Timewaster's Guide Archive

I think the Third Doctor is a place to start, then catch Thom Baker.
That will given you a good idea of the stories that went into creating the canon.  Just remember we're talking about 1960's TV and be kind about special effects and setting.

@ Silk and Valkemphyre. I'm aware of the parallels to Hamlet, and they're intentional, but I'm absolutely not novelizing Hamlet.  I may have bitten off more than I can chew, but the scope and scale is a whole lot larger and more politically complex.

I have drawn on five classic pieces of English, Russian and German literature, but I'm not simply stealing from them even if it looks like it in certain passages.  It'll get a lot more evocative in chapters 2-4. I'm just hoping that won't be a discouragement for the reader to continue.

Cool enough.  Would love to do that.

Thanks I'll see if I can figure a way to incorporate that.  What I'm using and what I'm most comfortable with is limited omniscience.  The narrator has the whole story after the fact, but, like the reader, he experiences it in scenes and reverie where he occasionally shadows the POV of a given character, then moves on.  The narrator is more of a "camera" than a truly omniscient narrator.  He is a character however and I'm working at getting his voice right, while transitioning onto and off of a given character.

For some reason this thread makes me think of Abraham Lincoln beards made of bacon.  Dan Wells in a bacon beard. . . .
hrmmmmm

I liked the touching scene where the creature presents it's child to El(im) and I was okay with the Prelude aside from the fact that the cosmology it presents is pretty flawed (see below).  I also liked the pacing and characterization in Chapter 1, although I was put off by wondering if Kyrie (Kyrie elaison?) is the baby that was presented to El(im).  You have a good command of setting and pace.  And mostly your narrative shifts voice appropriately for the character in focus, with a few odd notes.

On the negative side, I came up with essentially the same  three issues that Underdog, Shi and Comatose did and two more of my own.  Elementals are not necessarily overdone, because few ever do them according to the legends.  It's as if the D&D parodies are the only text out there, so a "cannonical" rendition would be refreshing and very different.  But then, by making them child gods you've pretty much taken off on a tangent as well.

For instance Faer Folk are elementals, as are classical Djinn, gnomes etc.  If you did them straight then you might be on to something.

I had a problem with the use of the almost Hebrew names.  I've written fantasy that used a good deal more Hebraic names for god etc., but the reframing of all those terms into something so allegorical just seemed like a parody to me.  I'm curious why you pluralized El (and why there is a camp named El in the plural), when there was the perfectly good Elohim already nicely pluralized.

The one thing I had a problem with that no-one has touched on is the cosmology, which seems to have demoted the "creator of all things" to a lesser being that is made of matter, bounded by time occupies space and in general is composed of the "things" he and she are supposed to have created.  It got recursive.

@ Comatose

Yeah.  That helps. 

This is the point where I say, "Yeah.  Meant to do that.  Yeah. That's the ticket."

I think smith has grown into the best or one of the best doctors.  He manages to incorporate the curmudgeon of the First Doctor the practical brilliance of the third doctor and the smarm that only Tom Bakker could summon.  In a very real sense he ties all the doctors back into a single personality.

When I was a kid I agreed, Bow-ties were coooool.  Now not so much.  The problem is they have this wonderful cast (even rory is pretty useful) but the writing has suffered.  The Pandorica was a good idea, but crammed into a two episode arch at the end of the season it was kind of pathetic.

Of course Doctor's elimination and reintegration into the universe frees him to become Rassalon, and there is no reason the Doctor's time lock would continue to work.

Maybe River is the now sane Master. . . . But no, she'll be that female clone.  Hurray for the shear absurdity and long live the series.