Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Word count: 106

I don’t think this was the first time someone emailed me about Species 2461, Icheb’s alleged species as listed at the Startrek.com library. I don’t think Startrek.com had a Borg Species List back when I first compiled my version, and I don’t particularly trust them not to make up species that were never actually mentioned in canon. Nevertheless, I have added 2461 to the list with an appropriate disclaimer.

It’s not canon unless it happened on-screen. Not that I’ve watched all those episodes - I just searched through Jim’s Reviews for the word “species.” That’s how I managed to get the facts of Species 571 wrong - I had it listed as Lansor’s species from “Survival Instinct” but just now I was going over Jim’s Review of the episode with a fine-tooth comb for an AU I’m writing, and figured out that P’Chan was 4 of 9 and Lansor 2 of 9. (Lansor’s species isn’t named or numbered at all, that I can tell.) Marika is the important member of the trio, but I think I should make an effort to add some character to the two I couldn’t tell apart.

So I stopped at 100 words, an order of magnitude short of my daily goal, to figure out who belonged to Species 571, that it wasn’t Lansor, and then to correct the Borg Species List and to upload the corrected version to the old host and here. I’d forgotten just how time-consuming story research can be. I already have doubts this story will be done in time for the contest deadline.

Word count: zero

Seema wrote Behind every good writer is an absolutely awesome and patient beta reader. Now this is so clearly untrue that it won’t take long to debunk. Behind some writers there are five or ten unexceptional and impatient betas. Other writers have no betas at all.

“Beta reader” is a strange term for an editor. Like all weird fandom terms, it covers a huge range of activities and attitudes. I suspect its origin is “beta tester,” that is, someone who tries out the beta version of new software and (ideally) reports any glaring bugs. That’s what I want out of a beta reader - I’m not looking for awesomeness or patience or heavy participation in the writing (programming) process.

I’m not against editing, but I think being a good writer means, among other things, being a good editor. A second pair of eyes is always handy but shouldn’t be an excuse for the first pair’s laziness, especially among people who for whatever reason are trying to improve their own writing skills.

Word count: 637

Filk:   Holodeck Hero
Author:  Jemima
Original:  "Paperback Writer" by John Lennon and Paul McCartney

Dear Captain Janeway, where've you been all Night?
I know it's dark out there; do you feel alright?
The crew's getting worried - we all need a break
I was bored to death, so I programmed me a holodeck hero
Holodeck hero

It's a silly program 'bout a silly man
And my Klingon babe doesn't understand
My best friend's bucking for a second pip
It's a long long trip so he helps me be a holodeck hero
Holodeck hero

Holodeck hero

It's got twenty chapters, give or take a few
I can whip up more in a shift or two -
See the Mines of Merc'ry, visit Planet X,
Don a rocketpack - don't you want to be a holodeck hero?
Holodeck hero

When you're feeling naughty you can play the Queen
She's the campiest vixen that you've ever seen
If there's any trouble use the pheremones,
Save the universe - you were born to be a holodeck hero
Holodeck hero

Holodeck hero

Holodeck hero, holodeck hero
Holodeck hero, holodeck hero
Holodeck hero, holodeck hero
Holodeck hero, holodeck hero

[fade out]

Word count: 1315

The following is an email I sent to the C/7 list in regards to the perennial “Did Seven ruin Voyager?” controversy. An abbreviated version of the argument below can be found in the comment I made in Rocky’s Seven of Mine LJ entry last month on the same topic.

People who pin the changes in Voyager on Seven’s appearance are missing the point. The show had problems at least a season before Seven, and I would say two seasons beforehand. As I recall, the actor playing Kes quit and Seven was a replacement. That a replacement for a relatively minor character ended up taking over the show is a sign that there was a huge vacuum in the show waiting to be filled, and Seven filled it.

An ensemble is not enough to carry a sci-fi show, and it wasn’t carrying Voyager. While ensembles are nice in principle, they can lead to an unfocused feeling where all the characters blend into one another, have no disagreements or tensions, and are, to put it bluntly, boring. TNG was terribly dull at the character level because of the shiny happy Starfleet ensemble - the most interesting thing those people did together was play poker. TOS, on the other hand, never had this problem, partly because of Spock and McCoy’s constant bickering and partly because it was never an ensemble show. TOS was about Kirk, Spock and McCoy. By season 3, Voyager wasn’t about anything and didn’t have the novelty value of TNG to keep people interested. There were better sci-fi shows around.

