Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I’ve been reading SelDear’s Veils of Reality series as part of my final push to vote in the Sam and Jack Awards by the Wednesday deadline. I’m a sucker for a good AU, or even a bad AU - twelve AU’s in one series is a bonus.

The muse gets hyperactive in the presence of AU’s, and now she has Yet Another Story Idea - one which requires the quantum mirror. I’m not sure what became of it; I was thinking about re-watching “Point of View” to find out, but if there’s another episode involving it, do tell.

Sometimes I wonder why people write in the real universe, when there are so many more possibilities open to you in AU’s. Somehow the AU’s seem more canonical than in Trek - I doubt I’d have an audience for an entire opus of AU Treks, but I think I could get away with never writing a non-AU Stargate story.

I thought I’d posted all my random leftover filks to ASC, but at 11:48 p.m., I noticed one last filk in my UFO (unfinished object) folder. It was Yesterday, When I Was New, and it needed work. But after my 24-hour filk-a-thon to finish The Sound of Borgness, twelve minutes seemed like more than enough to polish up one nearly complete filk. I posted it at 11:59 p.m., just in time for the awards deadline.

I posted a few other filks: a slightly altered version of Killing Me Softly, the old standard I Fought the Borg, and what I considered to be the two strongest filks from The Delta Quadrant’s Greatest Hits / Borgstory: “A Ship with No Plan” and “Borg Transwarp Highway.”

Here’s a draft of The Sound of Borgness. The final version will be posted this weekend at the URL indicated and ASC. The first two filks aren’t my best work, but don’t let them discourage you. It only gets funnier as you go along. Headers are here, the whole shebang is in the full entry.

Title: The Sound of Borgness
Author: Jemima
Contact: webmaster of jemimap.cjb.net
Series: VOY
Rating: PG for implied monkey sex
Codes: C/7, Icheb/Naomi, Mezoti, Azan, Rebi, Borg baby, filk
Summary: Filk of the musical “The Sound of Music”,
starring Seven of Nine as Fraulein Maria.
Archive: ASC only, but feel free to link to
http://jemimap.ficml.org/voy/filk/borgness.html

Disclaimer: This parody of Rogers and Hammerstein musical “The Sound
of Music” is protected as such by the copyright laws of
the United States of America.

Notes: Azan and Rebi were the Borg boys, Mezoti was the girl.
Thanks to T’Other Liz, KC, Kelly, and Seema for rhymes and
adjectives, one-syllable nouns, and kiss-off idioms.
The monkey sex is all Seema’s fault.

Date: January, 2004

Cast of characters:
Maria - Seven of Nine
Captain von Trapp - Chakotay
Mother Abbess - Borg Queen / Neelix
Nuns - drones
Rolf - Icheb
Liesl - Naomi
The Children - the Borg children (Icheb, Mezoti, Azan, Rebi, Borg baby)

Non-singing roles, for reference:
The Baroness - Janeway
Uncle Max - Tuvok

List of filks:
The Sound of Borgness (The Sound of Music)
Drone Seven (Maria)
Borg Perfection (I Have Confidence In Me)
Our Favorite Things (My Favorite Things)
“I” Not “We” (Do-Re-Mi)
Sixish Looking Elevenish (Sixteen Going on Seventeen)
The Lonely XO (The Lonely Goatherd)
So Long, Bug Off (So Long, Farewell)
Play Ev’ry Organ (Climb Ev’ry Mountain)
Something Tight (Something Good)
Voyager (Edelweiss)

(more…)

I wasn’t planning to do the DVD commentary meme, because it seemed
like way too much work considering that nobody really cares
(Bitter!Jack the Muse is sitting on my shoulder, playing a tiny violin
for me right now). But href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/mandysbitch/100150.html">CGB’s
MiSTing highly amused me, and Seema requested a commentary on “The Lamne’rau” or “The Museum.” I went with the shorter story.

Whenever I get ftp access back, I’ll put this up on its own web page (and I’ll get the new SG drabble up), but for the moment, the body of the story is going in the extended entry field (the MT equivalent of a cut). First, my commentary on the ASC headers of the story:

Title: The Lamne’rau

Hold it right there! The majority of effort on this fic went into the title. I spent hours combing through on-line Romulan dictionaries, trying to come up with a good Romulan term for “Borg.” (The precise derivation comes up in the story.) It’s disturbing how much time I devote to tiny details nobody is ever going to notice.

