Guidelines for Iris Wildthyme Fiction

What we’re looking for…

We intend, sales permitting, to release a short story book every year. The initial such book was by invitation only, but we’d like to include at least a couple of less well known or new writers in future releases.

So what we’re looking for is simple – a synopsis of an Iris story (using the Katy Manning version and accompanied by Panda) attached to a writing sample. The length and complexity of the sample is entirely up to you but we do need a fairly detailed synopsis, so that we can check that the story is going to hold together and make sure that it isn’t the same as a story we’re in the middle of publishing already.

Feel free to send in longer synopses for novels or novellas as well if you want – just be aware that we’re only doing a maximum of one of those a year and we already have authors in mind, so it’ll be harder to get one of those slots!

The Crew of the Good Old Bus

Iris

Ms Iris Wildthyme is an unusual woman in many, many ways. Possessed of what appears to be an elderly red London Routemaster bus (the number 22, headed for Putney Common, to be precise), in which she both travels and lives, in reality it is a sophisticated time machine which allows Iris (and whoever she chooses to take with her) to flit relatively effortlessly through all of space and all of history. It just looks like a bus.

A fan of female country singers, little pink laser guns and gin, Iris has an eye for adventure, a weakness for attractive men (especially ones in their mid-900s) and a real fondness for strong drink and good times.

Blessed with the ability to change her appearance in extremis (when faced with certain death, for instance) Iris has at various points in her life resembled Edith Sitwell, Jane Fonda and the popular television actress Katy Manning. This last incarnation is the current one.

Iris’ origins are shrouded in mystery, which is the way Iris likes it. The most recent theory suggests that she comes from the Clockworks, the home of a race of powerful but indolent technologically advanced aliens, situated in a separate universe to our own known as the Obverse. Some have hinted that it is the manner in which the people of the Clockworks merely record and not intervene which caused Iris to leave in her bus, looking for adventure and excitement. There have also been suggestions that there is something rotten in the Obverse, something which scares Iris for some reason…

Travelling with Iris at the moment is Panda, a small but perfectly formed…well, Panda.

Panda

Panda is a male (whisper it, ‘stuffed’) Panda (not a TOY! not a BEAR!), who has been travelling with Iris for some time now. He knows Tom and Jenny, and has heard about various other former companions of Iris’.

He sounds more than a little like the popular perception of Noel Coward
(actually he sounds almost exactly like the actor David Benson doing an impersonation of Noel Coward). He is at various times acerbic, sarcastic and full of himself, but also generous, witty and kind
as well – and can do anything that you imagine a 10″ tall stuffed
Panda can do, though at times not as well as he thinks he can.

He reviews opera and ballet for a number of august journals (or so he says) and, when his dander’s up, he has been known to threaten to punch enemies up the hooter. He can also boggle meanly at people. That’s about it on the offensive front, even if he does occasionally think of himself romantically as a bit of a dangerous rogue.

He’s very fond of old battleaxes – women like Anne Leslie or the glorious Peggy Mount. He’ll generally fix them with a rakish grin and say, ‘My god, but you’re a damn handsome woman.’

Perhaps that’s why he’s so very, very fond of Iris Wildthyme (not that I’m suggesting that for a second, you understand!) – for all that he also finds her shenanigans a bit annoying at times…

Organisations and Settings

MIAOW

The Ministry of Incursions and Ontological Wonders. It’s probably easiest to think of them as the Iris version of Torchwood/UNIT.

Their North Eastern branch is based under the indoor market in Darlington and is accessed via a non-ridiculous, non invisible lift.

Jenny, one of Iris’ former travelling companions who sadly left due to the fact that time travel gave her a dodgy tummy, now works in MIAOW Darlington, as does a certain vending machine last seen escaping from Tiermann’s World.

PUSSYWORLD

A planet populated by intelligent cats.

At one point Iris (in her Jane Fonda incarnation) was blackmailed by Binky, warrior Queen of the Pussyworld, into kidnapping a million old ladies.

There’s a Dogworld too, but you know…cats are both much cuter and much more vicious.

Other Stuff

Iris’ Bus

In theory a dimensionally transcendental time machine with an infinite amount of space contained within it. In reality, the bus is ever so slightly smaller on the inside than one might expect. It does however contain a tape deck, a supply of Tammy albums and a drinks’ cabinet.

The Doctor, Time Lords, Cybermen and all that Jazz

Nowhere to be seen. Not even in jest. Nothing whose copyright belongs elsewhere, either BBC or Big Finish or Telos or whatever.

You can hint if it’s sufficiently subtle and deniable, but that’s about it. And it’d have to be pretty damn subtle and deniable, so calling them Cyberons or introducing a mysterious time travelling boyfriend called The Dentist isn’t going to work.

Legal Stuff

Anything you send in remains your copyright and won’t be used by us for anything unless we get in touch and mutually agree to take things further.