Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

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…

Contest of the day: The Stargate SG-1 Fan Awards

The Awesome Author Awards are happening again. I wrote the KK to say I wasn’t entering because I’ve retired from Trek, but I have a few other reasons for not entering this year. I’m one of a handful of writers (Dakota, KJ, Sängerin, Sheri) who have entered in all three years, and it was my personal (not contest) policy to enter different stories every year. Last year, especially, I figured that I wouldn’t win or place but that the contest would be a way for people to see my new stories, since I don’t participate in mailing lists anymore. This year I have no new J/C stories to enter, so there’s no point to my entering on that account.

One reason so few other J/C writers have entered for three years running is that winners become ineligible. This policy is also used in the ASC Awards for the Alara Rogers (Best Author) award. It’s an approach that can bite you in the behind after a few years - I call it the last one to leave ASC turn out the lights and pick up the Alara Rogers award effect. It’s not so gratifying to win an award once the real competition has become disqualified or left the fandom entirely.

I know there are people who aren’t picky about how they get their awards, but I’m not one of them. I don’t want an award that I’m the last one left in the fandom to pick up - I’d rather just move on to fandoms that are still active enough to generate new competition. Moreover, even eligible authors still active in the fandom are avoiding AAA this year, compounding the last one out effect. I know of several writers who aren’t entering AAA this year because of unrelated incidents within KK (of which I have only second-hand knowledge), and others who won’t enter on suspicion that the contest itself is being rigged or abused in some way.

Personally, I don’t believe that there is any internal corruption of the contest in favor of KK members. In any contest, people will know certain authors and therefore be more familiar with their fic and more likely to vote for it, but this effect reaches beyond KK members. If there’s a big pro-KK slant to the winners, I’ve never noticed it. As for external attempts to cheat in AAA, I have no first-hand knowledge of it but from my perspective, such cheating has no visible effect - if person X places ahead of person Y because X cheated, but I don’t think either of them writes well, then for me the cheating is irrelevant.

To put it more simply, if I don’t like the fic of writer X but she has a hundred friends who love it, and if I don’t like Y either but she has a hundred friends who are willing to stuff the ballot box for her, how can I tell the difference? The friends of X are voting in good faith, and those of Y in bad faith, but if I don’t know either X or Y, to me it looks like two mediocre writers got the same number of votes.

So for me as a fringe member of the fandom, with nineteen days to go to my Trek retirement, the only standard I can apply to a contest is whether the best fic (in my opinion as a reader) wins. Fanfic contests are therefore almost always a disappointment to me, because the stories and writers I think are the best rarely win. That’s setting aside the fact that I don’t win, which is certainly a disincentive to entering contests but is not my complaint. I can always assume that my own fic is not as good as I think it is, but I’m not the only one not winning AAA.

When I vote in a contest, I look at every story in the contest (except NC-17 and slash), or if, like the ASC Awards, the contest is too big for that, I make sure to look at every story in the categories where I’m voting. I say look at rather than read because if a story is downright bad, or clearly worse than other stories I’ve already read in the category, I don’t finish it. As a consequence of this policy, I have looked at every PG story in AAA for the past three years. Because AAA is so huge, I had to keep detailed records of whom I was considering voting for. So I know exactly how far off the results are, in each case, from what I thought they would be.

For comparison, I’ll give the lists of who won in each year, and who I voted for. AAA placements are in order of winner, runner up, and honorable mentions. People equally ranked, in my opinion or as honorable mentions, get slashes between them. My rankings are determined from the number of categories I voted for them in, and ranking if there was ranking involved.

2001 AAA results: Shayenne, EJ, Cassatt/D Kent/KJ
Jemima’s ranking: EJ, Clare009, Shayenne, Lady Firebird, Karma, Alicia/Claudia/D Kent/KJ, Ammo/Sangerin/Turtlewoman

The first year was a big year, so I have a bunch of people in my list who got only a vote or two from me. EJ was far and away the best of the bunch, even better in 2001 than in the next when she won, but Shayenne is a good writer - I can’t complain that she won. I voted for two people off the Honorable Mention list, in only one category each. This was, by comparison, a good year. [I confused Dakota with D Kent at first - sorry about that.]

