who lives, who dies, who tells your story?

shinyopals

A MARRIAGE SONG

Why should we reck of hours that rend
While we two ride together?
The heavens rent from end to end
Would be but windy weather,
The strong stars shaken down in spate
Would be a shower of spring,
And we should list the trump of fate
And hear a linnet sing.

andi_horton

• "The worst part about regeneration, the Doctor decided right then, was that if he did die while being passed out the large intestine of this Giant Venusian Mammoth, Donna would never, ever, ever let him hear the end of it."

• "The first sign that something was wrong with the TARDIS was the sudden and terrible lack of hot water in Rose's shower. Her resulting scream, which was a sound usually guaranteed to bring the Doctor running, did not, so she screamed again. And then she wrapped her hair in a towel, tied on her dressing gown, and went to investigate the console room."

• "When Katie and Sark accidentally stole the TARDIS, they originally had no intent to become intergalactic con artists. Well, she hadn't, anyway. What Sark had intended in locking them in a dimensionally improbable phone box was anyone's guess."

• "While Rose knew in theory that the metacrisis had meant that the Doctor who had followed her home like an abandoned puppy was also half Donna, she was unprepared to discover that, as a result, her husband also seemed to be a bisexual transvestite and slightly schizophrenic. While this didn't make as much of a difference in his personality and behavior as might be expected, it was slightly unsettling when she found him in the dressing room at H&M, wearing a wrap dress and scowling at his complete lack of curves."

• "The Doctor knew about literature and he knew about pocket dimensions, but somehow it wouldn't have automatically occurred to him that, in her post-metacrisis post-amnesia state, Donna might take a vacation in a Wordsworth poem. Yet there she was, wandering lonely as a cloud. There were a truly frightening number of daffodils, too."

• "Many people have gone over Niagara Falls in barrels. However, just because one or two people can fit inside a small wooden structure and tumble over the falls and maybe possibly not die doesn't mean they should, and Rose informs the Doctor of this, wringing out her shirt and pouring riverwater out of the teapot she had previously left on the next to the time rotor on the console."

It’s just their little world, Jackie Tyler and her little girl. They’re happy, there. And then her little girl is gone, grown up and left with a man and Jackie wonders where her fair warning was. Rose always comes back full of stories and kisses and trinkets she doesn’t know what to do with but Jackie doesn’t need a spare bedroom, doesn’t need calls at midnight from other planets. She just needs to know her daughter is safe. But no one will promise her anything.
 

I still get asked with appalling regularity “where my ideas come from.”

Here’s the deal. I flood my poor ageing head with information. Any information. Lots of it. And I let it all slosh around in the back of my brain, in the part normal people use for remembering bills, thinking about sex and making appointments to wash the dishes.

Eventually, you get a critical mass of information. Datum 1 plugs into Datum 2 which connects to Datum 3 and Data 4 and 5 stick to it and you’ve got a chain reaction. A bunch of stuff knits together and lights up and you’ve got what’s called “an idea”.

And for that brief moment where it’s all flaring and welding together, you are Holy. You can’t be touched. Something impossible and brilliant has happened and suddenly you understand what it would be like if Einstein’s brain was placed into the body of a young tyrannosaur, stuffed full of amphetamines and suffused with Sex Radiation.

That is what has happened to me tonight. I am beaming Sex Rays across the world and my brain is all lit up with Holy Fire. If I felt like it, I could shag a million nuns and destroy their faith in Christ.

From my chair.

See, this is the good bit about writing. It’s what keeps you going. It’s the wild rush of “shit, did I think of that?” with all kinds of weird chemicals shunting around your brain and ideas and images and moments and storyforms all opening up snapsnapsnap in your mind, a mass of new and unrealised possibilities.

It’s ten past two in the morning, and I’m completely wired, caught up in the new thing, shivering and laughing and glowing in the dark. Just as well it’s the middle of the night. No-one would be safe from me right now. I could read their minds and take over their heartbeats with a glare.

Faster than the speed of anyone.

That’s how it works.

 

Amen, Warren. That's exactly how it works for me, too.

So I'm about to head out to Tesco and see what there is in the way of dinner, and I definitely need to look up where the British Museum is and where I can get a muffin pan and a small towel for my kitchen. Side note: Fruit vendors on the sidewalk are AWESOME.