Author: Jemima
Contact: jemimap@crosswinds.net

That email address is long dead, but nobody sends fb anyway. At least this way I can pretend that the reams of fanmail bounced.

Series: VOY
Rating: PG for assimilation
Codes: 7

Obviously, this story dates from my Borg period.

Summary: Seven’s brief childhood, as glimpsed in “Dark Frontier”,
“The Raven”, “Author, Author” and other episodes.
Preliminary to Tertiary, a life of Seven of Nine.

And I really meant to write it. I had
big plans, involving psychobabble and a cool AQ frame story. The best
laid plans of muse and man… I have other fragments of Tertiary
floating around in my UFO folder, but none are in any shape to post.

Archive: ASC only, but feel free to link to
http://jemimap.freeshell.org/voy/fic/tertiary/lamnerau.html

There isn’t room in this DVD to insert
my tirade against redundant archives and fic taxes.

Disclaimer: Paramount owns their bodies, but their souls are free.

This is a standard Jemima disclaimer in which I don’t disclaim anything because I haven’t done anything wrong. If you disagree, you’re welcome to sue me.

Date: January 2003

In the fine tradition of January fic-dumps to ASC, I dusted this baby off and posted it. It was written much earlier as part of Tertiary. I don’t know the exact dates, but I do know I started Tertiary in late June, 2001 and worked on it on and off through August of 2002. As far as I can tell from the changelog (I track my fic using RCS), a lot of The Lamne’rau was written in February and May of 2002.

Note: This story won first place in the Voyager Featuring Seven
of Nine category of the 2002 ASC Awards.

Something missing from this note is appropriate thanks to members of the C/7 list for help with a timeline of Seven’s childhood.

(more…)

Fossil of the day: a 428 million year old millipede in Scotland

I’ve finally written a Stargate filk. You can find One Brass Horus in the SG-1 section. Here’s a preview to see if you know the original, “One Tin Soldier”:

I’ve also put up The Perfect Setup, the sequel to The Universe Survival Guide. I don’t think it compares to the original, but there were demands for a sequel and Bitter!Jack The Muse is easily influenced in his current state.

In my day tirade of the day: a Slashdot thread on silver paste

The results are up for the JCFicHaven Decathlon, a new fanfic contest that’s not entirely unlike AAA. I rooted through all the award pages to find out what B’Elanna the Canon Correcting Muse (Retired) had won, and put her awards up on her award shelf. Jade’s awards are also up on her index page and relevant stories.

I can’t speak to the results, since I didn’t actually vote in the contest. B’Elanna the Muse won the silver medal overall, but every story of hers that placed was written at least three years ago, except for one drabble that’s only two years old. Apparently Lurking in particular was new to a lot of readers. I always liked that one myself.

I knew I hadn’t written much lately, but it was surprising nonetheless to look back on how much I wrote circa January 2001, and how little since Voyager jumped the big Borg shark in the sky. It makes me wonder how long this Stargate thing will last before I jump my own personal shark.

Well, back to the Ice Planet fic…

SCO quote of the day: “I can’t believe that SCO is interested in opening a new legal front. It’s a little like Napoleon invading Russia. At some point, you are overextended. Then it’s winter. Then it’s over.” –GrokLaw
Mars attack of the day: OMG! They Killed Spirit!
RSS link of the day: iTunes Store RSS generator

In hindsight it was obvious. I think Jerie was the first to suggest that Jack was my Stargate muse, but I knew it couldn’t be just any Jack. It had to be a particular Jack, like the AU General O’Neill, or mini-Jack. Today I realized that my Jack muse is Bitter!Jack:

O’NEILL: What are you doing here?
CARTER: It turns out we made a mistake. A big one.
O’NEILL: Which one? We made a few.
CARTER: Our alliance with the Aschen.
O’NEILL: Oh that. Not working out, is it? Gosh, I wish I’d seen that coming. Oh, wait… I did see that coming.