I think people overrate the value of an ensemble cast, or to be more precise, they use the “ensemble” canard because they can’t pin down what really went wrong with the show. If Voyager had suddenly become focused on Janeway, Chakotay and the EMH, the most vocal critics (whether J/C or pure Chakotay fans) would never have complained that, say, Tuvok was getting shafted. Chakotay was a pivotal character, and not only for the J/Cer’s romantic purposes. In a sense, Seven of Nine did not replace either Kes or the mystical ensemble - she replaced Chakotay.

Voyager’s early momentum was shot not when Seven showed up, but when the conflict between Starfleet and Maquis (and Tom) was brushed off. After that there was no internal conflict in the crew to carry between shows, and the nature of the premise kept external conflicts (say, Picard or Kirk vs. the Starfleet brass) from recurring. Chakotay was the most affected by this change because as the leader of the Maquis he was the one who either personified or resolved the resulting conflicts. The canon Paris/Torres relationship was a bad idea (”Blood Fever”, third season) because it defused yet another important area of conflict, as did “Resolutions” for the Janeway/Chakotay non-relationship.

When Seven appeared, she took up Chakotay’s dropped mantle of being the show’s “contrary.” She was outside of Starfleet like the Maquis had been, she had an annoying personality like Spock’s, and she had to learn about humanity like Data, while being tempted to go back to her own people like Odo. She filled a vacuum. If the Maquis issues hadn’t been dropped, then the show could have gone back and forth between other conflicts and Seven-based conflicts, maintaining the ensemble illusion. Instead, it rode on Seven for some time until new conflicts could be created. Demoting Tom was a good idea of which little was ever made, since it had no effect on his duties or his painfully dull relationship with B’Elanna. The EMH’s new, even more annoying personality was a better move for the writers. He became the character you loved to hate, whereas pre-Seven he had been the adorable curmudgeon.

Now it’s possible the Maquis conflict was doomed from the start, since it was political and Trek is a sci-fi show. The writers weren’t up for producing DS9 in the Delta Quadrant, but at least they could have kept up the Starfleet/Maquis banter to the Spock/McCoy level. In fact, as the real conflict subsided, joking about it was likely to increase in such a community. Instead, the writers dropped a major premise of the show, leaving it drifting in search of the Borg.

I sympathize with fans who mourn the old Voyager, but not because of the ideal of an ensemble or some promising pairing (J/C, J/P, C/T, P/Kes, etc.) that never got off the ground. I like J/P and I like ensembles but I like Chakotay in leather and Tom in the brig more, and I’m not the only one. The Maquis that should have been are still popular in fanfic, from Talking Stick/Circle to MJB’s Revolution to various AU J/C fics. One of the big disadvantages of C/7 being canon is that the leather-clad Maquis Chakotay doesn’t show up nearly often enough in C/7 fic.

Consider it a challenge: What if Seven of Nine had met the early Chakotay?

Word count: 1033

I know I’m a few years late for the clue train here, but I just now realized that there were never any angels on Buffy. There were a few good witches, painfully innocent monks, and evil misunderstood gypsies, but the good guys were never fully supernatural. Even the gods were bad guys.

It’s a malevolent view of the universe that identifies all supernatural power with evil and simultaneously restricts all goodness to humanity. (Oz, Angel and Spike are all partly human.) The constant supernatural malevolence makes Buffy a horror show, even though nothing is ever particularly scary.

The difference between horror and fantasy, then, is Elves - the good counterparts to misunderstood evil Orcs. Buffy could have used a few angels on her side; it would have saved her a lot of angst. But then, I get the feeling angst was the point - the only angel was the Angel of Angst.

The most striking piece of advice in Ayn Rand’s The Art of Fiction wasn’t the news about the muse - although I’d never formulated it quite that way to myself, the previous entry does more or less reflect my relations with the elusive muse. Plot is another matter altogether. Though (or perhaps because) I share Ayn Rand’s belief in the central importance of plot, I’ve lost many a bright and promising story to the blight of sudden plot failure. Now I know why:

So far, I’ve had as little success thinking of the climax ahead of time as I’ve had trying to wade out of the mire of an unplanned plot, yet I still feel that this piece of advice is the secret to finishing my pile of abandoned stories. I must pester the muse with my plot problems until she comes up with a suitable climax.

