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Author's Notes - Justin Richards' guide to The Sands of Time.

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Instalment One

(Note that this contains some minor spoilers - so you might want to read it after reading the instalment)

The Sands of Time was the third Doctor Who novel I wrote for Virgin publishing after Theatre of War and System Shock. Having done one book set in the future well away from Earth, and one in - near enough - the present day, I wanted to vary it again. But I didn't just want to set a story partly in the past, I also wanted to play with the whole notion of time travel, which I felt had been largely neglected in the books and for that matter on television. There is far more potential to the concepts and paradoxes than just using the TARDIS to go to different times and places.

I also wanted to write a sequel to Pyramids of Mars. Again, the whole of Egyptian mythology and the legacy of the Mummy movies from Universal and Hammer had not, I felt, been fully exploited. Rebecca Levene was the editor at Virgin, and she was happy for me to produce a proposal for a sequel, but warned me that she felt it might be tricky given that Pyramids of Mars did rather establish that the last of the Osirans was now dead. But, undaunted, I set to work.

I always start a book by deciding what it is about (as opposed to what happens). This book would be about time and about Egyptology. That decided, I then roughed out a relatively simple storyline which I could embellish and expand. I had read about the 'mummy parties' that the Victorians occasionally held where people were invited to an evening event with drinks and food and the centrepiece was the unwrapping of an Egyptian mummy - ostensibly for educational purposes, but really just for the sensationalism of it. I loved the idea that the guests would gather, and someone would be late but they go ahead anyway - and when the decaying mummy is unwrapped, inside the genuine, ancient wrappings is the missing guest.

That idea obviously developed and evolved, and it gave me something to start from - how could this have happened? What had to take place before that moment for the story to work and where did it lead in consequence? Having got an idea of the shape of my story, I started to add detail. Research is a lovely academic-sounding term. In this case it meant I watched Pyramids of Mars to decide what elements I liked and wanted to include and expand on. Then I got myself copies of all the Universal mummy films and as many of the Hammer ones as I could find, and I watched them. As I went through I made notes of the sequences or ideas that really struck a chord with me and I wanted to include - like the mummy attacking an encampment of archaeologists in Egypt, or the image of the mummy carrying the heroine into a lake...

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Having got a very rough story and a list of things to include, it is then a case of fitting it together like a jigsaw - what happens when? How does it all fit together? There is a balance to be found between including things for the sake of it, and letting your imagination encompass those elements and benefit from the mental exercise of discovering out how it all works.Once you have a story, the next thing to decide is how to tell it. In this case it was made more difficult given that the events don't follow a simple chronological sequence. So whose perception of those events, whose experience of them should the reader be privy to?

There needed to be a central thrust of the narrative, from which I could then decide on occasion to depart in order to clarify certain points and to conceal others. The hardest thing was to decide how to mix it up so it intrigues along the way, and falls into place at the end. So the opening sequence is a defining moment for the story, but we only discover its personal relevance to Rassul at the end of his story. Equally, the Doctor's visit to the Cranleigh wedding might seem like a gratuitous character moment, but it is essential to remind (or inform) readers of certain things that will be necessary to their understanding of the finale...

Another consideration I took into account was that I had been given six months to write Theatre of War, five to write System Shock, and this time Rebecca was hinting that I would get four months - if I was lucky. And I knew that in the next four months I would be travelling a lot to the USA on business. Luckily, laptop computers had been invented and I had one for my work. So I needed to structure the story so that a large part of it was in the form of relatively short chapters or chunks so I could write a complete, discrete section whenever I got some free time while travelling. I can still remember which piece I wrote in a coffee bar in Miami airport, which was accompanied by weak, fizzy American beer and a plate of nachos in a Marriott hotel in Atlanta, which on an uncomfortable chair at the departure gate of Birmingham International... Most of the short sequences between chapters were initially written like this.

Rebecca was very keen on the proposal, but had three problems with it. One was that she didn't like the title as she felt 'The Sands of Time' was a bit of a cliché. I liked it for the same reason, of course - and because it picked up on the Egyptian theme and the notion of time itself and an hourglass. Jokingly, I suggested we could call it Orion's Daughter and for a time it was going to be called Child of Orion - which explains some slightly stilted phraseology late on in the book. Luckily, rather than just insist, Rebecca asked her colleagues at Virgin what they thought, and everyone else liked The Sands of Time.

