I knew Nick Wallace before he was somebody. We both used to be part of the online Doctor Who writing group Who-ink – a forum for sharing and commenting on writers’ attempts to pitch for the Virgin and BBC Books Doctor Who ranges back when that was something you were allowed to do. We also bounced around the same circles until we got chatting about Rebus and ended up forming our own mutual support network. We moved in similar circles, but Nick also had connections in places I didn’t: he has worked frequently for Big Finish Productions, and that led them to offer him his first job editing a book – the collection of Bernice Summerfield short stories Collected Works.
When he got the nod, one of the people on his list of potentials was me: partly because we were friends, partly because our previous interactions “pointed to someone who knew how to write and write well”, but also for two other reasons: