Despite being a supporting character in my novel The Last Days Of Jack Sparks, Sherilyn Chastain seems to have a struck a chord with readers. She certainly did with me, and I enjoyed writing her very much.This will be a spoiler-free piece, by the way, in case you’ve – gasp – yet to read the novel.

An Australian-French combat magician with a foul mouth and a possible sex addiction, Sherilyn was created to serve the story in three ways:

1) I needed someone to question Jack’s dogged cynicism over the supernatural. Obviously, Jack’s flatmate Bex does this to a certain extent too, but Sherilyn’s knowledge of the arcane world allows her to go much deeper and really get under Jack’s skin. Which is why they argue like cats and dogs.

2) I needed someone to explain a fair bit of mysterious, supernatural stuff – especially later in the novel. Come the final third of the story, Sherilyn essentially becomes the Doctor in Doctor Who. Jack and Bex become her companions, asking what the hell is going on. Doctor-esque characters are ever so handy in stories in which bizarre conceptual stuff is going on.

3) I wanted a fun, colourful character who could be funny and dark at the same time.

So that’s why Sherilyn was created. What about the how?

What with knowing nothing about combat magic, I turned to my excellent friend Cat Vincent, a retired combat magician. Yes, yes, combat magicians are actually a thing in the real world. So I got Cat on Skype and interviewed him for around an hour. Because I knew the basic shape of the plot at that stage, I was able to ask him specific things that I needed to know. At times, I also asked him whether certain things would make sense within the magical world. Magical logic, if you will… or even if you won’t.

When writing Sherilyn, I made good use of Cat’s words. In fact, I quite often literally had his words coming out of her mouth. As a result, there is the occasional moment where I actually don’t understand what she’s talking about, but it sounds awesome and that’s all that matters at the time.

While Sherilyn is Aussie-French, she speaks with an overwhelmingly Aussie accent, and so I turned to another excellent friend, Dijana Capan, to make sure she would sound suitably Down Underly. This was mainly a matter of asking Dijana to supply the odd Aussie-specific phrase (“Get a dog up ya!”, for instance) or checking that I hadn’t made any phrases up myself.

So that’s Sherilyn Chastain. You know... beyond all that research, the more I look back at this powerful person, the more she does have the sense of a female Doctor about her. The way she’ll sweep into any given room and take control, and have a seemingly endless supply of magical ghost-hunting gadgetry, such an aerosol spray can of St John’s Root. So, yeah, Doctor Who probably smuggled itself into my work there. Certainly wouldn’t have been the first time and it won’t be the last…

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The Last Days Of Jack Sparks: Amazon US | Amazon UK | Amazon Canada

And here's the Jack Sparks page on my website.

Turns out that the next release in the BBC's Doctor Who: The Collection deluxe Blu-ray range will be Season 23, aka The Trial Of A Time Lord, on September 23.

The final series of Colin Baker's reign as the Sixth Doctor, Season 23 presented itself as one epic 14-part story, albeit divided into four individual stories within the overarching courtroom tale.

This afternoon, I'll upload a special mid-week YouTube video, in which I look back at the whole season, the new Blu-ray set's packaging and of course the special features. Subscribe here and hit the notification bell, so as to be sure not to miss it! 

Here's the list of special features for this set:

• Extended edits - of all fourteen episodes
• Terror of the Vervoids - four-part standalone edition with updated Fx
• Immersive 5.1 surround sound & isolated scores - on all 14 broadcast episodes
• Behind the Sofa - new episodes with Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant, Bonnie Langford, Mark Strickson, Frazer Hines and Matthew Waterhouse
• The Writers’ Room - Eric Saward, Philip Martin, Christopher H Bidmead & Waly K Daly discuss the ‘Lost’ Season 23
• The Doctor Who Cookbook Revisited - brave cast members tackle their original recipes from the 1980s official cookbook
• The Doctor’s Table - join Colin Baker and friends for dinner
• In Conversation - Matthew Sweet chats to companion Bonnie Langford
• Unseen studio footage
• Rare archive treats
• Convention footage
• Blu-ray trailer
• HD photo galleries
• Scripts, costume designs & more in the PDF Archive

Don't miss my YouTube video, in which I discuss all of the above in much more detail.