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Her second problem was that Peter Darvill-Evans had said he wasn't sure it all worked and the various strands of the story fitted properly together. That wasn't to say that he thought it didn't, but that he would like us to be absolutely certain. So to fix that, I produced a flow chart showing the different storylines and following each of the main character's personal time line. It showed the intersections and dependencies. Having been writing a manual and an online tutorial on how to go about designing and writing event-driven and object-oriented program code that seemed to me to be the best way to check my 'narrative design'. What I didn't know is that Peter has a background in those adventure books where you choose the path through the book depending on what action you think the characters should take - and those are designed with a flow chart, not surprisingly. So Peter was well able to interpret what I sent in, and was so impressed he had this huge chart (I think it was about a dozen A4 pages taped together) hanging on the back of his door for several months. Probably so he could marvel at the insanity of the mind behind it.

Story timeline | The Doctor's timeline

Rebecca's third point was really that she agreed with something I had worried about. In my letter accompanying the proposal (on 26 January 1995) I had said:

The main concern I have is that there is no character other than the Doctor and Tegan who goes right through the book. One way to fix this is to set the story after Time-flight, and have just the Doctor and Nyssa. Tegan's role can then be taken by another character - either one we already have (Atkins or Lord Kenilworth), or a new one (museum curator, street urchin, whatever). The only real change to the plot outline would then be to send the character to Norris's cottage by train and taxi rather than by car (in chapters 11 - 12). There again, it may not be a problem at all.

Rebecca agreed we needed to sort this out - with all the temporal to-ing and fro-ing, we really did need a point of view character for the reader apart from the regular TARDIS crew. Without this the book would have been mechanically sound and interesting, but somewhat cold and heartless. Luckily, I was able to fix this as I produced my flow chart and be certain I had not upset anything in the plot by having the character of Atkins travel with the Doctor for a while and experience the story pretty much as the reader does.

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It also gave me a great character who I came to like a lot - my plan for him was that he should start out like the Anthony Hopkins character in The Remains of the Day but then his experiences soften and liberate him to the extent that I could give him the happy ending that Hopkins' butler is unable to achieve simply because of who he is. One of the problems of writing Doctor Who books (and to a lesser extent of any series fiction) is that for a novel to work, your central character has to learn and develop because of their experiences. Now, thanks to Rebacca's perceptive comments, I had a character who could do this in a way that the Doctor never can and his companions rarely manage.

As I told Rebecca when I sent her a final version of the outline (which ran to about 8000 words in all) on 10 March 1995:

The villain, Rassul, now survives the whole book (well, almost). Also, Atkins goes with the Doctor and Tegan on their trans-temporal travels. The outline does not reflect their character development much, but I see Rassul as being a suave religious fanatic. He is rather like a 19th century version of a crooked US evangelist preacher, with more concern for his own style of life than for the after-life. Atkins I think will start off as Anthony Hopkins' character from The Remains of the Day. He is sexually and emotionally repressed and entirely devoted to his role in society to the exclusion of his style of life (spot the contrast with Rassul). He will develop during his travels, as his mind is broadened by exposure to futuristic science, alien menace, death, and - especially - Tegan) into a more balanced individual - to the point where he may even end up proposing to the otherwise dramatically-redundant housekeeper in the final paragraphs...

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Instalment Two

(Note that this contains some minor spoilers - so you might want to read it after reading the instalment)

Have set up a 'teaser' with the discovery that Nyssa has somehow been mummified millennia ago, this section of the book is to do with capitalising on the confusion of the readers and the characters. As the Doctor tries to work out what is going on, so the readers are on the same narrative journey.

That's not to say there isn't room for character work too. This confusion, and the situation, allowed me to explore Tegan's feelings. Without Nyssa and with the Doctor distracted she is very much alone - and Tegan is someone who I thought always puts on an act for whoever she is with. In this section she is in a daze, her world falling apart - in a later chapter she articulates that. It was a useful device later to be able to have Tegan alone with Nyssa's sleeping body in the tomb, thinking about who she really is and what's happening.

This is also a time when I could set up things for later pay-offs. We learn a bit about Rassul's background for example - both explicitly in the sequence where he is told of the grave robbing, and implicitly in his telling Nyssa that 'a father should not outlive his children.' This will be a key pointer to Rassul's motivation, a hook that helps us sympathise with the villain and realise that he, like everyone else, is being used by Nephthys...

