Thread by @ElSandifer

Someone told me it’s my ten year anniversary of starting TARDIS Eruditorum. So, a follow up to my thread about getting writing careers started and how I’m a useless model. This time related specifically on writing about Doctor Who from a me-influenced perspective.

First advice: don’t. It’s an oversaturated market that’s past its peak. Maybe in 5-10 years if the show has a huge spike in popularity again, but right now you’ve got too many people doing the same thing.

There are other pop culture properties. Some of them are wide open! The peak window for a massive cultural history of Marvel probably just passed, but you could still get on it. DC’s probably just about to pass. Star Trek continues to have room in it.

There’s probably space for a massive revisionist take on Whedon that respects what he meant to people but is firm that his time is long passed. I could see someone cleaning up in Tolkien right now. There’s lots of stuff to do. Copying my style in my backyard is gonna be rough.

Second advice, applicable if you take my first advice, mandatory if you don’t: stand out. It’s not enough to be good. You’re going to have to be *new*. There are volumes and volumes of prose on every show and text you might do. Why do we need your voice? What do you have to say?

Part of this is just having weird opinions. There’s a very distinct Eruditorum Press aesthetic within Doctor Who, with weird stories that my circle champions and beloved classics we tend to scorn. You need something like that.

That doesn’t just mean incendiary hot takes or trolling. I always posted what I actually thought about a story when I was writing. But it does mean having your own perspective and aesthetic and style.

But even more important... like other things. And not just other fandom things. Part of how TARDIS Eruditorum stood out was that I pulled in occultism, J.G. Ballard, politics, comedy, classic drama, literature, philosophy, soap operas...

It’s a long list. I’m into lots of stuff. I know Doctor Who very well, but I also know a lot of other things and I’m eager to learn about more things. The less insular your perspective the better you’ll do.

Know your subject area absolutely cold backwards and forwards, but know other stuff and be ready to bring it in. Surprise people with where it goes.

Third advice, applicable only to Doctor Who: come at me. Frankly, I’m the lowest hanging fruit in progressive Doctor Who fandom right now. There is absolutely room to try to consign me to an older, dustier era of fandom. There’s absolutely room to outflank me.

This is, tbh, what I did a lot to Miles and Wood’s About Time series. Do it to me. Engage with what I said, put me on a pedestal, and then knock me the fuck down and scream bloody murder about how I’m wrong. Be snarky and savage and funny and eviscerate me.

The job of being me is taken, but if you absolutely must make it in this specific fandom with this specific political orientation then the job of being my Grant Morrison is still largely open.

Anyway. Ten years of this. Gosh. It’s hard to process how lucky I am to have made it as a professional critic. It’s hard to process how weird my life is, and how much weirder doing this has made it.

I won’t be fake humble and pretend that I don’t think I’m good at what I do. I don’t think you can have my level of success as a completely indie critic without being very good.

But however good I am, I’m even more lucky and even more blessed I’ve been by the people around me. You don’t pull off what I’ve done unless you’re good, but there’s more people who are very good that don’t make it like I did than that do.

Arguably nobody makes it like I did. There aren’t exactly a lot of media critics working in prose who came up entirely through the indies with virtually no reliance on mainstream channels. There are even fewer who do it without relying on a single fandom.

My life is insane and wonderful, and the point here is that my existence as a stable and successful trans woman who carved her own niche is down to all the people who saw what I was doing and supported it.

Specific thanks here to Millie, Chris, Jane, and James, all of whom contributed labor at well below market rate to make me look good.

The past ten years have been incredible. This isn’t the life I dreamed of because I lacked the imagination for something so improbable. Thanks for helping me create the impossible. May the next ten years be even stranger.