doctor who – Jennifer M. Baldwin

I am getting close to the half-way point for my rough draft of 13 Treasures of Britain. I should reach 40,000 words this weekend.

I’m freaking out a little bit that my deadline is December 30 and I’m still not half-way done, but I am also strangely confident.

On the other hand… I have a sinking feeling that I’m suffering from a “main character problem.” To be specific, I’m afraid that I have a flat main character whom the audience won’t care about. My challenge is to find a way to get the audience to care about my Merlin character. Is the “save the cat” thing played out, or do writers still do that?

In a lot of ways, I’ve imagined my version of Merlin to be like a mixture of the Peter Capaldi and Christopher Eccleston versions of Doctor Who. But the first half of the book is mostly Merlin-collecting-things and doing crazy stuff (think: the first half of a Doctor Who episode, where the Doctor travels to another planet and encounters some treacherous situation). In a typical episode of Doctor Who, the emotional stuff usually builds in the second half, particularly when we find out there’s more to the adventure than the Doctor originally thought.

My problem is that I’m not writing an episode of television; I’m writing a novel. So for 40,000 words (100+ pages), the emotional stuff hasn’t come into play yet. It will happen in the second half of the book, but will the audience lose interest before that?

I can already foresee a ton of editing and revision once I’m finished with the rough draft. Which is actually exciting. I’m a weird person in that I LIKE revising. I’ve just got to keep the “inner editor” at bay for a few weeks more while I finish the rough draft.

I like that he’s meaner. Matt Smith’s 11th Doctor will always be my first Doctor – and thus, a part of me will always claim he’s my favorite Doctor – but, boy howdy, do I love Peter Capaldi as number 12! I was the lone voice of reason amongst my group of Doctor Who friends, who all had doubts about “the old guy,” but having seen him be amazing on The Hour, I knew Capaldi would be fantastic as the Doctor. First, he’s Scottish. And as a fake Scottish person myself (Digression: I can do a wicked Scottish accent… and this is NOT bragging. It’s mostly to do with the fact that I have no life and once spent an entire summer watching nothing but Kelly MacDonald movies and the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, all the while perfecting my ability to talk like a Glaswegian), I appreciate the Doctor’s new accent and think it totally suits a rather grumpy, rather prickly Doctor (and I love that he noticed that he had an accent). The Scottishness of the Doctor extends beyond his accent — he’s clever, and smart-alecky, and gruff — and I’m glad Moffat and Capaldi didn’t gloss over the accent but used it as a way to explore a different facet of the Doctor’s personality.

I also love that this meaner Doctor is a throwback to the first Doctor, William Hartnell. The first Doctor was essentially a grumpy old man. Capaldi’s Doctor is what I picture a young Hartnell being like: smarter than everyone else in the room, annoyed by others’ lack of intelligence, uncomfortable with letting too many emotions show, snippy and caustic because it amuses him but also because it keeps his deep, deep loneliness buried.

Also, I can’t be the only one to notice that the tone of this new season and this new Doctor feel like they are riffing on Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty. I know that Rick and Morty is an homage to Back to the Future (with a little Doctor Who thrown in), but I’ll be damned if the dialogue from, say, “Mummy on the Orient Express” doesn’t sound like it could be transposed word-for-word to Rick and Morty. Of course, Doctor Who is not copying a gross-out, R-rated adult cartoon – I don’t mean to suggest that – but it’s uncanny how well Capaldi’s Doctor matches up to Rick. Maybe it is the eyebrows…