It also mirrors the overall theme of time's circularity - Rassul tells Nyssa: 'I have heard it said that a father should not outlive his children.' He does not tell her that it was Nyssa herself who said it to him when he met her for the first time (in his timeline) in ancient Egypt. Nyssa recalls the phrase, and after she is sent back to ancient Egypt she says it back to him (watch out for that in the next exciting installment). Rassul's reaction is instructive, as is the fact that he still remembers her words thousands of years later...

One other thing to watch for - names. It's very difficult to think of names. I spend longer trying to come up with names for characters than anything else, it often seems. When I write an outline, just throwing down ideas and elements, I don't even bother now - it slows me down so much. So my initial outlines are full of people called Fred, George, Bert, Liz, Mary and Jane... Sometimes the name sticks (like George Wilkinson in Time Zero). Trying to find an 'academic' name for a translator I decided to reuse one I'd come up with for Theatre of War - Tobias St. John. I guess he gets about a bit. He's also taken from the first two names of my youngest brother...

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Instalment Three

(Note that this contains some minor spoilers - so you might want to read it after reading the instalment)

Because the reader cannot actually see what is happening, unlike television or film, the author can play tricks with how they describe things. It can be difficult to sustain, and authors mustn't lead the readers on too far or they lose their trust. The most sustained trick I've played, I think, was disguising the gender of the secret villain in Dragons' Wrath - misleading the readers into not even considering one suspect (I hope!).

Here it's just for a few pages, and since the sequence at the end of the last instalment was written from Rassul's point of view, it is legitimate that he thinks of where the Doctor, Tegan and Atkins are incarcerated as being a casket. If we could see it, we would know the truth. But it is only when we see things from another point of view that we learn what really happened, and now we have to reinterpret the scene of the casket being carried from the museum and dumped into the Thames...

That sort of thing is great fun for the writer.

Other things are necessary rather than 'fun.' For the story to work and be credible, I have to establish - and keep remind the readers - that past events cannot be changed... There's precedents aplenty for this in Doctor Who - from The Aztecs to Day of the Daleks, where we learn about the Blinovitch Limitation Effect. But whatever pseudo-temporal science we might like to invent to gloss over the necessities of the narrative, the Doctor is basically right when he tells Atkins that events can't be changed because otherwise things would be too easy.

Having added Atkins into the ancient Egyptian trip, I found him very easy and entertaining to write for. His character developed naturally, and his relationship with Tegan was every bit what I had hoped for. Most of all, I enjoyed writing his dialogue - like his comment about temporal prestidigitation...

It was also good to find that an idea which I pursued seemed to fit so well - the short sequence at the end of this instalment in 1975 examining the mummy. A few times I struggled to come up with an interlude between chapters that was interesting and relevant rather than gratuitous or boring. Or both. I also wanted a thread of Egyptian iconography to run through all of these - to remind us, even subconsciously, of what book we are reading. So when I looked into how the mummy could be examined without being unwrapped, I was delighted and amused to discover that the best way would be with a CAT scanner...

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Instalment Four

(Note that this contains some minor spoilers - so you might want to read it after reading the instalment)

With the Doctor now meeting Kenilworth for - or so Kenilworth thinks - the first time, we are coming full circle and now we can see how it was that Kenilworth knew the Doctor when they first met from the Doctor's point of view. It also explains other apparent inconsistencies like whether Atkins ever accompanied his master to Egypt...

We are into real Mummy territory now. The expedition to find the tomb is typical Universal Films material. I hope a lot of the atmosphere and the setup evokes memories of those films.

Certainly, this section shows an expedition being carried out more thoroughly than was often the truth. Later (in the next instalment in fact), with discussions of Napoleon, Champollion, etc. we'll start to examine how it really was, and address the question of when archaeology and research becomes grave robbing and desecration.

But for now it's all good, clean non-moralising fun. We have an expedition - the members of whom were determined really by their roles in the story. In particular the relationship between Evans, his daughter Margaret, and Simons was deliberately forged the way it is so as to provide for both drama and pathos (as well as some horror of course) later on down the line... It also helps of course to have some tension and misunderstanding between the characters.

The pyramid/tomb itself - once they get inside it - was obviously based on the one in Pyramid of Mars - at least in terms of the traps and puzzles it presents. But rather than slavishly follow the television story, I wanted to expand on that. Use its foundations to build with the thematic and narrative devices of my own story. In particular this was a chance to introduce in earnest the notion that the ancient Egyptians were trying to mirror the heavens when they built their monuments - the pyramids echoing the major stars along the side of the Milky Way as represented by the Nile.