In honor of Bitter!Jack, I’ve put up my “2010″ drabble, I do not love you Thursday, and an only marginally longer story along the same lines, And why you come complaining. Both titles are from “Thursday” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and the poem is included with the longer story for your convenience.

Sports stat of the day: The Mars Scorecard, though it gives the home team way too much credit for partly-functional landers
Warning: Second-hand spoilers for Stargate season 7, first-hand for S4 “Beneath the Surface”

Jerie has been blogging about the Real Sam again. Now I don’t object to the hussy at all, but I do object to the idea that the Sam we usually see is some fake Sam, or Sam with the military mask on, or anything less than real 100% Sam.

To me, the Sam doing the hussy with The Boyfriend is no more or less the Real Sam than the Sam mowing down Jaffa on alien planets. If you want to see Sam with a boyfriend, Jack or not, that’s fine, but that’s just a little piece of Sam. Sam had no boyfriend for six and a half years, and yet she was a character who smiled and frowned and felt plenty of emotions.

I admit that Sam is an enigma and a hard character to write, not unlike Buffy. But that enigma includes her previous boyfriend episodes. I didn’t find that Narim or Martouf or even Jonah cleared up the Sam question, so I doubt that The Boyfriend will do for me what he’s done for Jerie. We did have a fun chat about it a while back, though, in which I told her:

Open your eyes!
You are looking at Sam! The real Sam!
Not the mask of Sam - that’s Sam! The one on the show!
The Person On The Show Is The Real Sam.
She is not a front for some fanon Sam. Look at Sam! She’s right there on the screen! I see Sam’s feelings all the time.
I don’t know which ones she’s hiding.

Jack can’t figure her out when they’re having a conversation about it. I mean Jonah -
Jonah was all nervous about his feelings
because he didn’t know,
because even with free-the-brain-stamp,
she was still being Buddy Thera instead of kissyface Thera.
He was nervous about telling her about his feelings,
he said so - he made some disclaimer,
like would it be okay to tell you I remember feelings?
Why would he have to ask that if he knew?

But all along it’s totally obvious that Jonah is nuts about Thera.
She’s kind of fond of him,
the way Sam is kind of fond of Jack.
But it isn’t obvious that it’s more to her.
Even when he drags it out of her,
he gets some one word answer like “I’m glad”
- open profession of undying love it isn’t.
And [Thera putting her head on Jonah’s shoulder] may constitute marriage on some planets,
but in my book it’s just cute and says I’m kind of fond of you Jonah,
but who knows how fond?

Thera is the unhidden Sam.
In fact, Thera acts very much like the real Sam, showing us that the real Sam isn’t hiding her feelings, any more than Thera is.
That is Sam. Sam is Sam.
One must accept the Sam. Visualize the sound of one Sam clapping…
Do not look for other, inner Sams until you understand the outer Sam.
For this is TV, and the outer surface is all you get.

So you see I’m kind of zen about the whole Sam thing.

Desktop icons of the day: Snow

There’s an ENT-bashing party going on at Slashdot over the recent rumors that ENT will be cancelled soon. It amazes me that something so much worse than Stargate is allowed on the air. It doesn’t surprise me that there’s fanfic, though - I’ve always thought that the worse the show, the better the fanfic potential. VOY was a mediocre show that inspired reams of fanfic.

But write it fast, you ENT writers, because the axe is about to strike…

Warning: Spoilers for 2010

I watched 2010 today and was shocked by Sam’s hussy marriage. Since the episode appears in so many spoiler warnings for Sam/Jack fic, I naturally assumed it was shippy. Once I accepted it for the evil anti-ship episode it was, however, I got into it and thought it was an excellent ep. Nice sets, nice lighting, nice Bitter Jack (with a side order of I Told You So), nice to see the ladies dressed up in nice clothes (even if the species has no place to go) - and of course the total annihilation of the human race, with bonus death scenes for all Our Heroes. (Of course Janet and Hammond had to die off-screen. They deserve a pair of nice death fics. Jerie?)

And that’s my hussy! Way to marry a genocidal maniac - maybe someone at Showtime wanted to one-up “Counterpoint.” He’s sweet and loving and he must have realized why you couldn’t get pregnant. I’d love to go on more about the episode, but I feel a drabble coming on.