Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I took too long writing my ASC Awards acceptance speeches, so I don’t have time to blog about Khan. Soon, though, I will discuss the Superior Ficcability.

Sock of the day: Harry Kim

I haven’t been entering my votes in the ASC Awards for the last few days, but I have them all typed up in a file. I have only two Voyager categories left to read: J/C and Glory Days. Glory Days isn’t an official awards category; I just saved all the stories from the series (except for one Seven fic) to read together. Toward that end, I converted the whole series to PDF. My special, paper-saving version is only 82 pages, but I also looked at the double-spaced version, which was 344 pages and 100,000 words. Now I have a printed copy thanks to the wonders of LaTeX and duplexing laser printers. It had better pass the three paragraph test…

[The three paragraph test: read the first three paragraphs of the story. If it hasn’t caught your interest by the end of paragraph three, close the window and move on to the next story.]

Sock drawer of the day: the Enterprise NX-01 Mess Hall

I’m finally done commenting on TNG stories in the ASC Awards. VOY voting is already open and I have a schedule to read everything by next weekend, though I probably won’t have time to do Paris/Torres and the VS7.5 stories. I was worried about AAA, but the deadline isn’t until April 25th so I’ve put it off yet again.

So far I’ve gotten one comment back from the VOY voting - I’m on digest on the Awards mailing list, so I haven’t seen most of this weekend’s voting frenzy yet. That one comment was great to find in my inbox, though. I’d say more people should run feedback awards, but they’re a writer’s kind of award system. Most people have trouble writing feedback - the prospect of reading 250 Voyager stories in two weeks and then saying something intelligent about all the ones you liked is just too much for the average reader. The average reader doesn’t send feedback the first time, so it’s unlikely they’d do it months after the fact.

With all the Trek contests going on lately, technical issues are always coming up. How do you write an automated vote counter script? How do you track hits? How can you tell whether someone is a legitimate voter or a sock puppet? Or perhaps a sock platypus?

I say call a sock a sock - if it’s fuzzy like a sock and has those googly sewn-on eyeballs, odds are, it’s a sock. Stuff it back in the sock drawer with the other smelly underwear.

Not all socks are evil, thought - some are purely for entertainment value. Take, for example, the recent rash of Star Trek characters on LiveJournal: Kathryn Janeway,
Tom Paris and B’Elanna Torres, Seven of Nine, Deanna Troi, Kira Nerys, Captain Picard, the female changeling, and, of course, Q.

Filk of the day: “Temper[ature] of Revenge” by Tom Smith [after] Julia Ecklar is the ultimate Khan filk. Tune in to filk radio to hear such timeless lines as:

So find me a ship, Reliant will do,
Find me an anchovy covered in goo,
It will go in the ear of a young Russian jerk,
Who will send out a signal to James T. Kirk.

I’d been thinking of doing a Ceti Alpha V story long before “Not All At Once” led me to “Weeds” and got me thinking just how different my Khan would be from Rabble Rouser’s evil wolf out of Trek history. Khan is the Borg Queen of TOS - the villain who steals the show and comes back for encore face-offs with his nemesis Starfleet captain.

It’s one of the many ways in which VOY is closest to TOS in spirit. Captain Sisko had obscure, or at least muddy, antagonists, like Sloan, Kai Winn, and the Prophets themselves. Picard had Q, of all things. Q is cool and even has his own LiveJournal, but universe-destroying yet strangely attractive evil he’s not. He’s more of a milk-run nemesis. ENT, of course, is satisfied with picking on its own warped view of Vulcans, with a side of Suliban for muddy, mystery enemies. At least with TOS and VOY, you know who the bad guys are, that they want your lungs/ship/planet, and that they’re genuinely, enthusiastically bad.

Work has been a real drag lately, and I’ve also been doing some geeky stuff in my free time. The end result is that I’m too tired to blog. Instead, I’ll point you to the two TOS stories I read and voted for in the ASC Awards lately: Weeds by Rabble Rouser and the sequel Not All At Once by Djinn. They’re about Marla from the TOS episode “Space Seed,” with a little of The Wrath of Khan thrown in. If all TOS fic were about Khan, I’d have a new fandom on my hands. Fortunately, it takes only a paragraph or two of any fic involving Christine Chapel to send me running back to the Delta Quadrant.

Congratulations to Penny and Monkee for placing in Strange New Worlds VI. I thought they’d used up their amateur status last time, but three’s the limit. Ladies, you are now professional science fiction writers. You can even join the union if you’d like.

Weird science site of the day: Hole in the Water answers the unasked question, Why do people get sucked into the vortex of a sinking ship?

By the way, filk radio has changed over to holiday music - but not your average holiday music. So far, Santa has gotten arrested, and now the song is about why (and I quote) Christmas sucks. The Trekathon is over, but Trek is eternal.

While waiting for The Twilight Zone to come on last week I was subjected to part of an Enterprise episode clearly ripped off from the TOS classic, “Elaan of Troyius”. I understand that TNG also stole Elaan for “The Perfect Mate.” I never cared much for TNG, and ENT is too similar for my tastes, with its bland cast, milk-run diplomacy, and recycled TOS plots.