Seema posted an interesting quotation from The Life of Pi. Here’s the crux of the quote:

Your theme is good, as are your sentences. Your characters are so ruddy with life they practically need birth certificates. The plot you’ve mapped out for them is grand, simple and gripping. You’ve done your research, gathering the facts — historical, social, climatic, culinary — that will give your story its feel of authenticity. The dialogue zips along, crackling with tension. The descriptions burst with colour, contrast and telling detail. Really, your story can only be great. But it all adds up to nothing. In spite of the obvious, shining promise of it, there comes a moment when you realize that the whisper that has been perstering you all along from the back of your mind is speaking the flat, awful truth: it won’t work. An element is missing, that spark that brings to life a real story, regardless of whether the history or the food is right. Your story is emotionally dead, that’s the crux of it.

My contention is that the above situation is impossible. If you have the right theme, plot, dialogue, description, characters, and style, then you have a story. Nothing is missing. Writing isn’t magic.

If, on the other hand, your story doesn’t gell, then you have to conclude that one of the parts has gone astray - say, the plot doesn’t fit the theme or the dialogue doesn’t fit the characters. In particular, a story that’s emotionally dead must have either dull characters, an uninspiring theme, or leaden prose.

I’ll combat the depressing quote above with an inspirational Ayn Rand quote from The Art of Fiction. I was pleasantly surprised by her views on the muse: she believes in it and that it is the subconscious, but she also claims that the muse can be influenced, primed, and eventually forced to produce that elusive spark. Here is how to do it:

For the purposes of this meme, a story’s theme is an abstract idea about which any story might have been written and which happens to come through in this particular story’s plot. A theme doesn’t have to be emotional (”the sorrows of star-crossed love”); it could be concrete (”life among the Borg”). You should be able to say how the plot reflects the theme, but the plot itself should not show up in the theme.

I’m assuming most fanfic writers are like me - that they don’t start writing with a theme in mind, and perhaps never stop to think about what the theme of their story was. I usually start with some kind of interesting sci-fi situation, not even a full plot, and write the beginning before I know how things will turn out. This approach has generated several incomplete Voyager stories, and far more corpses of original stories. It had to go.

Now I’ve repented of my unstructured ways and in the future I plan to think about both a detailed plot and a theme before plunging head-first into a story. The first two tales to which I’m applying this new method are The Wrong Novel and (my rewrite of) Colony. I haven’t quite figured out what the theme is of Colony, though I have decided that the necessary subplot will involve Starfleet. Previously I had vague ideas about using the Borg, who we all know are the last refuge of hack Trek writers everywhere (but especially at Paramount).

Being stumped for the theme of Colony, I started thinking about some of my other stories and assigning them themes. This sport (which I originally thought to name “Let’s Play English Class”) can be applied to other people’s stories, too, but I’ll stick to a few of my more popular stories for the moment. I list the theme first, with a bit of how the plot brings it out. It’s all made up off the top of my head, just like I used to do in English class.

The Dance (Tunkai): “the quest for an ideal”

At first the crew believe they’re taking up a hobby for Seven’s sake, but Seven is incapable of treating anything that lightly (the ideal). Likewise, Chakotay’s anthropological interest in Tunkai becomes more than just a hobby (the quest), and turns him into the local authority on the matter. Tom gets involved because he does not want to lose B’Elanna to the ideal; he has no personal stake in the quest until he stumbles (pardon the pun) across another ideal which he finds equally threatening. At that point he resolves to undermine Tunkai, with mixed success.

At a couple of other turning points in the story, one early on and one at the climax, someone says “This is not our version of Tunkai.” These statements concern allegiance to the ideal, something which Seven and Chakotay are concerned to maintain, Tom to undermine, and the Captain to conceal because she has an overriding ideal in Starfleet protocol. The ideal is achieved for one hour at the climax, but because of its new nature (and Starfleet protocol) it cannot be reproduced. The conflict between Tom and the ideal is thus resolved.

