Aliens Have Landed: Part 1

Oh, dear, another post to talk about a story. I'm such an attention whore. Anyway, I do dislike the "Exposed" tag, but I can't think of anything better. Now I see why Doctor Who Confidential and Torchwood Declassified have such crap names - there's no word that means "behind the scenes" and is anything approaching cool.

Anyway, I'd originally started writing far more for Laoren and Trenavass, but then realised that the school actually housed the interesting part of the story. Since Trenavass's revelation is such a standard plot twist that it's barely more than a plot device, there was only so much "I can't believe it!", "soz Loz" dialogue to write before the aliens themselves needed to start marching.

Deleted scenes: There was a line that Jeremy was asleep upstairs. I took it out, because I like to leave characters unmentioned unless they're directly relevant. Rest assured, Jeremy still exists, and will no doubt hear the news soon enough.

I've been interested in the "person close to you is actually royalty" storyline for a long time, possibly because of my own tenuous link to royal blood. I pretty much stole the whole storyline of royal-alien-sheltering-on-Earth-from-other-aliens from everyone's favourite Classic Who writers, Pip and Jane Baker. It was largely the premise of Watt on Earth. And it had a character named Zoe, and I nicked her name too. I'm such a farce.

In retrospect, I think I made a big mistake in the lies he told Laoren. I'd prefer it if he'd merely lied by omission, rather than flatly fibbing. I mean, that's sort-of there - he never said he wasn't a prince, and indeed, he admitted that royalty were one of the most likely types of his species to speak English. But I think I should have made it clearer that he actually wasn't expecting the police to turn up at all, let alone so soon. And he shouldn't have told her he'd be meeting governmental types. Silly alien.

Anyway, I hope I've done Ffion justice in this story. Always hard to build up unseen characters. Incidentally, although I created it mostly so that Stephanie's story would make more sense, the Apathy Dart Gun is my new favourite sci-fi gadget. Imagine it - you get mugged on the street, so you take a shot, and the mugger just becomes absolutely bored and wanders off to watch Any Dream Will Do. Or you see one of those awful "GOD WILL JUDGE AND KILL US ALL" people on a street corner, and he just thinks "bugger it" and treats himself to a McDonald's Happy Meal.

Ambition

Note before I start: I've labelled this post with the word "Exposed", which I intend to do for any post of mine where I want to discuss a specific story. It'd be cool if other people did the same, so that writers talking about their individual stories can be easily found. I feel that I want to discuss certain things I write, but know that they're probably not going to raise the necessary questions, so I'll post them here. I assume that this is true of many other people's posts too, and I'd love to know the things I couldn't guess.

But anyway!

"Ambition" is both standalone and the first in a series. It's standalone, because for the time being, I don't intend to further Arthur's story. He's come full circle, which was partly the point of the exercise. It exists in the same universe as everything else I write, and indeed, the first draught had a reference to Mr Spencer. But I decided it was self-indulgent, and Mr Spencer became Dennis Freeman.

In a way, it's an evolution of an earlier idea, which I never wrote, because it was basically just a joke. The idea was, this young child has had an awful early life and, at the age of five, everything goes right for him at the same time. So much good stuff happens to him, that inevitably, the story seems to be leading to his downfall. And then it doesn't - a punchline, and the child gets to live happily ever after.

This takes it a step further - an ominous tone depicting something that is, in theory, nice and lovely. And anonymous organisations are always creepy.

I think this is also the first story I've written here that truly keeps the characters at arm's length. No inner thoughts, only a few clues as to their motivation, that sort of thing.