That is now pretty much established theory, though it was still emerging as a popular notion when I wrote The Sands of Time. It's a rich idea and has a lot of potential - the idea that the very geography of things is important and that topography is somehow powerful. It appealed to me then, and it still appeals to me now, it is such a beautifully elegant theory on which to build a story.

Which is why I've again used it as the basis of a novel - in this case The Invisible Detective's foray into the world of ancient Egyptian mythology and walking mummies... For those of you who are interested, Web of Anubis is out in August 2004.

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Instalment Five

(Note that this contains some minor spoilers - so you might want to read it after reading the instalment)

There's a line in Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Actually, there are lots of lines, and a good many of them - not surprisingly - are about death and the preoccupation of death and our own intimations of mortality. Given that the play is about two people who must - given both the events of Hamlet and the title of the play they are in - die.

But at one point, about half way through, Rosencrantz asks Guildenstern: 'Do you ever think of yourself as actually dead, lying in a box with a lid on it?' This sparks off some of his longest speeches in the play, and he decides: 'Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?' Writers are constantly trying to emulate other writing that they admire or which struck a chord with them.

Whether it be the Kenneth Brannagh film Dead Again (of which more in a later instalment), or Stoppard. I don't think it was conscious, but I echoed R and G again at the end of the Big Finish audio Whispers of Terror - Guildenstern's final words as he disappears from reality are: 'Now you see me, now you - ' Which in itself echoes the notion, discussed throughout the play, that death is an absence of being. It is passive, it is a non-existence. It is the failure of someone to appear rather than an active presence.

Which, in case you were wondering where this was leading, is the point of the sequence where Tegan talks to Nyssa as she sleeps in her coffin. Rosencrantz is unable to conceive of being dead in the box with the lid on. He says that he can only think of it being like sleep - as if someone will come and bang on the lid at any moment and try to wake you up. Which is what Tegan is doing. She needs a friend now more than ever. The death of Simons - and Margaret Evans' reaction to it - has brought this home to her. The disappearance of Simons' body again echoes the notion that death is the fact of someone leaving forever. Never coming back.

And this is something that Tegan has to be able to relate to - hence her reminiscences about her father. 'It's not that we've lost him,' she says, perhaps less eloquently than Rosencrantz, 'it's worse. He's gone, and he's never coming back. Not ever.' Rosencrantz wonders what happened to the moment in childhood when one first realizes that one doesn't go on forever - that one day you are going to die.

It must have been shattering, yet he cannot remember it, so he deduces that we are born with an intimation of mortality. This moment, for Tegan was shattering. She does remember it. And it has affected her so deeply she cannot even discuss it with herself - she can only speak about it to someone else, and someone to whom she is very close. Someone who is unable to hear what she is saying.

The irony is that Simons, as we shall see, does come back. Just as Marcus Scarman did. But, like the dead husband in The Monkey's Paw, that is hardly a comfort. The reality is not sleep like Rosencrantz hopes for but rather the bleached, rotted, worm-eaten skull that Hamlet must confront. But we're getting rather morbid here. The Sands of Time is, amongst other things, a book about family relationships - in particular about fathers and daughters. This is a relationship that is relevant to Rassul, to the Evanses, and later to Prior and Vanessa. Nyssa is almost a daughter to the Doctor and her predicament elicits a father's response.

Tegan too must be drawn into this thematic loop is she is going to be fully part of the story - and so she reacts in certain ways to both the Doctor and to Atkins, and so she must herself have had a father and a relationship with that father that we know about and which - like all the others in the book - was tinged and defined by tragedy...

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Instalment Six

(Note that this contains some minor spoilers - so you might want to read it after reading the instalment)

Again it is time to remind the readers that history cannot be changed. There are a couple of reasons for this - for the reminder, that is. First, going back and changing history is an obvious 'get out' and if it were possible it would enable the Doctor to put things right at a stroke. And second, given the changes of time and location, and the way that the Doctor's actions now seem to impact things that have already happened, we need to be clear that those events are immutable. What the Doctor now does is an essential prerequisite for things that have already happened having happened.

