Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

  Puppy: off
  Word of the day: fidelity

After I got Debbie to read Atlas Shrugged, including the forty-page political speech, we decided that it was a science fiction novel. Somehow I don’t think Ayn Rand had to struggle even as hard as Kurt Vonnegut to avoid the sf brand, as deadly to ’serious’ writers as a role on a Star Trek series is to serious actors. But if 1984 gets any credit for being in the speculative fiction genre, then Atlas Shrugged deserves it too. There’s absolutely no question that Rand’s novella Anthem is science fiction as well.

I have to admit that Ayn Rand impressed me immensely when I first read her, eleven years ago. First of all, I hadn’t imagined that someone could make a moral argument for capitalism, or against communism - I thought all debate on that issue would have to be pragmatic, saying that we are not saints enough for communism so we put our vices to good use through capitalism. That the woman had the gall to make selfishness a virtue, and then devote her life to making a philosophy out of it, and then, on top of that, to write novels based on her own personal aesthetic - good novels - amazed me on all the levels involved, philosophical, moral and literary. That was the day I should have known I wanted to be a writer.

“Katie, why do they always teach us that it’s easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It’s the hardest thing in the world–to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want.” (The Fountainhead)

I’m going to have to hunt down The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature and reread it, since Christine has been quite rightly pestering me for not knowing what the point is I’m trying to make in my stories. Ayn Rand was never at a loss for the moral of the story.

• The Ayn Rand Institute

Is it just me or is fanfiction.net always down? What fanfic needs is a good index site, not another malfunctioning archive. I don’t think a single one of my stories has shown up at Trekiverse yet, and I’ve been posting for over a year. (Ack!) Do I have to come over there and teach you people perl?

Site news: Claudia was begging in ASC so I decided to enter an old story in the Twelve Moons of JuPiter Awards 2001. The new deadline is November 4th, so it’s not too late to write your own J/P story for one of the many underrepresented categories.

I took the other award graphics off the story and made a separate page to house them: B’Elanna’s the Muse’s Award Shelf (not to be confused with the Jemima’s Trek Awards). I used a thumbnailer to make the little award jpegs - more details are available on the Technical Difficulties page. I used the “float” value for the first time, so the page may look odd in some browsers.

Aside from a little more housekeeping, that’s all that’s been updated. I have two very short stories in beta, but my beta reader has been hanging with Abby so it will be a few days yet.

The Star Trek Personality Test at startrek.about.com was rather inaccurate, but entertaining nonetheless. If you know your Myers-Briggs type already, here are direct links to your Star Trek character:

ESTJ|ESTP|ISTJ|ISTP
ESFJ|ESFP|ISFJ|ISFP
ENTJ|ENTP|INTJ|INTP
ENFJ|ENFP|INFJ|INFP

I disagreed with the characters chosen in some cases. Certain personality types are rare (1% of the population), so there may not be an appropriate regular character for them.

To my fans who hoped or feared I would never write again: I’m back at work on the Seven Saga. I have three, count ‘em, three new paragraphs! No, I’m not a perfectionist when it comes to writing fanfiction, but research is another matter. I spent half an hour making up a Romulan word for “Borg”, with the help of The Universal Translator Assistant Project.

Most of the rest of the time devoted to the Seven Saga (my infinite retelling of the Voyager story from Seven’s perspective) has been spent on a meticulous reading of the first few relevant episodes among Jim Wright’s Voyager Reviews, along with some cutting and pasting of dialogue. I hate it when people transcribe the show and call it fanfic, without even the humorous stage directions provided by Jim, but I’m hoping that Seven’s perspective will be sufficiently different from the camera’s-eye view to avoid the Sin of Transcription. I guess it will be a paragraph-by-paragraph effort.

So far, I’ve spackled the most glaring discontinuae in Seven’s history, though her fluctuating age and the Earth question are still at issue. If anyone has picked all the nits, do email me with the details.

  Puppy: off
  Phrase of the day: trial by jury

I had jury duty again today, which implies that if you’re on standby and are told not to come in, then your number goes back in the hopper. I was on standby half a year ago, I think. This time I had to hike all the way out to Roxbury to do my civic duty, which involved sitting in a room for three hours before being dismissed. The prospect of twelve angry Bostonians had scared all the bad guys into plea bargains, the judge informed us. And he disapproves of Judge Judy.

