Goodbye to VOY
Half an hour past midnight this morning I gave up on Voyager.
I’d been working on my first-season AU in response to my own Leather-clad Challenge and I was excited about it from a plot point of view, but I couldn’t get a grip on the characters. I’d written half of my daily word count and was stuck in the middle of a scene involving Tom Paris, Harry Kim, and Seven of Nine (first season AU, remember).
I once said that even a monkey with a typewriter could write Tom Paris, and I believe that when Tom stops writing his own lines for you, it’s time to give up on VOY fic - the muse has flown. So at 12:41 a.m., I checked the story back into RCS (pardon my geekiness) with the comment: “518 words and giving up on the entire fandom.”
I will make a noble, hopeless effort to tidy up some works in progress and finish my revisions to Colony, but for all intents and purposes my affair with Voyager is over. A memorial filk is in the works.
Now my long-suffering readers may say don’t let the door hit you on the way out, or they may ask why, Jemi, why? Much of the answer was in my reply to Jerie about what I need from a fandom, but Jerie’s own requirement gets right to the point - a show should make you ask “What if…?” If I’m not asking that question about VOY anymore, I’m never going to come up with the fanfic answers.