the viewers noticed, the better he had done his job. Yet that is not the norm today.

Some shows, like Enterprise harkens back to the day where some passion for storytelling existed in science fiction. Characters were quickly fleshed out and made three dimensional unlike shows like Voyager or Andromeda. And with a passion is a good, healthy sense of humour.

The focus on the Traveller is to return to that passion and focus on characters, which are in different situations. The roots can be traced to early Star Trek, Next Generation, Babylon 5 and Doctor Who, with a smattering of shows like Thunderbirds and the Prisoner. These series were not focused on having the fanciest effects, but on good storytelling, even though there were some bad episodes in these series (Omega Glory, Spock's Brain for example). The rocks looked like they made of foam or the alien was a run thrown over an actor but the story transported the viewer beyond the mere visuals. And even today, with all the special effects available, most viewers would prefer a good story to exceptional special effects.

The Traveller became an idea which went on for a little while. At that time, there was no planned revival of Doctor Who, so I used many ideas from that show as a basis for my show. What I like about the Doctor Who format is that we are dealing with an alien who can travel through space and time, so the whole universe is open to the viewer, as any time in history.

During my ruminations, I came up with ideas for about 27 episodes. Some only had a few line descriptions while others had 10 to 20 paragraphs of description. And the stories bounced around from Gutenberg to deep into space.

By early 2003, the idea was shelved as I was getting my life back together. My focus took me away from writing for a little while. And when I came back to it in 2004-2005, my obvious focus was Tangled Threads.

With the revival of Doctor Who, last year, my idea becomes moot. It would be seen as a Doctor Who rip-off against the real doctor. Yet I am pulling out The Traveller and brushing off the dust on it.

Thing is, the second season of Doctor Who disappointed me. The first season kicked butt and then things fizzled. Of the 13 episodes, 5 I really liked and the rest were, for me, opportunities lost. But what had me more annoyed was that most of the episodes were current Earth. 3 were off planet, a couple in an alternate Earth, 2 historical but the rest were on Earth between the 1950s to 2010. I'll get into that in the next post.

Then, my buddy Mike brought back a BBC book with an adventure with the Doctor and it wasn't bad. So a light bulb went off and now I am starting to focus on writing some stuff for Doctor Who. And revisit The Traveller.

My goal here is personal. Keep a little time capsule of things that revolve around my writing and the different projects I have in the pike. Unlike my main blog, I don't think this will be of any interest to anyone until I finally publish. Basically this will become my own line writing journal. A little glimpse into the creative process of a writer trying to write and organize his ideas.