There are a couple of ways of demonstrating this immutability. One is the sequence of Tegan trying to break the chain of events by changing her food order. The other is the Doctor's explanation of how snowflakes have an individual life of their own, yet interact with each other and follow an overall and inter-dependent pattern. This is an interesting theme - one which can be applied to things other than just snowflakes, of course.

The beauty of using snow is that each flake, each crystal, is unique and individual within the crowd. We can make the same point about people - as with the ebb and flow of crowds along a New York street in Sometime Never… and how a simple change in that rhythm (initiated by a creature which is outside the usual laws of Time and can therefore make that change) can alter the flow not just of humanity but of history itself.

I use a similar, but perhaps less 'deep' example in The Burning, with the Doctor and Stobbold commenting on the interaction of the sparks from the fire. Here, again, we are talking about predestination (albeit with the Christian overtones that Stobbold brings to the conversation) but also about the nature of fire.

Predestination, in a sense, is the fate of Margaret Evans in this section. As an author I created her simply to have someone to kill off tragically. Of course it isn't quite that simple or callous - there are emotions I wanted to invoke, a sense of unease to play upon, and I needed someone I could use as an echo of the very moving death of Lawrence Scarman in Pyramids of Mars. Partly this was to contrast the Fourth and Fifth Doctors' attitudes to death and partly it is because that is such a 'signature' moment of the story that a sequel that does not pay homage to it, that does not acknowledge its power and emotional depth would not to my mind be doing its job.

The relationship here is rather different than in Pyramids - a simple, easily communicated relationship between two brothers who (we are carefully reminded) used to play happily together is exactly what is needed in the shorthand-world of television. But within a novel a more complex relationship is needed to produce the same emotional depth and sense of tragic loss and waste. Hence the frustrated and awkward relationship between Margaret and Simons.

Looking back, perhaps I got it wrong. Perhaps it would have worked better is Margaret had been possessed, and finally given the power to get whatever she wants, she is forced by that power to destroy her one real passion - Simons. But instead I went for the more pathetic (in the real sense of the word) and perhaps easier option of having the repressed woman as the victim - a final tragedy in an unfulfilled and misunderstood life.

Or perhaps that is exactly the right way to do it - after all, not everything in this world is as beautiful and symmetrical as a snowflake.

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Instalment Seven

(Note that this contains some minor spoilers - so you might want to read it after reading the instalment)

There is a problem with monsters and creatures that are large and impressive and frightening and silent on screen. They don't necessarily transfer well to print. When I started thinking about a sequel to Pyramids of Mars, I imagined that the Mummies would have a lot more to do in the book than eventually turned out to be the case. The reason for this is quite simply that on the page, they are boring.

Actually, boring isn't quite fair. They are more inconsequential. When the Mummies are not actually doing anything, then they disappear into the background of the narrative. On screen their very presence is powerful and impressive when they simply stand and watch events. But in a novel, if they aren't doing anything it is all too easy for the reader to forget they are there. And all too difficult for the writer to remind the reader of their presence without it seeming forced and intrusive.

When the Mummies are doing something, there is another problem. They don't speak, they have no way of expressing themselves other than by lumbering massively and inexorably onwards. And there are only so many ways you can describe the enormous creature moving heavily towards the Doctor. Or whoever. I imagine the same problems arise with many of the monsters who were so impressive on the small screen - the Yeti in particular spring to mind as a creature that has never really come across so well in books...

So in the end, the Mummies are subservient to Rassul and to Simons. Simons himself is a necessary villain for several reasons. One is simply to give Rassul someone to talk to - to help with plot exposition and motivation in traditional side-kick manner. Another reason for Simons is that since he is totally possessed and unswerving in his allegiance, it allows us to see Rassul's doubt and uncertainty - it helps us realise that he is not beyond redemption. That he has a story of his own, his own reasons and motive for helping Nephthys, and his own doubts about what he is doing...

While Rassul may be unnaturally old, he has to maintain a semblance of humanity. He has to be able to pass unnoticed (or almost) through London centuries - millennia even - after his own time. Marcus Scarman was obviously a dead man walking in Pyramids. That was something I wanted to expand on - what if he had been kept animated for longer? How long before he started to decay and waste away? How would he have smelled - especially in the heat of Egypt?

Finally, whereas we only see the real Scarman for a few moments before he is killed, I wanted Simons to be a real character before his death and reanimation. I wanted to show the contrast between the effete, slightly nervous, and very human person and the cold, unfeeling instrument of Nephthys. The reader's reaction, in many ways, I hope would mirror that of Margaret when confronted with such a changed, yet still recognisable, man.

