Well, there you have it. I hope you've enjoyed my first foray into the world of Who fanfic. As Susan said, the adventure isn't complete - but that doesn't mean the story isn't complete, at least from her perspective!
I won't leave the rest of you hanging forever - but you will have to wait until after The Chase, in about six months' time, for reasons that regular readers can readily figure out for themselves.
Now that the story's finished, I'd like to say a little about how it
came about - and what I was trying to achieve. During this marathon I
had become frustrated that Susan was so ill-served by the TV scripts. In
fact, almost all traces of the unearthly child disappeared by the end
of the third serial - and many only lasted one episode! It's not
surprising that Carole Ann Ford decided to leave when her contract
ended. As a bit of a continuity fetishist, this put me in something of a
bind: I didn't want to contradict her portrayal on the show, but I
didn't want to write a story about a screaming, useless peril monkey
either.
So then I thought, why not write a story that is, on one level, a
completely traditional adventure that might have appeared on the show at
the time, but then restore some of the unearthly child in Susan's inner
dialogue? For this I needed some distance, so decided to make it first
person and have a framing story, set shortly after her departure from
the TARDIS (since The Dalek Invasion of Earth was fresh in my mind).
The fact that there's a further framing sequence beyond that came about
for two reasons. The main one is that both of Ford's Companion
Chronicles are narrated by a later Susan, with a more mature manner than
I would expect from the immediate post-Invasion period, and I found
myself using this voice. The second was my need to have a reason for the
narration, something personal to make it truly Susan's tale. Family
seemed to be a key ingredient, and motherhood offered more scope than
matrimony. So I ended up writing three voices for the main character,
subtly different for the earlier two periods, and then with at least a
decade's more experience for the narrator. Right now, I have absolutely
no idea how successful this has been!
Anyway, I now had a point to the story and a structure - but no
adventure. Obviously it had to provide the opportunity for an "insight
moment" regarding parenthood, but there needed to be more to it than
that. And this is where I got a bit stuck. The people of the Nest and
their plight came quite easily, but every time I tried to include an
actual plot the focus swerved away from Susan. The only way I could
bring it back was to make use of her telepathy, and I felt that had been
overused as a "see, Susan is useful" trump card (and, of course, it had also been used as a "see, Susan is worse than useless" card in The Witch Hunters).
The breakthrough came when it occurred to me that I didn't have to
complete the adventure here. Let the show's first action hero, Ian,
handle half of it in his own post-farewell short story! That left me
free to concentrate on the part that mattered right now.
And after that, it was just a matter of getting the words onto the page.
Which isn't as simple as it seems, partly because of the serialised
nature of the story; but I know myself fairly well and had to do that,
or I would never have finished it. Still, there are things I will change
if I ever prepare an all-in-one version. For one, I've realised that
for Ian's Tale to work they need to spend more time in the Nest - and
that would give me more of an opportunity to emphasise the activities of
the Nest's youngsters, and in the process make Susan's rationale
clearer.
Oh, and if anyone can think of a better title than "Susan's Tale", I'd appreciate it! Best I can come up with is Beneath the Surface, but that makes me think of Silurians and Sea Devils...
Next Time:
I'm taking a couple of weeks off. After that, on Gallifrey Base I'll be
starting a new thread for a new phase; on the blog, of course, that
doesn't apply. Vicki Pallister, rescue is on the way...
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