Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Ooh! Ooh!

Lawrence Miles has updated his blog, finally. This has inspired me to do the same to mine (Google Account? What?), if only to point out to anyone interested what a brilliantly creative writer Loz Miles is. I don't know him from Adam, but never has he written anything that drove me to feel afterwards that I wanted the time it had taken to read it returned to me. And that is a statement that applies to very few writers indeed (as well as being a pretty unwieldy one).

This is even more remarkable when you consider his tendencies to write, for instance, some of the longest Doctor Who fiction published, and these extended burblings about popular culture. For anyone who has no idea who he is, I think one of the best places to acquaint yourself with his world view is probably still his OG interview, which is exceedingly entertaining. Don't be put off by the Doctor Who content to it, that's really pretty incidental, and if you're not a fan of Who you'll be pleased to hear that since then he has only become more and more distant from it.

Personally, I think that's pretty regrettable. I know he would never be trusted to actually write episodes of the new series, but I think he'd have some great story ideas. I mean, the ideas in his fiction have been second to none, and since Doctor Who is (at least as far as Charlie Brooker is concerned) ideas driven TV, I'm betting he could knock some of the pretty half-baked plots we've seen in the recent series into a cocked hat. NB. I'm not saying all the things I just linked to were absolutely dreadful, purely that the ideas driving the plots were pretty unimaginative. You can still hang an entertaining and interesting emotional drama on them, but why not put interesting ideas in there too?

Well, here's hoping that the new year brings plenty of creative success for Loz, not least some more FP audios. It's a real shame that the novel range has ended (for now, at least). Of course, if Loz has some brilliant new plans up his sleeve, I might find it in myself to forgive him for letting them go. Eventually.