User talk:Icecreamdif

21:09:14 Tue 29 Mar 2011

Out of curiosity…
Why haven't you read any of the novels?

I'm looking over the amount of text you've read by people like me, Boblipton, Light6, etc., and it's more than a novel's worth. You're spending hours of your life every week reading the stuff we spew out, and honestly, most of what we write isn't that interesting. Besides the fact that people like Paul Cornell and Larry Miles are better writers than us, they're explicitly writing to entertain Doctor Who fans, and we're not.

I'm not picking on you here; it's just that you seem to have to most enduring patience and interest in reading our nonsense, and I'm really curious why you don't think it's worth putting a fraction of that effort into reading one of the novels.

Remember, there's no law that says you have to accept them as canon just because you read them. Also, if you've heard that they're hard to find or expensive, that was true for the NAs about 5 years ago, but not anymore (and it was never true for the EDAs); I just saw Love and War and Alien Bodies used on Amazon for under $5 in the US and under £4 in the UK. (And if worst comes to worst you can pirate them easily and PayPal the authors whatever you think they're worth; I did that with a bunch of NAs a few years ago.) --70.36.140.19 05:16, September 19, 2011 (UTC)

I know what you mean about spinoff novels; digging through the mass of garbage in the Star Trek or Star Wars spinoffs to find the handful of good ones isn't worth the effort. But, as in so many other areas, Doctor Who is different. The NAs really were attempting to write "stories too big for the small screen", and usually pulled it off, and the EDAs were worthy successors. The other lines are a bit more hit-and-miss, but because they're mostly standalone novels, you can pick and choose from within them.

I think the two novels I suggested are good starting points. Love and War and Alien Bodies aren't necessarily the very best, but they're early in their respective series, they straddle the line between "deep" and "accessible", and they don't requires knowing much from the previous books.

As for the BF audios, there's some great stuff out there. If you're looking for more McGann, I guess the best place to start is Blood of the Daleks, the first New Eighth Doctor Adventures release (coproduced by BF and BBC7). It's not the best one, but it's good enough, and it sets up a regular series that in general works better than the one-off 8th Doctor stories from the Doctor Who Monthly line.

Anyway, I actually do have an account, but I stopped logging in intentionally to restrain myself from being able to edit semi-protected pages. Unfortunately, my "nearly-static" IP address no longer seems to be anything close to nearly static, and they've removed most of the protection, and the new editor has all kinds of bugs for IP users (especially when trying to create new pages), so maybe I'll start using my account again, or create a new one. Thanks for reminding me; I was thinking about it on Friday, but it slipped my mind over the weekend… --70.36.140.19 11:57, September 19, 2011 (UTC)

Notable aliases
Hi, I meant to leave a message on that forum but a browser crash lost me what I'd written and other distractions the other day meant I didn't get back to it (sorry). I've left a message on the forum page, mostly just a summary and confirmation that I've got the summary correct, as it all ends up as the basis for changing policy.

I've also left a message on Mini-Mitch's talk page, noting it was 8 or 9 editors discussing the issues. Thanks for contacting me (and in future don't hesitate to prod me towards a topic, I try to keep a handle on everything but I do more than occasionally get distracted!). Thanks. --Tangerineduel / talk 15:34, September 19, 2011 (UTC)

ALIASES: If you'll leave me a message, after you've excised the parts you think best, I'll go through the article to fix the details of grammar and punctuation that generations of people have created. Boblipton 18:45, September 20, 2011 (UTC)