john_amend_all

(Administrative note: I've added the 'promptme' tag to the original meme prompts post, so it can be easily found just in case anyone wants me to ramble on about anything else.)

thisbluespirit also asked me to explain This Time Round, and Storytime in particular. I'll try, at least.

It's a question probably as old as storytelling itself: Do characters have an existence outside the narrative that gave them birth? Where do they go, and what do they do? The question's been addressed many times over the years; Doctor Who itself had a go in The Mind Robber.

In 1998, inspired by the Subreality Café shared universe, Tyler Dion created This Time Round as something similar for the world of Doctor Who: a place for characters (be they from Who, crossovers, original creations or fan writers' own author avatars) to meet up and relax. The first TTR story, A Quiet Night Out, was posted in January 1998. As can be seen from the original thread, it received an enthusiastic reception, and quickly grew into a shared universe with a few more or less bizarre rules and many more conventions.

Once the dust had settled, what was left was something like this: The Round is a pub, and it's emphatically not bigger on the inside than the outside. It's run by a dubious figure known only as the Proprietor, with the help of a motley gang of Who companions, crossover characters and OCs. The Round is located on the outskirts of a small town called Nameless, somewhere on the coast of Britain. Or somewhere Brit-ish, at least. The Round, and Nameless, exist "Outside Continuity". That means, firstly, that the characters are aware of their own fictional nature; secondly, there's no requirement for things that happen in one TTR story to affect another, unless the writer feels like it; and, thirdly, released from the straitjacket of continuity, the characters may reveal facets of their personalities that you wouldn't see on the show. Or just act completely contrary to their canonical nature, if that's funnier.

At its best, this approach led to a freewheeling, comedic style of storytelling, the prime example of which is probably the To Die For arc. It started as a parody of anti-Adric revenge fic, and evolved into an elaborate series in which Nyssa keeps killing Adric (there being no continuity, he just comes back to life each time) while unconvincingly insisting that whatever her reasons are for attacking him, they certainly aren't personal, and she definitely isn't trying to repress less violent feelings for him. It must also be admitted that at its worst, you could end up reading a story with a plot you can't follow, featuring half-a-dozen characters who've come no closer to the Whoniverse than meeting someone who once appeared in an obscure Doctor Who comic strip.

From my point of view, the Round works like a counterpart to the community that I understand to have built up among Doctor Who actors, only with the characters; it's somewhere they can relax together and muck about. I've found a couple of other uses for it, too. One is letting the characters comment on events in the Whoniverse (for example, when Matt Smith's casting was announced, I had Romana reuse a gag from City of Death and ask why he hadn't got eyebrows). The other is assembling teams of people who never met in canon, and sending them on a more or less conventional adventure; that's how most of the Jamie's Angels stories came about.

These days, the Round seems to be, if not abandoned, nearly as good as; only a few stories are posted each year. I put that down to the decline of alt.drwho.creative and Usenet in general. Though there was an attempt to set up a parallel LJ community, the mod seems to have lost interest, and nothing's been posted there for years. The archive of stories can be found at ttrarchive.com, though don't expect the bells and whistles of Teaspoon or AO3.

While TTR has no 'canon' as such, here's a list of TTR stories (all but the first in the To Die For arc) that introduce some of the more prominent concepts and OCs:

A Quiet Night Out — as mentioned above, sets up the premise.
Friendly Fire — introduces the Adric Defence Force.
Access Limited — explains Polly's rôle as the Round's door warden.
Cabals Up — introduces Number One.
The Knights Who Say 'Nyssa' — introduces the Wonderful & Adorable Nyssa's Knights-Errant Regiment.
Like Water For Adric — introduces an important facet of Number One's character.
The Feminine Mistake — Francois the Ogron Bartender showed up in earlier stories, but Chapter 1 gives him (and his 'shift supervisor') a day in the limelight.

I know there are other facets of the Round and its spinoffs that I haven't covered; if you feel inspired to explore the Round and come across any other aspect of it that mystifies you, you can ask in the comments and (if I know the answer) I'll try to explain it.

And now onto Storytime.

Once the Round was up and running, it branched out into various spinoffs, one of which was Look Who's Talking, the toddler AU. All the characters are children in a playgroup, with the adult version of the Eighth Doctor's companion Izzy attempting to keep order, under the loose and not-in-the-least helpful direction of an incorrigibly indolent (and, of course, unnamed) Supervisor.

One day, B. K. Willis wrote It's Story Time! where, in Izzy's absence, the Supervisor has to read the children a fairytale — in this case, Red Riding Hood. As the narrative begins, it is acted out by the adult This Time Round characters. The main roles of Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf go Number One and Francois the Ogron (see To Die For, above) with book companions Bernice Summerfield and Roz Forrester as supporting characters.

The conventions were swiftly codified by Doug Killings' Cinderella: the story-within-a-story in script format, characters fighting the narrative every step of the way, interjections by the toddlers, values dissonance, and a happy ending (that may not be the original one).

Storytime is what got me into writing fic longer than double-drabble length. Sequelitis caught me just at the beginning of my Zoë-on-the-brain phase, and ended with my new favourite getting her eyes being pecked out by birds. Unwilling to let this rest, I wrote a drabble-length followup, which (a couple of rounds of drabble tennis later) led to a whole 950-odd words of fic describing the chaotic outcome of Zoë's machinations. Having concluded that arc, I decided to write a Storytime of my own, and succeeded. I found the form helpful; the tale-within-a-tale provides a ready-made skeleton around which a fic can be constructed. Thus, I ended up writing... rather a lot of them.

In my experience, the easiest way to navigate Storytime is to go to the list of Look Who's Talking stories. All but one of the Storytimes is clearly marked as such, that one being 'Master Test' chapter 3. And since I wrote so many of them, I think I'm far too much of an interested party to say which ones you should or shouldn't read. A few of the early ones assume a knowledge of 'To Die For' or other TTR stories; later ones, not so much.