Locked In Space

In Aaron Sorkin’s still partially excellent The West Wing, the President tells someone who wants to make the impossible happen for the sake of his boss “You don’t want to be the guy, you wanna be the guy the guy relies on!” I’m having that translated into Latin as my family motto: when it comes to writing, if someone tells me they need a good story pronto there is nothing I like more than being the person who can help them out.

The first time I heard about Stewart Sheargold’s Locked in Space it was because one of the writers Stewart had commissioned for the book had to withdraw, and there was a 10,000 word hole where their story was meant to be. Stewart asked Obverse Books supremo Stuart Douglas if he knew anyone who might be able to turn a replacement in to a reasonably tight deadline. And Stuart thought of me.

The theme of the collection was - I had to admit - a tricky one: Iris Wildthyme and Panda had been locked down in their bus by a space plague, and Stewart wanted stories of how they kept themselves sane without breaching lock down rules. Being trapped on the bus - which, whilst ostensibly a TARDIS is not bigger on the inside - might seem to be the main problem, but that kind of restriction barely affects a story in practice: particularly in prose, anything can happen anywhere, and having a restricted toy box to play in often leads to more creativity in any place. No, the difficulty here would be tone. 

This collection was clearly “inspired by real events”, as the TV movies like to put it, and the global pandemic and its associated lock downs had been a traumatic event for a lot of people. Some people might think that a character as fun and funny as Iris was not an appropriate figure to have “do” a lock down story. And I wasn’t entirely sure that I wasn’t one of them.

But there was a part of me that thought that sounded like a challenge. And I do so love to help out.

The obvious - to me - solution was that I needed to write an Iris lockdown story about whether I should write an Iris lockdown story. Which meant it was time that I made my debut as a Doctor Who universe character.

The first thing I wanted to do was set the story in the Fancy Dress shop from my previous Iris collection The Perennial Miss Wildthyme - it was, after all, technically the Bus so I wasn’t breaking the format too much. And I knew that the actual heart of it would be Dale Smith talking directly to Iris about appropriate ways to deal with trauma. This left a surprisingly small amount of plot needed for the adventure Iris and Panda were ostensibly having: a brief mention of one of Jarvis Cocker’s previous jobs in a radio series he had made gave me both a title and a basic plot to happen around the story. Surprisingly quickly, I had an outline for what I wanted to do.

Because of the need for speed, it had been agreed that I would deal directly with Stuart and not Stewart until it was time for editorial input, so I sent my pitch off and waited to hear if it was OK. A short time later, I heard it was, so I got started writing.

When I was happy with the story, I sent it to Stuart, who passed it across to Stewart (are you keeping up?). This was my first time talking to - let alone working with - Stewart Sheargold, and the story I had sent him could be read as dismissing the very basis of his collection, so I was more than a little nervous about how he would respond. 

Thankfully, he turned out to be a lovely person with impeccable taste (he said he liked Heritage) and he had mostly only minor suggestions for improving the story and getting it to fit a little better with the other stories.

We did have a little discussion about the best way of differentiating the section where Dale Smith and Iris Wildthyme talk from the rest of the story, but with a minimum of fuss we quickly got to a version that we were both happy with. The story was signed off, and we said our goodbyes. The only additional changes came right at the end of the process, as the final proofs were being mocked up as we had to lose a recurring joke about Richard Osman being the universal measurement of social distance on the flimsy excuse that nobody but me remembered this being the case. I agreed Osman could be the two meters he always should’ve been, and the book went off to print.

The final book - Locked in Space - was announced for publication in October 2023, and I have to admit I’m a little nervous about how it will be received: it is far and away both the most silly and revealing thing I have written so far, and there’s still a good chance that everybody will disagree with my conclusions about how appropriate it is to have Iris Wildthyme interact with real life tragedy. 

All I can say in my defence is that I really enjoyed the process of writing it, and I really look forward to the chance to have the guy rely on me again.