The Museum: “the conflict between duty and mercy”

I was surprised when the idea of mercy came out in resolution, because there are very few cases in the series where mercy wins. In “Choose Life,” Chakotay talks Janeway out of her clear duty not to reproduce (making this the only light story in the series, and the least popular), but in “Mirror, Mirror,” Chakotay is as frustratingly duty-bound not to get involved with Janeway as she has been with him in the real timeline. “Home Front” and “Logic Dictates” are narrow escapes from the implacable human machinery (duty) of Section 31; in “Once More Unto the Breach,” Tuvok doesn’t escape it. “To Perish in that Howling Infinite,” “Ambassador,” “Mushroom Soup,” and “Your Wish is My Command” show Seven and various Maquis acting as they might have had they been more dutiful drones or terrorists, respectively.

“The Museum” is a series with a unifying subplot. The wild, dark, or in some cases (say, “Endgame”) ludicrous events of the timelines affect the “real” crew, so that Janeway feels them drifting apart from her. In most cases they feel simple survivor’s guilt because real life is already better (more merciful) than the alternatives seen, but Janeway and especially Tuvok, the only two serious advocates of duty, are influenced by their milder selves in the direction of mercy.

The Lamne’rau: “the offspring of scientific hubris”

I mean hubris in the sense of reckless passion rather than excessive pride (though Magnus has some of the latter, too). The Hansens are too curious for their own good, and their unhealthy interests are reflected in their daughter. They are carelessly ignorant of the true danger posed by the Collective, but the reader is not; this contrast, rather than the actual events of the story, makes for most of the chilling effect (or so people tell me). This story began as a simple fanfix of some bad stardates in Seven’s childhood, but the final result can be summed up by a line of hers from one of my filks: “He who seeks out the Borg the Borg find.”

It’s been quite a while since I read any Jane Austen fanfic, but a friend of mine lent me Mrs. Darcy’s Daughters by Elizabeth Aston. When you write in a post-copyright fandom, you can sell your fanfic just like Real Fiction. I’d love to write some Barsoom fanfic and get paid for the pleasure.

Mrs. Darcy’s Daughters is high on plot and low on atmosphere, not unlike the Jane Austen fanfic I used to read. The Darcys have gone off to Constantinople, leaving their young sons at Pemberley and their five daughters in London for the season. These daughters bear an uncanny resemblance to Mrs. Bennet’s troublesome brood, with one telling exception - there is no equivalent of Jane.

Two daughters are saucy, one preachy, two flirty. Our Lizzy-equivalent survives her requisite crush upon an unusual Wickham-equivalent, then manages to get into an Elinor-style bind with her cousin’s fiance. Yet nowhere do you see the stoicism that marks true Austen heroines. Instead, the author goes out of her way to point out the amoral nature of society’s restrictions. In Pride and Prejudice, blame for the waywardness of the younger Bennet daughters is attributed to the unequal marriage of their parents, but no explanation is ever given as to how Mrs. Darcy’s Daughters turned out so poorly.

Since true Austenfic revolves around issues of character, it is strange to find the five sisters unchanged in the end, except for the odd marriage or two (or three). Fanfic can be literary but in this case, despite the fancy trade-paperback binding, it isn’t.

Veronica makes a mean blue margarita, so the following should be taken with a rim of salt…

Buffy’s cookie-dough speech happened to touch on a pet peeve of mine. It’s not so much a psychobabble peeve as a characterization peeve - that is, of course I believe that people mature over time, but I don’t believe that people look at their own maturation process from the outside. Buffy can be cookie dough, but she cannot conceive of herself as cookie dough.

I’m going to make a wild guess that most of my readers have been twenty-three (sixteen plus seven) in the past, and that when they were twenty-three they thought of themselves as complete human beings, capable of saying which dead vamp they were in love with without further “baking.” It’s one thing to claim immaturity as a cop-out - the classic “I need time” which really means “go away now” - but it’s inhuman to claim immaturity as a real protest.

The integrity of the individual at any age is an aspect of human dignity that is quite frequently lacking in badfic, but rarely lacking in real, live people. The proper reaction to someone who says they’ll know how they feel ten years from now is disgust, not respect. How you’ll feel in ten years is another issue entirely - everyone does feel something now, and ought to be able to express it in word, if not in deed.