Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I’ve always been unduly fond of editing, so I’m enjoying revising Colony.
I’m not sure I’ll be quite as excited when I get to those twenty or thirty missing
scenes, but so far, so good. I revised the first section (out of a former six
and current seven), and though the additions were a great improvement, I keep
having ambitious ideas about theme and supporting characters that will someday
mean working back through the beginning again.

I confess, I had one of those Really Bad Structural Ideas, which was to drop
every single name in Roll Call somewhere along the way. I’d only have to drop
an average of one name a scene. So far I’m breaking even, I think.
I’m also keeping close
track of the sexes of all my characters - when your first name is Crewman or,
alternately, Tazise, it’s hard to remember after a while.

Things will be simpler once I pair a few characters off. Then, if you know
one, you know the other one is the opposite gender. It’s not so much that
they’re heterosexual as that they’re only interested in reproduction. Babies!
Everywhere! But it’s not babyfic - babyfic doesn’t involve anything like the
massive daycare organization I’m planning.

It’s not all about the Original Aliens, either - I’m enjoying writing the
Voyager characters again, as well. I’m especially looking forward to making
trouble for Tuvok, both on the “Resolutions”/”Galileo 7″ level of logical
Vulcan trying to command illogical Humans, and on the “UMZ” level of…some
kind of life-threatening of Tuvok. That subplot is to be filled in later.

I’m taking things one scene at a time. I find that I can write from a plan -
most of my plans for Colony involve taking a few sentences of
tell, moving them the appropriate spot (usually earlier in the
story), and turning them into a full scene of show. I had my
doubts when I started, but it’s working pretty well so far.

I’m hoping to lure the muse back in time to threaten Tuvok’s life. Maybe
she’ll kill Harry while she’s at it - Kimicide is all the rage. At the very least,
I need to pair him off with an OC and get him in trouble, a la…well,
every K/f episode. Maybe I’ll let him have the first baby.
I’m branching off from “Shattered”, so he could even beat P/T to the Lamaze
class if he tries hard enough.

I didn’t realize, when VS7.5 did it that “Shattered” was such a natural
break-point. I was going to go all the way back to “Drive”, but nothing of the
real Season 7 weirdness happened until “Lineage”. I may be stocking up on the
babies, but there will be no Klingon messiah child.
Not again. The line must be drawn *here*. This far, *no*
farther.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 5th, 2002 at 10:41 pm and is filed under Fanfic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.