Simon Guerrier

I did a degree in English Literature at the University of Central Lancashire 1994-1997. In those ancient days, they still insisted that we hand-write essays (the feeling being that typed essays would aid plagiarism etc). There was one computer room for the whole Cultural Studies department (covering Literature, Linguistics and various other subjects), and in all the time I was there, it was only ever busy in April, when the final-year students had to type up their dissertations.

At the time, I didn’t know anyone with a mobile phone or anyone who used the internet very much. In January 1996, it was announced that there was going to be a Doctor Who TV movie (the one starring Paul McGann), so I would go once a week to the computer room to look up the Doctor Who News Page (at the time run by Shannon Patrick Sullivan). I thought this meant I was keeping up with the production. A friend of mine studying computing at another university would also post me print-outs from Doctor Who websites with news. Yes, really.

In 96-97, I wrote my dissertation on the Doctor Who TV movie and the Star Trek film First Contact, and remember having to press my department for guidelines on how to cite web pages – because it wasn’t a rule they’d yet established. I also helped type up my friends’ dissertations, and showed many of them where the computer room was and how it worked because they simply didn’t know.

In 1997, I moved to the University of Reading to do an MA, and there it was impressed on us by our course leader Professor Edward James that we should use the internet for research, not least because many of the books we’d be studying were available on Project Gutenberg etc. So I was using the internet a lot more, going to the computer room on the ground floor of our nine-storey hall of residence. That room could be busy in the day, but was always quiet in the evenings, so I used to do emailing and browsing then, often working into the small hours. I probably used it once or twice a week.

I dabbled a bit of REC-ARTS-DOCTORWHO but found it a bit overwhelming and busy – it really needed you to check in every day to follow discussions. But I was also keen to be a Doctor Who writer (in those days, anyone could submit ideas for official Doctor Who books) and I then heard about a mailing list set up by one of the established authors: Kate Orman’s The House of Allen Road.

I think I joined late 1997, and loved it. There was a lot of wise, insightful books chat – about the latest titles, about how you might submit. A fair number of the authors chipped in. And there was also a bunch of students at other universities who all seemed to share my outlook and ambitions to write for the range. When a book about Doctor Who fandom was published and mentioned a pub in London with regular meetings of Doctor Who fans, a few of us on the mailing list agreed to meet up and go along.

That was how I met Eddie Robson (now an established writer of Doctor Who things, as well as radio and TV), Will Howells and Matt Michael (among other things, both regular contributors to Doctor Who Magazine). I became a regular at the pub meetings, met many of the commissioning editors who’d rejected my submissions and by 2002 got my first writing gigs – a feature in DWM and a Doctor Who short story for Big Finish. That same year I went freelance.

Through the pub meetings, I was invited to join three egroups – later Yahoogroups. They were most private groups of fans who generally knew each other in real life – places we could have bitchy, gossipy conversations that we couldn’t post in public.

In 1998, while still at Reading, I got my first (second-hand) computer, but wasn’t connected to the internet until later that year when I’d finished university and moved into a house with some techie housemates. It was slow and dial-up, but I was now checking mailing lists and sites daily, and being an active participant. I can’t remember when I joined what was then the Outpost Gallifrey forum, but definitely before the series came back in 2005 and probably by 2003. I was a fairly active participant in those days.

By about 2007, I think, I started to ease off. It was uncomfortable to witness let alone participate in discussions about things I’d written or worked on, or – more frequently – about people I knew or guessing at events that I might have been involved in. I think the timbre of discussion changed, too: I felt it was more openly aggressive. My feeling was, having been on several different groups and lists, that the tone was always set by those who could devote most time to posting, drubbing anyone else’s point of view. I think it was also the sheer volume of stuff, too. I was overwhelmed and couldn’t keep up, just as when I’d first looked at REC ARTS.

I moved to Facebook – which I left in 2012 having found that overwhelming, too – and to Twitter, which I joined in 2009.

I generally posted as myself, or as ConcreteElephant (the name of a fanzine I produced). I’ve been 0tralala (with a zero not an oh at the beginning) since 2005.

I made a lot of good friends in those communities, many of them, such as Eddie, Will and Matt, who I still see (though becoming a parent has curtailed my social life quite a lot). There were also a whole bunch of people I used to chat to every day who I now don’t see and whose names I can barely remember. But what I really remember is how much those mailing lists helped me build the confidence to talk to people in person. I got used to chipping in to discussions on line, and then when I started going to the pub and conventions, I felt brave enough to talk to strangers.

A couple of mailing lists were shut down without warning, and I’d liked to have had the chance to go through them beforehand. One site had a useful file-sharing folder, where we’d put works-in-progress for comment. I lost all those things – and because I’d been using that folder as my back-up, I had no copy. One group was closed by its moderator after a nasty argument, and I lost all contact with the people – many of them posting anonymously – I’d built up relationships with.