Check out the box set at Amazon UK

To ensure that we all start on the same page with this, let me explain the difference between the proofreading process and, say, the copy-editing process.

The copy-editor reads your novel and makes a whole bunch of suggestions. Sometimes these are ways in which a sentence might flow more smoothly, be clearer in meaning or just be downright better. Other times, the copy-editor might identify a logic problem to ask you about. A potential plot-hole, in other words.

Just like the rest of the edit process, copy editing is awesome. Copy editors are horribly unsung, given that they can make you look like a better writer than you actually are. Crucially, they’re a fresh pair of eyes, bringing a fresh take to a book which you and your editor have both read several times by then.

I still remember a sentence in my first Orbit Books novel The Last Days Of Jack Sparks, which my copy-editor improved so much by suggesting the use of the word “solicit”. I think it was Jack saying he would solicit the combat magician Sherilyn Chastain’s views on something. Whatever it was, that suggestion made the sentence flow like a dream. And I TOOK ALL THE CREDIT, MWAH-HAH-HAHHHH

When you get your manuscript back, full of the copy-editors’ suggestions, you go through the whole thing and say yes or no to each of them. Yes, you do have that power of veto, but it’s one to wield wisely and carefully. Why? Because it cannot be overstated how much the copy-editor offers a fresh perspective on your project. For instance, if something wasn’t clear to them about your book, on a macro or micro level, then chances are it really could do with clarification.

During the copy edit, you’re not just responding to the copy-editor’s suggestions and questions – you’re reading through the whole thing again. At this stage, you’re still able to get hands-on with the Word file and make pretty much all the changes you want. And this, it’s important to note, is your last chance to carry out any serious surgery the book needs to undergo.

So that’s the copy edit. What’s the proofread, then? This is the final stage of production – for you, the author, at least. Different production editors no doubt go about this differently, but in the cases of my new novel Ghoster and 2016's The Last Days Of Jack Sparks, I was sent the type-set novel through the post, across about 450 A4 pages. It’s a glorious moment, when you get to see your novel laid out on the pages, just as it will look in the finished version. Or at least, close to how it will look, because this is your final chance to make changes.

You read through the whole thing (again) and mark up any issues you find. The difference this time, is that you’re looking for micro rather than macro. Typos, small plot-holes, things like that. You no longer have the Word file to tamper with. Instead, you’ll be communicating a list of changes you’d like to your production editor – and this list needs to be as brief as humanly possible. In fact, if the proposed changes are “excessive”, then they may incur financial charges! And these may well be passed on from the publisher to you.

Yeah. This doesn’t get talked about much, does it, eh? But the bottom line is: the proofreading stage should never be thought of as this huge, all-encompassing safety net, and your production editor should not be thought of as someone who’s going to be willing or able to make hundreds of corrections to the manuscript on your behalf. Even if they’re as super-cool as Orbit’s managing editor Joanna Kramer, who has overseen the production of Ghoster and The Last Days Of Jack Sparks.

The thing is, we’re authors, which means we’re rarely 100 per cent happy with our work. Certainly not our writing, anyway. So with Ghoster, for instance, I saw various sentences during the proofing stage that I wanted to try and ‘perfect’. In the end, though, I had to accept that most of these sentences were actually fine. I chose instead to prioritise anything that was an actual mistake, as opposed to my endless quest for a perfect sentence. Besides, there’s always the danger that last-minute changes will cause you to, for instance, use a word which has already been overused elsewhere in the text. In fact, some last-minute changes run the risk of tipping over the whole apple cart. One careless eleventh-hour 'correction' could actually screw the plot, so tread lightly.

Once you reach a certain point with a novel, you just have to accept that it’s done.

And as of Thursday morning, when I hit Send on an email to Joanna with the list of proof amendments attached, Ghoster is done.

Come October 24, if you are of a mind to do so, you’ll get to read the novel and spot any typos we missed. Just, please, for the love of God, don’t tell me about any of them.

Here’s Ghoster at Amazon. Pre-orderliness is next to godliness. 

Amazon US | Amazon UK | Amazon Canada

P.S. Subscribers to my fortnightly newsletter The Necronoppicon received this article direct to their inboxes, two weeks ago. Consider joining us here. 

