Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Word count: 100

As you may have noticed from the new splash screen, the name of Jemima’s Trek is changing to Jemima’s Chevron. I’ve had a chevron theme since Jemima’s Trek first opened for non-commerce three years ago. Since my Buffy phase I’ve wanted a more generic site title, and while Buffy still isn’t covered by chevrons (unless they’re especially wooden and pointy), they are coincidentally a Stargate theme as well. If you don’t like the new name, feel free to suggest something better, such as “Jemima’s Pointy Things.”

Along with the name change and splash screen, I’ve tried to get everything over here from Freeshell except the (non-SG1) fanfic. The About/Style section has been slightly updated, though the blog is still a better place to find most of that information. Random pages like the Borg Plot Classification, B’Elanna’s Award Shelf and the Section 31 FAQ are here now. I think I’ve accounted for all the broken links, though I’m sure a link or two must have gotten past me.

Finally, two new drabbles have been added to the Stargate page: Just Testing and Baseball. Yet more drabbles are on the way.

Word count: 0 and counting

I wasn’t in the mood for Colony today so I made a new splash page based on the W3 tip about confetti menus. If you look at their stylesheet, you’ll see that’s it’s all done with margins. Unfortunately, I was having a lot of trouble with WinIE cutting the words in half (vertically) and both WinIE and MacIE mispositioning them (presumably by adding up the pixel values incorrectly), so I switched the whole thing to absolute positioning. Now it looks more or less the same in IE and in competent browsers.

The splash screen is pure CSS, using your system fonts. For example, if you have Final Frontier or the Stargate letter font, then Voyager and Stargate will show up in their respective font. Colors were picked from the color table of the background image for the main FicML page. I also added a dotted border as a hover effect. You can see the CSS at the bottom of my stylesheet, jp_tab.css.

Word count: 1025

I made a few changes to the preference picker to allow users to see the generated CSS code. You can also view the PHP source. Soon users will be able to save their preferences as well.

Word count: 1115

Seema asked a question about the ominiscient point of view on Zendom - specifically, how it differed from a wandering limited POV. I said:

In the omniscient POV, it’s the narrator (generally the author) who sees and knows all. If you’re leaping from character to character and having each character tell what he himself knows, then it’s not omniscient, it’s just very choppy limited POV. If, on the other hand, you can tell it’s the author (or narrator) providing the information, then it’s omniscient. It can be hard to tell the difference.

Not surprisingly, this was misunderstood. Some writers do leap from head to head while writing the omniscient POV, and only occasionally make it clear that there is a narrator’s POV present. That makes it hard to tell the difference.

Better examples of omniscient POV convey character and feelings without leaping into everybody’s head. Tolkien was mentioned as an example, but it’s easier to open any pre-20th century work of literature if you want to see the omniscient POV in action. Jane Austen is my favorite example of what can be done mainly through the medium of dialogue, without all this modern head-banging.

So I’ve been considering shifting Colony from its original head-banging omniscient POV to a more restrained example of the bird’s-eye perspective. The scenes I’ve written recently are in limited omniscient (that is, third-person limited POV) because I’ve gotten into the bad habit of writing that way. Like most fanfic writers, my initial style was omniscient. I didn’t change until someone pointed it out to me, and now I’m starting to find it tedious to pick a POV character and follow him through a scene (unless it’s Tom). I like the idea of omniscience better.

The Internet Writing Workshop has a nice omniscient POV exercise.

Word count: 1200

Despite Jerie’s noble attempts to drag me through the Stargate into the Mirror Mirror Fandom (new drabble coming soon), I’ve written yet more of Colony: The Neverending Fanfic. I got plenty of missives from Zendom, but no one took me up on my offer to run a Fanfic Taste Test. The only email that changed my life was Earthlink’s advice to turn off my modem volume - I’d had it on for a while so I could gauge the line quality and give up if the phone lines were hopeless, but they seem fine at the moment.

On the geek front, I attended W3School for some info on xsl:output and spent all of ten seconds contemplating

Tomorrow I may have more Fun Geek Toys™ ready, but for now I have a drabble to write.

Word count: 1390

Sometimes I read books because of the associated filk. I’ve known forever that I ought to read The Forever War (Joe Haldeman), but I didn’t get around to buying a copy until the filk got stuck in my head. Likewise for The Spirit of Dorsai (Gordon R. Dickson), which is half of the collection Dorsai Spirit that I bought under the influence of several Dorsai filk.

The Forever War follows the career of one Private Mandella as he advances through the ranks of Earth’s military space forces from the very first batch of draftees to well past the end of the eponymous war. He accumulates millions in interest on his pay due to relativistic effects. Although there are wormhole-analogs in the story, the process of getting to and from them at near-light speeds lets Our Soldier live through centuries of conflict without fighting many battles himself. He’d like to muster out, but he finds that human culture has passed him by.

The writing was excellent, and the use of relativity here was a gem in a genre filled with fanciful hyperdrives and wormholes that take the space out of space. The only disappointment was the ending, which was a bit of a clone ex machina that reminded me of the resolution of Forever Peace.

The Spirit of Dorsai doesn’t really compare. The book consists of two novellas with a frame story that made no sense to me, though I’m sure it fits into the Childe Cycle somewhere. The first novella follows an old woman as she leads the defense of her home town on the Dorsai against occupying forces. There was a lovely plot twist in here, but also a feeling of plot holes, or at least stretches in credibility. I got the feeling that Dickson wasn’t comfortable writing a female character, though I couldn’t point to anything in particular. (It’s not like his characterization is naturalistic even for men.)

I enjoyed the second novella more. One of the Dorsai was assassinated in Dorsai!; this story tells how the local authorities try to solve the murder while dealing with a band of suddenly vengeful mercenaries. Meanwhile, the Dorsai leader tries to balance the requirements of the Mercenary Code against justice and personal honor. I’m a sucker for honor, and there are elements of a good mystery here as well.

Word count: 1050

You’re a Cardassian! Intelligent and devious,
you’re a bit of an enigma to those around you
and scientific to the core.

What Star Trek Race Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Word count: 750

I used to play this game of matching Trek characters across series: Chakotay was equivalent to Riker, Spock to Data, etc. If I tried, I could match up the whole cast of one show with another. This wasn’t just a recreational activity - it also said something about the function each character would have in a story, and was thus related to the find-and-replace theory of badfic. (If you could find-and-replace Mulder and Scully with Jack and Sam, the fic was probably badfic.)

So, when I go looking for Tom Paris in all the wrong places, it’s because I need someone to do what he does in my Voyager fic. Xander was a kind of Tom Paris, and I’m thinking that Colonel O’Neill himself is the Tom Paris of Stargate. (It’s clear that Teal’c is Anya/T’Pol/Spock/Data/Odo/Seven.) I would have expected a more minor character to play Tom - I can imagine that it’s difficult (from a plot perspective) having your male romantic lead also being your rebellious smart-aleck outsider - who is going to snark about his non-relationship with the female lead, if he’s busy angsting over it? You lose a bit of elbow-room that way, but there are also benefits to not having so many separate characters to juggle.