In this section of the book, everything changes. We switch time zones yet again, and in effect we acquire a new cast of characters. Only Tegan, the Doctor and Atkins persist. But we have met Prior right at the beginning of the book (albeit in his younger days), and the villain - Rassul - is still on hand to remind us that we are in the same narrative, that the problem and the mystery remain the same.

That, more than anything, is why Rassul appears briefly early on in this part of the book. It is to remind us how much is still the same, and to show too - since he has a car - how things have moved on. How much more sophisticated and prepared is the villain now? After all, we - and the Doctor - may have just arrived, but Rassul and the Mummies have been waiting for us all the time. We still don't know what exactly he is up to, but hopefully there is a feeling that events are reaching their culmination and that before long all will be revealed.

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Instalment Eight

(Note that this contains some minor spoilers - so you might want to read it after reading the instalment)

The Napoleon vignettes were amongst my favourite to write. I had come across a reference somewhere - I forget where, I'm afraid, to his visiting the Great Pyramid. It was a reliable source, a history book or some learned archaeological tome, so I assume it is true. Apparently - as in The Sands of Time - Napoleon insisted on entering the pyramid alone. When he emerged he was white-faced with shock and refused to say what had happened. Of course, he may just have got spooked by the darkness and shadows, and since he aspired to rule the world didn't want to admit to a fit of the heebie-jeebies.

The short section where he almost relates what happened, I have a feeling, was also related as 'fact.' But I can't check without remembering where I found it - and perhaps this is simply my invention.

As to what Napoleon actually saw in the context of our story here, I leave as an exercise for the reader!

In many ways this story only works for the Fifth Doctor. We've already talked about the dynamic of which companions to use and why they seem to fit so well. Of course, I started from the point of knowing who would be involved, so a lot of that is deliberate right from the start. There are Who books that can, could, and have been intended for different Doctors and companions. But this isn't one. The idea of having to change it for the Sixth Doctor and Mel just wouldn't work at all. It always was for the Fifth - and most vulnerable, and in many ways most human - Doctor.

Which meant that one thing I could take for granted was his ability to pilot the TARDIS with reasonable accuracy. He uses it a lot in this story,. Far more, I think than in anything else I've written (though no doubt someone will point out I'm wrong, if I am). This is the 'short hops' era when the TARDIS is a means of transport between locations and times almost without comment. When subsidiary characters are invited on board without much comment from either the Doctor or the character.

As Gareth Roberts said in his TARDIS Inside Out piece in DWM recently, that does debase the TARDIS and detract from its mystery. It may be, as he says, a lazy way for writers to move the story about. Let's face it, this was all too often the case. But it also opens up possibilities. It's a shame that - like the notion and implications of time travel itself - the possibilities were ignored. Maybe The Sands of Time helps show how it could have been done in a more original and interesting manner, and maybe how it should have been done.

Less original, as several reviewers have pointed out, is the idea of gathering together Egyptian artefacts to form a sort of critical mass for the rebirth of the undead villain of the piece. It's a trick used (grotesquely and effectively with body parts and life energy) in the terrific Stephen Sommers version of The Mummy. But before that, it was the basis for Bram Stoker's novel The Jewel of the Seven Stars.

This is a novel that has been filmed twice. The second version - The Awakening, starring Charlton Heston and Stephanie Zimbalist - isn't a patch on the Hammer version though: Blood from the Mummy's Tomb. This is a rare mummy movie in that there is no mummy, at least not in the traditional sense. And the twist ending is terrific!

So, does The sands of Time consciously and deliberately pay homage to Blood from the Mummy's Tomb? Was I imagining Vanessa as played by Valerie Leon? Of course I was...

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Instalment Nine

(Note that this contains some minor spoilers - so you might want to read it after reading the instalment)

Writing action sequences is difficult. You have to keep things moving, while keeping it very clear what is happening. The moment the reader has to pause and work out who is where, or doing what, then you have lost them. At the same time, clarity must not be wordy. Brevity - short staccato sentences - punctuates the action and gives it pace.

Like any writing, it's something you get better at as you work at it. Writing is a craft as well as an art - practice is everything. When people ask me what they must do to improve their writing, I tell them they need to write a lot, and they need to read a lot. Seeing what works - or doesn't - for other people is very instructive.

