Good news, bad news, Torchwood query

[snorkackcatcher]

Good news: I already have a good chunk of outline springtime_gen fic mapped out. Not starting way past deadline for once. :)

Bad news: It's already 2,350 words, so at this rate it's unlikely to come in at less than 8K words again. Maybe I should stop throwing in every random detail that occurs to me.

Also, a question for Torchwood fans: I was reorganising some files and was reminded of Catching Wild Geese, a semi-serious fic written pre-S2 about the team's abortive Saxon-inspired trip to the Himalayas. I was fiddling with it to see if could be adapted to fit current canon -- the original version has Jack there when they get back, but Kiss Kiss Bang Bang suggests a gap of maybe a few months before he turns up.^(*) That's doable, with some work. The tricky bit is that I really need them to have been in Tibet, but unfortunately the mission report that appeared on the BBC tie-in website (that's a link to a copy, scroll down a bit) says they were on K2, which is a long way away.

So how much would you say people consider that canon, or care about whether it is or not? How well known would that version be? I do prefer to avoid contradicting the Official Version of events where possible, even if it's not technically canon (for certain values of canon), but for this fic to work anywhere other than Tibet requires a very unconvincing handwave.

(*) Come to think of it, I'm not entirely sure what (or who) he was doing all that time, since destroying the Paradox Machine rewound time back to the day after they were sent. Was it a result there being leeway at either end of the TARDIS lock, and they arrived back from Utopia a few months later than they left from Cardiff?

Comments

[lareinenoire.livejournal.com]

So how much would you say people consider that canon, or care about whether it is or not?

I'd go with explicitly stated on the show canon rather than website canon; I tended to lean that way with JKR interview canon too.

I'm not entirely sure what (or who) he was doing all that time, since destroying the Paradox Machine rewound time back to the day after they were sent.

Pish! We all know the answer to those questions.

What? Fixing the fifteenth century
Who? Edward IV

;)

[snorkackcatcher]

Oh of course, I'd forgotten that. It's virtually canon itself, isn't it? :)

I'm more inclined to treat JKR interviews as canon as they definitively come from the same source, as compared to a TV show where not even all the episodes are written by the same person, but of course even there you get contradictions ... I suppose the question is how much it's considered backstory for the characters and thus might play into future episodes. (Then again, apart from Gwen that's a moot point now anyway.)

[lareinenoire.livejournal.com]

Hee! I like to flatter myself, but it is at least as valid an explanation as anything else?

Makes sense about the JKR interviews, although I tend to allow for how difficult it is to keep all the tiny details in your head at once -- God knows if someone asked me about a minute detail from my dissertation, I'd probably not be able to answer it and it's about a third the size of OotP.

[stlscape.livejournal.com]

FWIW, Chris Chibnall said in some print interview that Jack had been gone 6 weeks to 3 months.

[snorkackcatcher]

That sounds about right -- enough time for them to be organising themselves on their own rather than expecting him to turn up.

[bedawyn.livejournal.com]

I'd go for broad strokes (they went to the Himalayas) and not worry about the nitpicks (K2) when it comes to dealing with supplementary material. I mean, the Himalayas message from Owen is dated December 18, which either places it before "Out of Time" or means Jack was gone for an entire year. (Unless... huh. I just had a weird thought about fixing that discontinuity. I suddenly suspect I'm going to be wrangling that in my head at 3 am tonight.) But anyway, the supplementary material is full of so many inconsistancies that trying to comply with all the details will just drive you insane. Besides, most of your readers probably won't remember anything more than "Himalayas" or know exactly where in the Himalayas K2 is anyway. The few who will would probably rather have you writing than going insane.

As for the timing of Jack's leaving and going... several of us have already gone insane trying to make that work. The details in the scripts, in the background sets, and in the supplementary material, around both Jack's and Martha's leaving, is so tangled that the Doctor himself couldn't straighten it out. Save yourself and just handwave, handwave...

[snorkackcatcher]

I hadn't thought about the date ... they all sound like very fair points! OK, I'll skim over any details that don't fit, then, it's not like they appeared onscreen. And reading that again it struck me to wonder who exactly had the authority to give the TW team "Orders from the highest authority, apparently. With Jack not around to grease palms, we couldn’t get out of it. So we went" -- given that they're supposed to be separate from the government and all that. Yeah, that way madness lies.

(The Tibet requirement comes because it has a reference back to the Yeti serials from the DW Troughton era -- anywhere else it's probably not going to work. :)