Richard Salter is a writer who β like me β cut his teeth on Doctor Who fan fiction. He got involved with the Doctor Who Information Network, and when Matt Grady moved on from being the editor of their fiction publication MythMakers, Richard took over. His first issue was their 40th Anniversary celebration, and because I’d had a story in the last issue, Richard got in touch and asked if I’d be willing to write him a story. I did, and he liked it so much that he asked me to write something for his next issue too. So I wrote the story Blossom, which became a favourite of another fan called Stuart Douglas and led him to ask me for stories when he set up Obverse Books.
Richard β like any other writer β was also establishing a career of his own. He contacted Big Finish Productions to talk about their Short Trips range of anthologies, and convinced them that he would be a good person to edit one of the books. Faced with a tight deadline, Richard had to come up with a shortlist of people to ask for stories, and preferably include a few people that the audience might have heard of. As someone with a BBC Book behind him, and someone that Richard had worked with happily before, my name ended up on the list. What I couldn’t tell him when he got in touch was that I had just been commissioned to write The Many Hands, so by the time Transmissions was published I was also the only NSA author in it. That claim to fame has since been trumped: the book also features a story by New Series writer James Moran.