Hello, I’m Lucy. This is the story of how I got to be holding a copy of my book, in Red Lion Bookshop
It’s been a strange time, and while I might look calm on the outside, I can assure you that my insides look a lot more like this:
First, some background. I’m a librarian by profession, and while I’ve wanted to write since I was a child, I’ve only been writing in an organised way for the last five years. I’d written a few things before that, but I had only shared them with my family and close friends. So, what brought this on? During the second stage of lockdowns, I needed an escape. I was fortunate in many ways, I could work from home, but the times were taking a toll on my mind, and I wanted a distraction. I found it in Doctor Who. I had watched avidly when I was a child, and had drifted away from the more recent series, but I’d enjoyed some repeats of older episodes. I felt as if even the cybermen seemed cuddly and reassuring compared to the outside world, so I got a subscription to Britbox and set off on my journey. It turned out to be exactly what I needed and in an unexpected development, it also inspired me to write.
Introducing Benton and Hawthorne
Sergeant John Benton and Miss Olive Hawthorne are characters from the 1970’s era of Doctor Who, when the Doctor, in the person of Jon Pertwee, had been exiled to earth and was working as scientific advisor to UNIT, the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce. Sergeant Benton appeared regularly through the series, but Miss Hawthorne was in only one adventure, The Daemons. The Daemons brings the Doctor, some of his UNIT colleagues and his companion Jo Grant to the village of Devil’s End, where strange things are occurring. Freak weather conditions and poltergeist activity have interrupted an archaeological dig, the vicar has been replaced at very short notice, and Miss Hawthorne, a white witch, is convinced that there is devilry at work. This devilry is being harnessed by the new vicar, who turns out to be none other than the Doctor’s arch enemy, the Master! He hopes to harness the power and knowledge of an alien being with black magic rituals. In a particularly memorable sequence, Sergeant Benton and Miss Hawthorne team up to rescue the Doctor from villagers who intend to burn him at the stake, and it was this incident that inspired my stories.
During a watch-along of the Daemons, organised on social media, a conversation started about how good Sergeant Benton and Miss Hawthorne were as a team, and how it was a shame that they didn’t get more adventures together. That gave me the idea to start writing. My favourite genres are mystery and crime, and I decided that Miss Hawthorne should work as an advisor to UNIT, travelling around and solving mysteries with Sergeant Benton. The first person to see the stories was my best and oldest friend, Claire. She read them as I wrote them, in installments, and was very good at finding inconsistencies in the plots, and places where I’d accidentally changed a character’s name halfway through. Then, tentatively, I began to share them with other people. How did I get from here to a book? I’m coming to that now.
A meeting at Aldbourne
An unexpected result of my (re)discovery of Doctor Who has been the new friends I’ve made, through social media, and after that through podcasting. I’ve found myself surrounded by a community of kind people who share my interests. Many of them are fans of much longer standing than I am, but they have all been welcoming and supportive. One of my new friends, Jason, attended an event at Aldbourne in Wiltshire, where The Daemons had been filmed. John Levene, who played Sergeant Benton, was a guest at the event and Jason mentioned my stories to him. He had been interested, so the next year when I attended the event, I took him a copy of the stories as a gift to say thank you for inspiring them. At the end of the event, he told me that he had looked at the stories and wanted to try and ‘do something’ with them. I was overwhelmed and very flattered, the more so when a message from the organisers was followed by a phone call from John Levene, telling me that he was determined to get my stories either made into audio plays or published. Over the months that followed, I received regular updates from him, and I was hopeful, but I tried not to hope too much. However happy I am with my stories, there is always the voice in my head that says, “Yeah, it’s not Middlemarch, though, is it?” In other words, why would a publisher choose my stories over anyone else’s? Just as I had convinced myself that nothing would happen, something did! I had a call from John Levene to say that Candy Jar, an independent publisher, was interested in my work, and that he had contacted the family of Barry Letts, one of the creators of Miss Hawthorne about using her in the book. Shortly after, I was called by Shaun Russell, the head of Candy Jar, who confirmed that he was, indeed interested in publishing my stories. The screaming blue mouse inside me intensified…
Do I have the right(s)?
Candy Jar has published several books featuring characters from Doctor Who, specifically from UNIT. They are able to do this because the characters have been licenced to them by the estates of their creators, Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln. Writers for Doctor Who that created new characters were able to retain the copyright for their creations and they, and their estates are able to use them or licence them to others. Miss Hawthorne was created by Barry Letts and Robert Sloman under their pseudonym Guy Leopold. The Letts and Sloman Estates gave their permission for us to include her in the stories, and I am very grateful to them, and to the Haisman and Lincoln estates.
What happened next?
What happened next was that contracts were signed and Candy Jar got to work. My stories were edited, and John Levene contributed a foreword. The cover design was produced, and a description was written, and my book was published! It still doesn’t seem quite real. I was overcome the other day when I realised that something I had written had an ISBN (I did say I was a librarian!)
This has been the story of how I came to have a book with my name on it and my stories in it. I am grateful to everyone who got me here, and I hope that readers will enjoy the further adventures of Sergeant Benton and Miss Hawthorne.