The first thing to note here is that movie censorship still very much happens. Certainly in the UK, the British Board of Film Classification regularly bans films altogether, so it’s not as if we’re suddenly living in Amsterdam, where movies would probably have to break all kinds of real-life laws just to raise an eyebrow. 

However, there is so much less censorship than there used to be in the crazy 1980s, when horror films would fall foul of the censor’s scissors simply for daring to present an exploding head. Hell, in the early ‘80s, some action films would have bloody bullet wounds snipped too.

The second thing to note here is that I loathe censorship and stand opposed to it.

So what exactly do I miss about movie censorship?

The hunt.

That’s exactly what I miss. The thrill of the chase.

By its very nature, movie censorship created more than one version of a movie. As a result, one of these versions suddenly became far more desirable than the other. Horror films that would not otherwise have attracted all that much attention suddenly achieved legendary status when they were banned or trimmed. Many of the flicks that ended up on the UK’s banned video nasties list of the early 1980s were absolutely appalling… and yet after they were pulled from the shelves by the police, they instantly became holy grails for collectors and horror fans alike.

Thirty-five years later, several of these nasties command over £100 in value – even as much as £1,600.

Even though we should obviously have been allowed to watch the unexpurgated version of a movie in the first place, in the exact manner that the writer and director intended, there was an odd excitement when you watched a film and could tell it had been hacked by some zealot. As a general rule, the gory scenes appeared to have been censored by a particularly clumsy chimpanzee. Onscreen, an axe would swing towards the latest victim’s neck and the action would cut abruptly to a shocked onlooker, or blood spraying the walls, or even straight to the next scene.

Of course, sometimes when you finally got your hands on the original version of the film, you’d discover that there was nothing extra to see at all. Either the director had been more restrained than you’d given them credit for, or the editor of the actual film had behaved like a particularly clumsy chimpanzee. But therein lay the thrills – what exactly had hit the cutting room floor? Collectors would flock to film fairs, hungry for under-the-counter copies of films which could not legally be seen in the UK. Dutch tapes, perhaps, whose content would obviously be fully intact, because the Dutch are sensible folk (apart from allowing dope to be sold by canals with no safety rails, obviously.)

Let me give you a solid example of the hunt in action. I first saw the Friday The 13th sequel Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday on the UK rental release, seen here on the left. I loved the film, which seemed pretty darn violent. Then I went on a press trip to America and picked up the ‘Unrated’ US VHS tape, seen here on the right. When I came home and watched the film, my mind was blown. The film was now even bloodier! One notorious scene in particular, involving someone being graphically sliced in half inside a tent, was absolutely ridiculous. In a good way. 

On top of the rush I felt from having sourced this forbidden footage, was the joy of sticking it to The Man. Those dusty old geese at the BBFC didn’t want me to see this stuff, but I DAMN WELL HAD. How’d you like those apples, eh? 

And then, it all went wrong, because with the new millennium came progress. All that pesky liberation of art, plus a revised view on exactly how much mollycoddling the average adult viewer needs. As a result, the hunt was ruined! 

With increasing regularity, even the gutsiest of horror films simply ended up landing on DVD or Blu-ray in an uncut form. Jesus Christ, they even had to try hard to achieve an ‘18’ certificate as opposed to a measly '15'! Of course, there were noble exceptions that still managed to roll up on these shores in a censored state (The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence or A Serbian Film, for instance), but mostly the entire ecosystem that had developed around searching for the uncut versions of films was dying a death.

It used to be a real mission to hunt down an uncut copy of The Toxic Avenger or Zombie Holocaust. And now they're both just on Blu-ray in HMV.

Of course, needless to say, it’s great that we have far less censorship now than we did in the 1980s. 

And yet I really miss the buzz of seeing things I wasn’t supposed to see. 

I miss the legwork of having to physically go places to find banned movies on VHS.

I miss the giddy high when you finally get that forbidden fruit in your hand, then take a big juicy bite.

I miss the hunt for movies that posh 65-year-old men decided might transform me into a raving driller-killer.

Ridiculous, isn’t it? But then, it’s only natural that a ridiculous thing like movie censorship should invite a ridiculous response.

Tell me I'm not alone in this. Does part of you miss movie censorship too? 

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