PS Creativity > Fan Fiction > Darkness on the Edge of Town > Author's Notes
a Fifth Doctor adventure written by Paul Clement
Author's Notes
This is a story that took a long time to go online. In fact, my second story to end up on the internet, The Legacy novella In Nomine, was written after I had completed 'Darkness on the Edge of Town'.
The idea for the story, which at one stage was tentatively called The Claws of Lloigor, came after reading an omnibus of stories by horror writer H.P Lovecraft. I loved his whole style of writing as well as the Cthulhu Mythos his collective works spawned, and toyed with the idea of writing a story in a similar first person narrative style. An idea that was ditched fairly early on during the planning stage.
One thing that stayed fairly consistent throughout the planning stage was the idea of having the story set in two distinct time zones. At this stage I hadn’t decided on turning it into a Doctor Who story, and was working on a completely Lovecraftian style endeavour. It was while working on the 1700’s era that I realised how easy it would be to turn the whole thing into a Doctor who story and decided to change a few things to fit things in a little better.
Once I had the idea of a Doctor Who/Cthulhu story in my head, the next job was to choose the TARDIS team that would appear in the story. I discounted the original lineup immediately. I’d already written the novella that I had wanted to do for that particular set of people when I’d done The Night They Drove Dixie Down, and wanted to move on from there. Working my way through the TARDIS teams, the one that really jumped out at me was the Fifth Doctor with Tegan and Turlough.
They certainly turned out to be harder to write for than the original TARDIS team, and there were a few times when I thought about turning back to what I felt I could do better. In the end I stuck with it, as I felt it was the best way to improve my writing.
I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.
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