A while back, Philip Purser-Hallard invited myself and seven other authors to take part in Forgotten Lives: a Doctor Who charity anthology built on the idea that the eight pre-Hartnell Doctors seen in The Brain of Morbius actually had a pre-television run. We were given basic guidelines, but otherwise encouraged to build our respective Doctor from the ground up.

As a lot of you know by now, I created a version of Philip Hinchcliffe's Doctor: an arrogant swashbuckler with his roots in mid-20th-century sword and planet sci-fantasy. He's appeared in two books so far (in my stories "The Gauntlet of Absolution" and "The Demons of Dog Street"), and both Purser-Hallard and Ian McIntire have written stories for him ("Retrogenesis Part 4" and "The Hive Minders Part 1" respectively).

I'm always happy to hear that people enjoy these stories. As I've said before and often, working on this project is one of the things I'm proudest of, and I hope I'll get to write more outings for this Doctor in future. But as we're in the actual show's diamond anniversary year, I thought it might be a good time to talk about why it's so fun for me. Well, a reason.

I've talked briefly before about what I think makes the Doctor interesting as a character: the dichotomy of the character's actual personality with the "Doctor" persona on top of it. I dug into this in my Black Archive installment on Heaven Sent; and if I hadn't spent so much time thinking about a fictional alien's psychology, I probably wouldn't have felt at all prepared to take part in this project.

Now, I'm not a Doctor Who showrunner, and I'll never be one. This isn't me saying "This is the one and only right way to build a Doctor." There are more than a dozen tried and tested ways to do that. This is just my view as a fan who ended up in a charity anthology. And I'd be intrigued to hear what others think about what's going on inside that alien brain.

As I mentioned before, I spent a lot of time thinking about the dual nature of the Doctor—the idea that the "Doctor" we know is a fiction created by the star of the series. The real person (whom I call Theta Sigma in my Black Archive, simply so I have something to go on) has a changing personality from regeneration to regeneration. However, the Doctor is always the Doctor, so Theta Sigma must also always be Theta Sigma.

What are that person's constant traits, then? Other people will likely have their own answers. For me, those traits are unconventional intelligence (i.e. something that may or may not be quantifiable on a report card), confidence, and—branching off from that confidence—a very firm belief that they can do no wrong. But there's one more ingredient that marks the difference between the Doctor and, say, the Master: self-awareness. The knowledge that that last character trait is probably really dangerous.

That's where the Doctor persona comes in: something to hold "Theta Sigma" to the mark. As we've seen in stories like Time Heist and Amy's Choice, no one hates the Doctor more than the Doctor. Or rather, no one hates Theta Sigma more than the Doctor. The Doctor persona is this mysterious individual's ideal self: the person Theta Sigma would like to be, who can put others first and not burn up a sun just to say goodbye or strip the timeline just to stop one death. Any given regeneration's Doctor persona could potentially be a whole bundle of contradictions: not just pushing against a particular brand of arrogance, but pushing against everything.

We see this a lot more clearly in NuWho, where our Doctors by and large have two layers: what you see on the surface, and what gets loose when something cuts too deep. That dichotomy is what I love to see most in a Doctor. If I was going to make the kind of Doctor I would enjoy reading, I would have to create two whole characters.

I knew what I wanted tonally. I love rogues and swashbucklers, and I'd just finished reading and reviewing an excellent sword-and-sorcery anthology. We'd been encouraged to root our Doctors and their stories in a pre-Hartnell era, either in terms of style or in terms of the story itself. I was fascinated with the existence of sword and planet fiction—the result of fantasy writers trying to adapt to a readership that was growing increasingly more interested in sci-fi—and decided that was where I would jump on.

The outer "Doctor" layer came first, and he's honestly the kind of character I just enjoy writing. I pulled inspiration equally from classic literature and a certain Dungeons & Dragons actual play to come up with this dude: a sort of reverse Scarlet Pimpernel who's not as concerned with saving the universe as he is with looking extremely cool while doing so. That fit best with Hinchcliffe's Doctor, given his entire... well, just look at him.

Then came the next question: what kind of "Theta Sigma" personality could this possibly have been made in response to? This, for me, was the most fun part: backwards engineering the Doctor's assumed persona to see what he was covering up. Why act so foolish on main? The obvious answer would be to trick people into underestimating him, but that's not the Doctor so much as a gentleman detective. (Which I also enjoy, but maybe another time.) The Doctor persona has to stem from what he feels should be changed about himself in order to be a proper hero. What he hates about himself.

I leaned a little into Human Nature, or at least the end reflection of it, when sorting this out. I was fascinated by the idea of the Doctor holding himself back, even (and especially) from his enemies. The dubiously canonical Death Comes to Time, where we see how powerful an unfettered Time Lord can be, also came to mind. So, I thought... what if we had a Time Lord who knew he was both extremely intelligent and extremely willing to weaponize that intelligence? Someone who was well aware of his ability and readiness to run roughshod over an entire planet to get the job done? Who could (and would) do in six minutes what the Doctor would do in six episodes, with far less bedside manner?

This ridiculous puffed-up swashbuckler persona, then, is how he ties one hand behind his back. This Doctor wants to talk about how great and clever he is (perhaps needling himself a bit every time he does this?) and would rather exhaust all the fun and wrong avenues before targeting the actual solution. An arrogant goofball obsessed with the aesthetic and the adventures he could be having wouldn't dare go straight for the Big Red Button.

Of course, there are times when the real persona slips out. Those are some of the most fun moments, actually: when something cuts so deep that being the Doctor isn't enough to hold our hero to the mark. I'm also a big believer in demonstrating importance of companions at every opportunity—hence showing the Doctor mask-off in front of Rue (his companion in my stories) wherever possible. This requires giving him something to be pissed off about that doesn't drive him full Time Lord Victorious, which you can read about in my first two stories.

And hopefully future ones.

If you've bought copies of the two Forgotten Lives anthologies, thank you. I'm still stunned that our group of fan-created Doctors has such a loyal following, and I'm still honored that I got to be a part of this. If you didn't get a chance to grab a copy, keep an eye on Obverse Books, as they'll sometimes surprise us with stray extra copies for sale. Fingers crossed I'll get to write more of this guy someday and read more of everyone else's Doctors as well.