Does the sequence of the mummy attacking Norris's cottage work? I think so, for the most part. Like almost everything, I would execute it differently today I'm sure. But my approach remains the same. If there's a complicated sequence of actions to go through, then I play them out in my mind. I watch with my mind's eye as the action unfolds. When I'm sure that I am clear on what happens - because if it isn't clear to me it won't be clear to anyone - then I simply describe what I see. Like transcribing the action of a movie.

Once I have something written, once the sequence of events is mapped out on the page, then I embellish it. Some description, some striking imagery will have been included anyway just by way of description. Now I finesse that - cutting out repeated words and phrases, trying to find interesting and new ways of describing things. So long as they aren't too distracting - in a sense, originality at this point would actually work against the effect I'm trying to achieve. There are times when it's good to pull the reader up and out of the prose and have them think about the way I've used a word or phrase or an image I've invoked. But this isn't it. This is the time to keep them absolutely inside the story, so caught up in the action that they are breathless with it by the end.

And after the action you need a few quieter moments for the readers to get their breath back and relax back into the story. It sounds paradoxical, but the story stops when the action starts. A fight or battle or chase does not forward the plot in and of itself. So afterwards, that's the time to slip in some development that makes it seem like more has happened than is actually the case. In this instance the quiet moment is the image of the mummy carrying Vanessa through the swamp in the moonlight. It is a signature image for the book - something I knew would happen during the story even before I knew what the story was. What else could I have had on the cover - twice?!

This is the part of the book where as well as the action hotting up, the revelations start to come. It is time to start unravelling the mystery - to reveal people's real motives and agendas. Balancing the exposition with that revelation is a delicate balancing act. At some point, exposition becomes info-dump. You need to add in enough character and action and surprises to avoid the readers realising they are being spoon-fed background information they will need to understand later events.

One way of doing this is to make that information surprising and significant in and of itself. An obvious example here (and stop now if you've not yet read the instalment) is the revelation that whoever 'stole' the tomb - the man who we now know must be in league with the villains - has a distinctive walking stick. I've already set that up so that, I hope, that simple and otherwise innocuous piece of information will twist the story round and stand it on its head - it will undermine and reframe the reader's understanding of what is really going on.

It's a trick I often try. The best example of it I can recall is in the under-rated and oft-ignored 1991 Kenneth Branagh / Emma Thompson film Dead Again. If you've seen the film, you'll already know exactly what scene - what line - I'm referring to. Interviewing Andy Garcia's character, Branagh's character asks him a final, simple, apparently inconsequential question. Garcia's answer is equally innocuous - except we, and Branagh, know something that Garcia doesn't. We have the context, and suddenly not only does everything make perfect sense but we realise that we have completely misinterpreted everything that has so far happened in the film...

I've tried to recreate the feeling and effect of that moment more times than I can remember. Perhaps the closest I've come is the 'wheelchair' revelation in my Sixth Doctor novel (still available from all good bookshops!) Grave Matter. But that, of course, is a story for another day...

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Instalment Ten

(Note that this contains some minor spoilers - so you might want to read it after reading the instalment)

It's a more subtle 'reversal' than the walking stick business in the previous instalment, but our discovery that the girl sacrificed in the opening sequence of the book was Rassul's daughter alters our perceptions. In particular it alters how we see Rassul and interpret his motivation and involvement. It is all too easy to have villains who are simply 'evil'. The trick is to provide enough sympathetic background that we can empathise if not sympathise with them...

Part of the appeal of the Daleks, despite the 'totally evil, no redeeming features' argument, is the fact that we understand where they came from. In terms of the narrative, they were born out of the horrors and possibilities of the Cold War. The product of a xenophobic era of history... Not so much a 'dislike for the unlike' as a 'there but for the grace of God...' appeal perhaps.

Drama comes from contention and a clash of ideals. The very best drama is provoked (if that is the best word) by the argument and disagreement between two people who while irreconcilable are both right. Think of Crimson Tide.

So having Rassul turn out to be motivated by events and feelings which we would all find it difficult to react to differently ups the drama and the stakes. Right when we know the Doctor has to win, there's a shade of sympathy and understanding for the man we thought was the villain.

The revelation also throws into context his reaction to Nyssa's comment about fathers not outliving their daughters. As I've noted before, this is a book about fathers and daughters...

