Hello, imaginary internet people! There you all are!
And welcome to the first of my semi-regular newsletters. If you're reading this, it means you signed up for it, or someone else put your email address in by mistake. Either way, welcome! I don't currently know what the schedule for these will be, this is the first one I've managed to pull together, so I'll try to get in the habit of keeping them coming. They'll mostly be about writing and writing-related stuff, thoughts that are too long for social media, links I've found - and maybe even the occasional bit of news, I know, what a concept for a newsletter, it's never been done before.
What are we all up to? How's everything going? You doing okay? Surviving? Getting out and about? Drinking enough water? The world is a weird place right now. I'll try to make it slightly weirder for you. It's my gift. It's my curse.
Me? Oh, thank you for asking! Well, I've supposedly got lots of things happening, lots potentially happening, lots potentially about to fall to pieces - this is the life of a jobbing writer. You might have 10 jobs all at once, you might be down to your last few pennies, and you never know what the next few months will hold. That's writing. We're creative, sensitive, filled with anxiety. We have somehow signed up for a job that is the best possible fit to our skills, AND the worst possible fit for our anxieties. The thing that makes us good at making up stories is the same thing that makes us worry about everything. As I like to say, only actual impostors never get impostor syndrome.
Us? Our impostor syndrome has impostor syndrome...
We're a mess. But most of us don't have any actual real world qualifications, and are unemployable in any other job. I've got a 60 words per minute Pitman certificate in shorthand and typing from 1994, I probably couldn't even get hired to stuff envelopes. So I'll take the anxiety in exchange for the promise of sometimes maybe possibly getting writing work now and again. Also, and this must be said, we're not exactly digging holes or breaking rocks for a living. It's the best job in the world. It's just the most unpredictable job in the world too.
Art stuff
I don't often go to art exhibitions, but I really should, as I get a lot out of them. This year, one of them really spoke to me as a creative, more than I expected. It was at the Tate Modern, featuring two artists who seem very different but actually have a lot of similarities - Hilma af Klint, and Piet Mondrian. I've been a Mondrian fan since I read Lawrence Block's The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian, but I only knew his later work, the primary colours and black lines that he's most famous for.
It turns out that Mondrian started out as a classic landscape painter, which was a big surprise to me. He gradually evolved his style, experimenting with representing flowers and trees in different ways, then moved into geometric shapes, separating out the colours, slowly moving ever closer to the forms and patterns we're more familiar with today. But weirdly, Klint had a very similar journey, which the exhibition shows - she started out with landscapes, and progressed her style along similar lines (no pun intended), eventually ending up with geometric shapes and bold colours, very different to where Mondrian ended up, but very much in the same arena. They both lived and worked at pretty much the same time, even dying in the same year - but never met.
So why did this exhibit speak to me so much? Because it was a very clear, stark representation of two completely different people trying to find their *thing*. Both started in landscapes, but clearly wanted to do something else, they just didn't know what that was yet. So they experimented, they tried new things, they stripped out elements like colour, lines, shapes, etc, brought them back in, made wrong turns, latched onto bits they preferred, moved forwards with those, until they got closer and closer to the thing they really wanted to do. They knew it when they saw it.
We can all learn something from that. Sometimes we don't know, creatively, what it is we want to do, what type of stories we want to tell. We have to get lots of stories out of us first, chipping away at the marble to figure out what the sculpture is. Sometimes we don't figure it out until late in life, sometimes we get there earlier. But we're all striving to work out what it is we want to do. We all want to know what our thing is. Keep experimenting. Find your thing. You'll know it when you see it.
Movie stuff
Last week I saw All Of Us Strangers, which starts out feeling like one type of film, then gradually turns into something else entirely, and is absolutely *gorgeous*, leaving me in an emotional puddle on the floor. Wonka also left me in pieces, it's an absolute delight, from the Paddington gang, and Simon Farnaby once again delivers an exceptional script visualised beautifully by Paul King. I'm very much on the Timothée Chalamet train, I think he can do anything. Oh, and I nearly died laughing at Rowan Atkinson's delivery of a line when he answers a phone in the church, I'll let you discover that for yourself - make sure you're not mid-drink/food during any of his scenes, don't choke on laughter like I did.
Anatomy of a Fall is a gripping, sometimes infuriating (deliberately so) drama/thriller about the aftermath of an accident, and was so stressful it has become a verb we now say in the house here - "be careful on those stairs, I don't want to get Anatomy of a Falled..." And Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget is HUGE fun, one of those perfect sequels that delivers on expanding the themes of the first movie - our almost 6 year old really enjoyed it too, it held her attention all the way through, which is a lot for a kid.
Work stuff
What else has been going on? I've been doing some more audio work for Big Finish, but can't say what that work is, before anything is announced, so keep it under your hat for now. I've also been working on a comic that I can't say anything about yet. And I have a few things bubbling along that are hopefully just about to pop into life, including a couple of US-based projects. As always, most of these things involve waiting for Money People to say yes or no, which means they stay infuriatingly secret until they either get announced, or just fall apart and vanish.
