I know I’ve been really silent here the past few weeks… months… but there’s a really good reason for that:
I’ve been finishing my co-authored book, Who Is The Doctor. And we just sent in the final section for it. You can see the listing of Series Six stories that we were working off of on my office bulletin board. Every story is crossed off:
(Yes, that is an adorable picture of my wife above our list).
Who Is The Doctor has been a bit of a wild ride that’s taken well over a year. I wrote my first entry (judging by the time stamp on the e-mail of the copy I sent to my co-author Robert Smith?) November 2, 2010. We sent the first five seasons (plus a lot of other stuff) to our editor at ECW Press, Jen Hale, in July. Since July the book has been edited and rewritten (more on that in a second), which took until the beginning of November. We spent November writing the entries for the last season (plus a lot of other stuff). Along the way we’ve also been copy-editing the sections that have gone through edits and re-writes.
This is the first time either Robert or myself have worked with a professional editor at a publisher (we acted as editors on our books with Mad Norwegian Press, with publisher Lars Pearson offering helpful advice and suggestions every so often). I won’t lie about the experience. It was hard, especially at first as everyone is trying to get a sense of what it is we’re doing. An editor’s job is to look at the work and ask difficult questions about what it is you’re trying to do. Sometimes you want to scream, “Because that’s the book we’re trying to write!” and then figure out some polite way of saying that. Other times, you have to take a step back and figure out why something isn’t working and make it work. You have to know when to hold your corner and when to bend agreeably. There were wars won and wars lost. There always are. Some of the things that were lost are frustrating to me, but at the same time, the feedback we’ve received from people reading through the manuscript is that it’s now tighter, better and more accessible. Which means our editor did a good job and we hopefully did a good job too. And Jen has a great sense of humour and a great enthusiasm for the material, which helped a lot.
But the editing and rewriting process was all-encompassing. I liken it to having a large hole drilled into the back of my head and having the contents inside slowly leak onto the ground in back of me. I have had no “foreground” since August: no time for hobbies or outside interests, no time to do other writing than the book and my day jobs (hence the silence here), and, perhaps surprisingly, no interest in doing anything else to do with Doctor Who. (I have half a dozen things to do on the Doctor Who Information Network’s website and blog that have just sat in the queue). It’s all moving forward like a shark.
I’ve been really lucky to be doing this with such a decent human being as Robert Smith?. We have a good working relationship and we’re usually quite good about finding compromises when we disagree on something. We both have pretty big egos, but I’m always amazed at how good we both are at giving each other our space (Robert is probably more skillful at that than me at it). We’ve only actually been visibly testy with the other twice or so in the whole 13 or so months we’ve been working on this, and it’s been toward the end when we’re both quite tired. Which I think speaks to the level of trust we both have with each other, even though we’re very different people with different outlooks on Doctor Who, politics, language and other things. (And we have complementary skill sets, which helps). I guess what I’m wibbling about is this: It’s good to do a book with as good a person as Robert.
We have another month or so of work ahead on Who Is The Doctor: we’ll have edits and rewriting to the section on Series Six and the final bits and we’ll have copy edits of the remainder of the book. And then we’ll be working with ECW’s crack marketing team on promoting the book.
At the end of all this, sometime in April, there will be a published book that I genuinely hope will add something positive to the world of Doctor Who and, I would like to think, the discussion on contemporary television generally.
In the meantime, time to get back to the grind. More blog entries (and, in December, columns) to come, though, I promise!
Oh, you can also now order our book on amazon.ca and amazon.com !
I have been very remiss in not pointing out that my friend of 16 years, co-editor, co-author (and interrobang fetishist) Robert Smith? had a book of his own out this past fall. 
