Red Dwarf, then.
So, er, yeah. Although this has been in the pipeline for a couple of weeks (and in fact, I actually officially started work at the beginning of this week), it’s only now been made public and can be announced: I’m now the writer/editor/whatever of The Official Red Dwarf Website.
It’s still sinking in, really, even though the first weekly news updates from my pen (keyboard) are already up on the site for all to see. I’m actually, officially, part of the Red Dwarf “family”. It’s been a long and odd journey getting here - from watching the show as a nipper, to setting up my first blog about it in 2004, to playing Doug Naylor (the Doug Naylor I now work for) in a fan film, to joining the obnoxious loudmouthery of peerless fansite Ganymede & Titan, to publishing a book about the show. Even then, I never expected through any of that that I’d ever really get to have any official connection with the series - even though, like anyone else, I’ve always had a dream that I’d one day be writing it (fitting it in and around my Doctor Who and Superman commitments, of course).
But now I do. I’m responsible for the weekly site news updates, as well as keeping it generally ticking over - and some other bits and bobs of work that I can’t really talk about now, to boot. And there’ll be a lot of news updates to come - in case you didn’t know, Red Dwarf is imminently entering production for a brand new series of six episodes, to be broadcast next year on Dave. And I’m going to be seeing a lot of that first-hand, and telling the world about it. In a lot of cases (as with our already-teased big announcement next week) I’ll be the first person to tell worldwide fandom of major goings-on (although in other cases, Digital Spy will probably beat us to it as we negotiate the “Can we publish this yet?” legal minefield that they’re not bound by).
Unfortunately, this also means I have to keep my opinions about Series VIII to myself from now on, but hey ho.
It’s a bloody exciting time, though. Unlike the man I’m replacing - the eleven-years-serving, pretty-much-impossible-to-follow Andrew Ellard, now a scriptwriter/editor of no small renown - this isn’t my full-time job, and I’m not involved in the production side of things, or anything like that. I’m the part-time news-monkey, basically. But still - all of a sudden, I’m getting paid to write about Red Dwarf. Every week.
It’s definitely one of those “wish I could tell the teenage self” moments, I’ll tell you that.
Originally posted at seblog.co.uk. You can comment here or there.