By the way, when I talk about new, specific projects here, I'll be using codenames, as most of this stuff doesn't get announced for ages, sometimes for years, and I'm not usually allowed to give the game away. Also, it makes me feel like a secret agent or something, instead of an exhausted writer clinging to the last remaining shreds of health and dignity.
My Doctor Who Target novelisation of The Fires of Pompeii came out last year, as did my Big Finish audio for the Cass box set starring the 8th Doctor, Paul McGann ("Previously, Next Time"), and this year I had a 9th Doctor audio released starring the mighty Christopher Eccleston. Hearing the man himself say the line "Jessica Fletcher is the GOAT" was quite a moment, let me tell you. We also had to explain to him what "the GOAT" meant in this context, which was also a moment.
And I've discovered that every one of my audios has one scene that is almost impossible to perform, the actors are left breathless and shattered after the first take. Scene 26 recently was a killer. Paul McGann memorably retitled my previous audio as "Tongue-Twisters in Space". It's just that I know the actors are all so good, they'll be brilliant at it, and after the obstacle course of take one, they usually nail it on take two. Most other scenes they can rattle off in one take, they're professionals. The most recent one I've written (still secret!) is basically a verbal SAS workout for one particular actor, I can't wait to hear how they tackle it.
Speaking of tricky work, the Target book was one of the hardest things I've done, as I'm used to scripts, a very different beast to prose. Also, it's odd writing the book version of a script when you've seen the episode so many times. At first, I was worried about changing anything, but had to get past that to make it work, otherwise people may as well just read the script. Obviously, I wanted to give it a flavour of classic Target books, the idea being that if you never saw the episode, the book was a recreation of that experience - but at the same time, it has to flesh things out, give scenes more room to breathe. TV moves FAST, it has to, the audience craves excitement. Books have much more leeway to go off on tangents, explore the inner mind of the characters. And Donna demands space to talk. I've missed writing for Donna so much, she's one of my favourite ever people to write dialogue for. It's been so lovely seeing her back on screen with David Tennant in the three specials this year, which I absolutely loved. So excited to see Ncuti's first full episode on Christmas Day, I think he's going to be amazing.
Waffle stuff
That's probably plenty of waffle for my first, introductory newsletter, enough to let you know if you like it or not. If you enjoyed it, please pass it onto anyone you think might like it too, or just let them know it's here. And let me know if there's anything you want me to write about in particular, this is for you after all. It will always be free, I know most people have a second, paid version, but I genuinely can't be bothered working out how to set that up on the website, this was tricky enough.
Oh, and at the moment I'm using Substack, despite the platform allowing transphobes and Nazis, because it's the simplest I've found that won't charge me money. I'm exploring other providers, but right now I'm using their bandwidth and spending their hosting money on this nonsense. Also, every platform owner seems to be horrendous, so I'll probably just have to go with it for now. If I find a better solution, then I can just port everything over.
My website is going to get an overhaul soon, as well. I'm looking at a different host, Weebly has been great and easy to use, but I need to update it and tie it together with the domain name properly. That may well happen over the break, now I've got a bit more time. My website also contains all my info and social links etc. FYI, I'm not active on Twitter anymore, as it's a cesspool of awfulness - I check replies/DMs briefly once a day, occasionally post promotional things, then I nope out of there. But! I'm having a lot of fun on Threads, BlueSky, and Mastodon, they're much more friendly and relaxed, like the fun, early days of social media - I highly recommend signing up to one or all of those. So come find me on whichever social site you prefer, all links are on the Contact page of my site.
There's also free stuff on there too, on the appropriately named Free Stuff page - some Doctor Who short stories from the Short Trips books and Doctor Who Storybooks, Torchwood stories from Torchwood Magazine, and all three of my produced movie scripts, Severance, Cockneys Vs Zombies, and Tower Block. Yes, I know. I'm a giver. That's what I do. I give.
Whatever you've all doing during this end of year period, I hope you have fun, and stay safe. See you on the other side, and fingers crossed that 2024 is a better year for everyone.
James Moran
My website:
http://www.jamesmoran.com/
Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian exhibit, "Forms of Life":
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/hilma-af-klint-piet-mondrian/exhibition-guide
The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian, by Lawrence Block:
https://lawrenceblock.com/books/the-burglar-who-painted-like-mondrian/
My Big Finish work so far:
https://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/doctor-who-the-ninth-doctor-adventures-travel-in-hope-2825
https://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/doctor-who-time-war-5-cass-2521
My Doctor Who Target book:
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/447631/doctor-who-the-fires-of-pompeii-target-collection-by-moran-james/9781785947797
I definitely enjoyed this first newsletter. I had a similar experience with the Tate exhibition. I went in not really knowing what to expect but came out enamoured, especially with Klint's work, so much so I bought the exhibition book on the way out! I plan to encorporate some of her ideas and imagery in my writing sometime in the future. And fun fact: if you read anything about Rudolf Steiner there, I went to a school somewhat based on his ideas of education.