The end of the book is the place to tie up the loose ends as well and sort out the villain. The trick here is to set things up so there isn't too much remaining to be done after the story has really finished. We can all, I suspect, think of books - and films - that had a colossal, exciting ending. Then went on for another twenty pages or minutes explaining things and winding down. Not terribly satisfying - and one reason surely why the film of The Return of the King was curtailed before the final showdown with Saruman in the Shire...

That said, I couldn't resist the coda with the sphinxes by Cleopatra's Needle in London. Partly this was because it was while I was in the process of writing the book that I discovered the sphinxes are the wrong way round. The 'dummy' sphinxes were facing the other way, and when the real ones were put in place they were positioned facing backwards - and no one knows why. Well, here's one possible (if rather incredible!) explanation at last.

The other pay-off I wanted to deliver was the changed relationship between Atkins and Miss Warne (who BBCi pointed out to me should by convention be called 'Mrs' as head of the domestic staff even though she isn't married - I could pretend that I deliberately ignored this for clarity... but you live and learn!). The Marcus Scarman visit also seemed 'right' though quite what it portends I leave to the reader to decide. Perhaps he will be inspired by Kenilworth's stories and decide to excavate in the same area of Egypt. Who knows? But it is a final little twist of time - events of the Doctor's future perhaps dictating the events of his own past...

When I wrote The Sands of Time, I was working for a large computer company. I started there as a technical writer, though by this time I had moved into interface design and future technology. But I still went for coffee (and beer) with some of the technical writers - in particular Craig Hinton and Peter Anghelides. Being Doctor Who fans and aspiring authors - Craig had written The Crystal Bucephalus by then - Craig and Peter were of great help reading through my drafts and making suggestions. Thanks to Craig, I discovered all about the magnetic properties of Mars and included that, for instance. So belated thanks to them both for their help!

Neither of them gave any indication that they were unhappy with the way the book ended, or that it was in some ways rather reminiscent of Pyramids of Mars. But it was something I was conscious of, as we shall see...

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Instalment Eleven

(Note that this contains some minor spoilers - so you might want to read it after reading the instalment)

All authors have times when they decide that everything they've written is absolute rubbish. I try to keep my own moments of self-doubt to a few minutes rather than hours or days. There was only one occasion realty when I decided might have got it all completely wrong and remained of that opinion for long enough to do it all again.

One of the things I set out to do with The Sands of Time was to build on Pyramids of Mars, but not to debase it. The worst form of debasement is inventing a convenient weakness in the enemy for the Doctor to exploit - so I was dead against that. Having him discover (or worse, simply remember) that the Osirans are allergic to gold, for example, would have rather punctured the whole thing.

But this did give me a problem when devising an ending for the story. My decision was to use a variation on the ending of Pyramids of Mars - the Doctor uses the same inherent weakness but in a different and hopefully surprisingly imaginative way.

Having sent my draft manuscript to Rebecca Levene, the editor at Virgin, I began to have my doubts. What if the readers weren't that impressed - if what I had written realty was just a re-run of the end of Pyramids?

So I thought about whether I could change the ending while remaining true to my original intention and without having to rewrite the whole book. And I wrote a different ending.

When Rebecca Levene, the Who Editor at Virgin, sent back her comments, she didn't seem to have any problem with the ending of the story as originally written. But I'd already got an alternative. Not wanting to waste it, I decided perhaps we could have

both endings, leaving readers to decide which they preferred. So I added this chapter to the end of the book. Then I sat back and waited to see if Rebecca would notice.

Of course, she did notice. And - quite rightly - she suggested that having both endings was probably a touch self-indulgent and quite redundant. Which would I prefer to keep? I decided to keep the original, which I think is cleaner and more focused. It is also, of course, the ending I had in my mind when I wrote the rest of the book - the ending everything else was designed to lead up to.

But somewhere, in another quantum universe, people have read (and I hope enjoyed) the alternative instead. So here it is. I leave you to make your own mind up which, if either, you prefer.

It has been printed before - in I, Who 2 published by Mad Norwegian Press in the USA in 2001. But this is the chapter's first 'British' mass market appearance and the first time it has appeared in the context of the novel as a whole.

Obviously, I hope you enjoy it. But do read it as a curiosity, not as the bona-fide end of the book in some authorial 'Director's Cut' of the novel. Because Rebecca was absolutely right - The Sands of Time is better focused and less fragmented without it.