2002 AAA results: EJ, Brianna, Jemima/KJ/Sheri
Jemima’s ranking: EJ, Seema/Rocky, Monkee, Jade, JinnyW

In 2002, things began to get funky. EJ won, perhaps because she’s the kind of writer that crosses boundaries between what I like and what the general AAA voting population likes. Note, however, that I did not vote even once for any of the other people with Honorable Mentions (including myself). I did consider voting for Brianna in one category, but she didn’t quite make it. Most notably neglected in 2002 was Monkee, considering her fame in J/Cdom and abroad.

2003 AAA results: Brianna, MaquisKat, Kadi/KJ/Sylvia
Jemima’s ranking: Seema/Rocky, JinnyW, Jade/Caffey, Sylvia, Brianna/Diane/Morgan/Yael

This time I did vote for Brianna in one (and only one) category, as my third choice. Even Sylvia did better - she was my first choice in one category. Otherwise, I didn’t vote for the winners at all. The lists are nearly disjoint. I knew Seema and Rocky were doomed after the results of the previous year, but I’d at least hoped for a showing for JinnyW. No such luck.

None of this is intended to get down on Brianna. If you write something and other people enjoy it, that’s great. I don’t like a lot of the stories that make it into SNW, but the ability to sell your work, either literally or in terms of hits and feedback, is what counts. Writing to the market is more important than abstract literary qualities. As the man said,

“The public does not like bad literature. The public likes a certain kind of literature, and likes that kind even when it is bad better than another kind of literature even when it is good. Nor is this unreasonable; for the line between different types of literature is as real as the line between tears and laughter; and to tell people who can only get bad comedy that you have some first-class tragedy is as irrational as to offer a man who is shivering over weak, warm coffee a really superior sort of ice.” –G.K.Chesterton in “Charles Dickens”

So I have to conclude that AAA is not my market. They want coffee and I’m selling ice. All my favorite authors are also selling ice and losing along with me. ASC is my market. I don’t look at the ASC Awards results and think who voted for these people? I know who they were, I know what their feedback said, and I know they’re looking for what I’m looking for in fic.

And in nineteen short days when I retire from Trek, the Stargate SG-1 Fan Awards will be my market. Fortunately they’re by nomination, so there’ll be none of this considering whether or what to enter.

Writing link of the day: Tell ‘em You’re A Writer!
Trek obituary of the day: the actress who played Marla McGivers in “Space Seed”

I wasn’t going to mention this, but I was a semifinalist in the Writers of the Future this year. I get a nice certificate (it’s in the mail) and also a critique of my entry. The critique said my main character just observed everything and didn’t have much of a stake in the outcome - though the science was good. I just have to abuse the main character more next time.

The reason I mention it is that I’m taking it as a sign I should stop futzing around with fanfic and get serious about my writing. Like the man says, No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Thus, I’m retiring from writing Trek. I won’t take down the site, stop working on FicML, or otherwise flake out on my few fandom commitments. I can understand people thinking that I would, but I’ve never been the social butterfly fandom type so I don’t think a complete flounce is called for. But no new fic for you!

The truth is, my fanfic output started declining when I first started writing original fiction back in 2001. The end of Voyager and the failure of Enterprise to impress were only contributing factors. Stargate is fair game since it’s still on the air and it rarely takes up more than 100 words of my time, but I don’t expect to ever get back to the fic output I had when it was just me and VOY.

And I don’t want to. Fanfic hasn’t been the same fun since I started serving the other master. There’s always that feeling that I’m wasting time and ideas that would be better spent on my own universe. There’s a fic-stopping perfectionism that I didn’t have back in my J/C fluff days. And finally, there’s the fact that writing is no longer just a hobby. I don’t want to work at writing and then turn around and play at fanfic - that’s just too much typing. I want a hobby that’s just a hobby, like needlework, so I can rest my weary muse.

Klingon of the day: Omar

Seema and I have been discussing retirement from writing Trek for a while now. Last night we made a joint resolution to retire on January 1st. I know she’ll never keep it, but let me be the first one to back out - I’m too busy at the moment to retire on the 1st. Retirement involves wrapping up or tossing out a bunch of ufo’s (unfinished objects), most notably Colony, so I’m going to have to retire sometime between mid-January and mid-February.