While awaiting my chance to say “string ‘em high”, I read half of Asimov’s Foundation. It’s been about twenty years since I read the trilogy last, so I was surprised just how familiar it was. Maybe that’s just Asimov, though. It never ceases to amaze me what people got away with in the good old days of sci-fi. Asimov’s idea of the decline and fall of Galactic science is the disappearance of nuclear power - in other words, a shift from 1954 to 1942. Twelve thousand years of civilization and…well, it doesn’t become me to mock the Great One. Foundation stands on the principles of psychohistory rather than the cheesy terminology of “nuclear blasts”. Still, Tolkien should have gotten the Hugo for best series ever. He knew about the rise and fall of empires…

I can’t believe I read the whole thing.

I’m a Voyager girl, so it takes a lot for me to read TNG. Picard/Crusher makes me retch, with one exception. In fact, any TNG crew pairings feel like your parents getting together, and who wants to read fanfiction about that? So I’m still not sure how I got drawn into the Captain and Counselor series, but here I am, many megabytes later, practically liking Deanna Troi.

The series begins with “Elephants in the Lift”, which introduces the ultimate in off-the-wall pairings - not even the Evil Twins could have come up with P/T, but Lori pulls it off convincingly. Near the end of the infinite series, in “Actions Speak Louder”, all the characters, old and new, are drawn into mysterious doings in the Briar Patch. If you like DS9, action-adventure, or the dark doings of Starfleet renegades, “Actions Speak Louder” and “Leopards on a Limb” are for you.

Maybe Lori’s answer to post-series TNG will inspire me to write some AQ VOY.

  Puppy: off
  Phrase of the day: planned obsolescence

I forgot to mention one other book I read to avoid Blue Mars, a popular science book about immortality. I won’t mention the title, since it has nothing to recommend it. We die, the authors informed me, of planned obsolescence–but I knew that already. I’m not sure how I found or came up with the theory, but it seems obvious to me that people die because we’re designed to, not because of any particular disease. Cancer, especially, is not a true disease but a sign that the body is wearing out.

The book did mention one interesting piece of evidence that was new to me: Gompertz’ Law of Mortality (1825), which states that after puberty, your chances of dying double every seven years. Only recently has research confirmed this. (See http://www.anl.gov/OPA/Frontiers97/SL3.html.) Don’t worry, though–it takes a while to add up.

Well, I’ve gone khaki, and taken the robot test - Liz made me do it.

I’ve also almost finished Lori’s infinite Captain and Counselor series. I skipped a bit in the middle after my first head of steam ran out back in August, which was, I suppose, the best way to read an infinite amount of fanfic in a finite amount of time. I see Lori has finally put up file sizes so you can see I’m not exaggerating - to think I used to call Suz prolific. I was so young then…

On to the new: I made an Enterprise page and put it up at your friendly neighborhood Jemima’s Trek site (except the Crosswinds mirror: first, they deleted my account accidentally, and now they’re in some sort of backup mode–too late–and won’t let me upload). If Enterprise turns out to be the ultimate in Trek kitsch (and it’s looking promising so far), I want to be there for every Sato screech. “Hailing frequencies open” doesn’t begin to describe it, Captain.

Scott Bakula is already failing to act. No Shakespearean actors on this one, folks–we’re back to what the p’tak dragged in. I’ve always been a pushover for the strong, wooden type. If I can’t have Kirk or Chakotay (or first-season Shouting Spock, or even Odo in a pinch), I’ll settle for Archer. You can keep Riker, though–he was just slimy.

For the first time in several months, I’ve had the free time to putter, so I made this sunshine yellow blog after a flurry of posts about blogging on CSFic. (Visit Wikifection, the C/7 home page.) Of course, I should have been working on the Seven Saga, or any of my C/7 UFOs (unfinished objects). Maybe next time…

Well, I’ve gone trendy. Before I begin to blog, I’ll transfer the State of the Site here from my overloaded home page: