VWORP!2 and the further voyages of the Escape Pod: delayed

It’s with a heavy heart and a light head that I have to announce that the second volume of my Doctor Who guide, VWORP!2, likely won’t see print until January 2014. The revised second edition of its predecessor, VWORP!1, will arrive alongside it, with several pages of new content pushing it past the 400 page mark.

There are several reasons for this, but the simplest reason for the delay is actually good news: I got a job after over two years of searching. The original Christmas 2013 release date was announced on the premise that I was spending the entirety of every day ingesting Doctor Who through the eyes and ears, in between sending out job applications that might as well have been FOI requests submitted to UNIT: they seemed to vanish into a cosmic round file, never to be heard from again. I was determined that, short of landing a new job, finishing VWORP!2 was my job now (along with work I was putting in toward WARP!1 and The Guide To 42 British Science Fiction TV Classics, on those occasions when I’d reach my Doctor Who saturation point).

Also, I suffered a couple of catastrophic back-to-back computer failures in the past month, which seriously set things back. I’ve got a new hard drive on order to become the new drive C: for my primary workstation, at which point I will be back in the making-books business in earnest. Nothing related to the book was lost in this double-drive-death; I’m actually reasonably good at backing my stuff up.

Now that the finger of fate (I hesitate to identify precisely which finger) has pointed at me and said “Get back to work!”, it’s much harder for me to do that planned year’s-end binge of Doctor Who audios required to reach the (big) finish line (no, I couldn’t help myself, thank you very much for asking). This also has the beneficial side effect of allowing me to include Matt Smith’s final adventure as the Doctor, the Christmas special The Time Of The Doctor, as the last TV adventure in the book, rather than cutting it off at the 50th anniversary special. (Call it a hunch, but I have a gut feeling that the episodes titled “The [insert word here] of the Doctor” are going to form a self-contained storyline of their own. Now, if we’re talking about “The Toenails of the Doctor” this time next year, feel free to remind me I said that.) This way, the third volume starts clean with Peter Capaldi on board.

(This also future-proofs VWORP!1 v2.0 from the persistent rumors that another lost story from the B&W years is about to re-emerge. You’ve heard the same rumors I have. I have no idea if they’re true. The fact that VWORP!1’s revision includes brand new, written-from-the-ground-up reassassments of The Enemy Of The World and The Web Of Fear has taught me not to rule anything out.)

Delaying VWORP!2 and the second edition of VWORP!1 slightly into 2014 also lets me line some other dominoes up in a neat row, about which more later. 2014’s going to be kind of a big deal around here. (Wow, that escalated quickly.)

I will aim to have WARP!1 out in the summer, hopefully before the late-summer/early-fall daisy chain of conventions in this part of the country, ideally aiming for a world premiere at the 2014 Glitchcon, whose organizers have been divinely good to me over the course of promoting the one whole book I’ve gotten out the door to date. 42 British Science Fiction TV Classics will, hopefully, be finished in time for Christmas 2014. Not half ambitious, eh? Four books in one year.

The computer crash has also seriously thrown the Escape Pod podcast off course, so here’s the plan: there probably won’t be new Escape Pods until January. The December installments are all recorded, but not edited together, which is something that became impossible when the boot drive with all of the software on it died suddenly at the beginning of December. The software is backed up, but there’s no point in installing it on anything other than a stable, clean drive. December’s Escape Pods will be completed in chunks of five or so at a time and will be available in the archive section. Several January installments are also already recorded (it’s a long story) and it makes more sense to try to get the Escape Pod ready to fly again in the New Year before it hits the magical 366-episode mark in March (again – in one year! wow!).

Another project, long-simmering in theLogBook.com’s skunkworks, will start to taxi down the runway once the Escape Pod is complete – the project for which the Escape Pod has merely been a dry run. It will be a bit more complex, but also a lot more fun. And this time I’m bringing friends along for the ride.

2014 will be the year that projects get finished, and that’s just the beginning. Stick around, and there’ll be more to tell.