In fact, I’m too busy to blog why I’m retiring or to chat. I’ll try to explain tomorrow.

Jade wanted me to show off my hard screenshot work, so here’s the Khan of the Day at a convenient 100×100 size (click to enlarge, download if you want it):

In her blog, Seema praised DS9 for “friction, continuity, war and angst.” DS9 was the least popular of all Trek series before ENT came along to wrestle for the title. Trek fans clearly don’t want continuity or angst - not because cohesion and plot are bad things in and of themselves, but because they’re bad television.

Television has to be episodic to succeed. You can do it without the annoying reset button - Stargate doesn’t suffer from the reset follies that Voyager did - but you can’t show a five year movie in one-hour bits and expect the audience to stick with you. Yes, rabid fangirls will come along for the ride, but rabid fangirls are not a large enough demographic for network TV.

A series is something you can drop into at any point, see an episode, understand more or less what’s going on, and want to see more. A serial requires you to go in order or you’ll miss, not the subtle details, but the main meaning of what’s going on. You see one episode and you’re hopelessly lost; you know you don’t have the time for this. You walk away.

The serial vs. series problem affects virtual seasons as well. I’m not the only one who had the best intentions of reading VS7.5 but fell off the wagon early on. It’s not always clear at the outset which one you’re dealing with - you might think Lois McMaster Bujold is a serial writer, but she writes series. For all I know, VS7.5 is a series - but if it smells like a serial, I run away.

It doesn’t matter whether serials are superior to series on some literary or fan-fodder basis. I’m willing to admit, sight-mostly-unseen, that Babylon 5 and DS9 were far, far better shows than Stargate or Voyager. It’s a purely economic decision on my part to watch the latter. I can miss entire seasons of VOY or SG-1 (and believe me, I have) and still follow the fandom and write fic. The barrier to entry on a show that has five-year plots, or even one-year plots, is too high for me.

Word count: 1940

Several relatives got to meet the mac for Thanksgiving. Mandy, 8, was the most impressed; her fingerprints are all over the screen. As I was demonstrating QuickTime, I discovered that none of my cousin’s children had ever seen Star Trek. Considering that I was already addicted to TOS by that age, I was shocked by their abysmal ignorance.

I could tell that most of them were not sci-fi people, but Mandy was fascinated by Khan. She fast-forwarded through everything else, but she wanted to see the sleeping man wake up.

Mandy has definite fandom potential.

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.

ASC, Enterprise and Beyond, and the LiveJournal set are all aflutter about the ENT problem. I don’t mean the problem that Enterprise is courting cancellation or even that it’s managed to alienate so much of the huge Trek fanbase. I mean the apparent problem that some unspecified number of ENT writers don’t post to ASC. Here’s what I posted to ASC on this thread:

To be more explicit about it, I know the vast majority of J/C writers either never post to ASC, or have posted once or twice and then given up. And ASC is better for it - that quantity of fic would be overwhelming, especially during the awards.

Most of the alternatives to the newsgroup have a lower barrier to entry, which results in either badfic or too much fic - fanfiction.net is a good example of both. In Real Life, publishers and editors are the barriers to entry that guarantee a certain quality to the fic. Online, the barriers are woefully low and getting lower all the time. Newsgroups aren’t hard to use, but you do have to be geeky or persistent enough to figure out how to post - the first barrier.

Also newsgroups are completely public and unowned, so no one is responsible for coddling bad writers or preventing flames. This lack of feedback for mediocre fic is the second, and probably bigger, barrier to entry. It means that people who are cranking it out for the feedback have little incentive to post to ASC. It’s not exactly an editorial process, but nevertheless the result is that the best Trek fic has all been posted to ASC at one time or another.

Those of us who benefit from these barriers to entry are sometimes too willing to try to break them down for new people. But the truth is, not wanting to post to ASC already says something about a Trek writer, whether of ENT or any other series - and I hear it, even when they don’t say it aloud. I’m not crying over fic that never made it to ASC.

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: 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?