Nemesis spoiler space…

Don’t make me say I told you so.

Tonight, I saw a remake of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. I’m a sucker for a handsome, genetically-engineered genocidal maniac with a Captain Ahab complex. Joachim wasn’t nearly cute enough this time around, but the doomsday device was lovely, complete with the requisite unusual waveform and yet another new kind of Trek radiation. Is there a list of those (and the particles - oh, the particles!) anywhere? Best of all was when the semi-human first officer designate sacrificed himself to save the ship, conveniently leaving his katra behind.

Speaking of first officers, I have to ask: is there any character more universally hated in Trek than Will Riker? The audience groaned whenever he did anything (or anyone), and I can’t believe there was anyone there besides me grossed out simply because Troi belongs with Picard. (If you don’t believe me, go read Lori’s Captain and Counselor series.) That being said, it wasn’t an ensemble movie the way The Wrath of Khan was. Nemesis was about Picard, the Anti-Picard, Data, and the Emergency Backup Data (so Veronica dubbed him), with a touch of Geordi for technobabble and some beating up of Riker to satisfy everyone’s deep-seated urge to punch the idiot’s lights out.

All-in-all, it was an even-numbered Trek movie.

Word count: 1734

Seema sends huggles to all of Trek fandom for, essentially, not being ville fandom. I second that huggle, and raise her a List of What’s Right About Trekdom:

Trek has one central archive, Trekiverse. It may be a couple of years behind, but anything that’s missing can be looked up in Google Groups. There are a few minor archives as well, such as the ones at JuPiter Station, Voyager’s Delights and the J/C Index, but they’re mainly link lists. No one gets any status in Trek for running an archive, certainly not BNF status. Insufficient Reluctance is appreciated and occasionally even thanked, but never worshipped.

Trek has a newsgroup. You can follow alt.startrek.creative and never, ever have to join a mailing list. This has worked well for Lori, and, aside from the lists I own, I don’t follow anything but ASC. I get all the good fic that way, because anyone who writes well eventually ends up at ASC. Since no one owns the newsgroup, no one gets any status out of it. Since the newsgroup is the main forum, no one in Trek is a BNF because she controls a pivotal list. None of the lists are pivotal - they can all be ignored without impairing your fan experience. (In fact, it would probably improve it.)

Trek has no blogging culture to speak of. A few of us still write Trek and blog, too, but there is no serious blogging about Trek fandom itself. For example, Seema and Lori blog mainly about their Real Lives, and my blog leans heavily towards science fiction and technology. Liz is all HP, Christine is AWOL. When we meta it’s cross-fandom, because the meta and blog culture we’re exposed to is cross-fandom. There’s no blog-based fan-wankery in Trek worth commenting about, because the BNF’s don’t blog (Seema excepted). So while you can make a name for yourself in certain newer fandoms by picking arguments with people who are lower on the BNF totem pole than you are and rubbing elbows with the Higher Fans (or vice versa), in Trek nobody can hear you blog.

Trek has geeks. It’s not something that fan writers think about often, but I believe the geek contingent lends a certain tone to, say, TrekBBS, and that attitude leaks down to the fanfic level. The fact that there is a Trek fandom beyond fanficcers makes the fandom less inbred than in shows where the fandom, is, essentially, the fanfic contingent. It gives us a bigger audience, more potential writers, and a place to farm out people who can’t write but still want to be fans. To be Myers-Briggs about Trek geeks, they tend to be N’s rather than S’s, since S’s don’t care for science fiction. They know what a light year is. They believe in IDIC. They can fake the technobabble. They may even know how to carry on a rational argument.

Seema said “mostly rational,” and it’s true that Trek has a few sockpuppets who are a great source of amusement on ASC. Trek has a few backwaters in which people can build up a sort of localized BNFdom, but when they venture out into the Real World of Trekdom, nobody knows their names. Whining about contests or other fans or the way the series ended just doesn’t cut it out here. Trek fandom is fair: everyone can write whatever pairing or fanfix they want, everyone can post to ASC, and everyone gets a fair shot in the ASC Awards. Nobody is in control, and nobody’s opinion counts for more than anyone else’s. There’s nothing to gripe about. We’re living in Gene Roddenberry’s perfect future out here.

Trek does have a few vile and irrational fans who think they can raise their status in fandom by attacking other people, but the truth is, they can’t. This isn’t high school, where cutting the other children down and puffing yourself up makes you popular. Nobody cares who’s in your clique or mine. Trek fans are adults.

In Trek, it’s all about the show and the fic. If you have nothing interesting to contribute, nobody will listen to you. If you can’t write like Penny Proctor, you’ll never be a BNF. Those are the breaks. Other fandoms should be more like Trek, and it’s just their bad luck that they haven’t the geeks, the newsgroup, and the adults it takes to Be Like Us.

Word count: don’t ask

I was going through my email backlog (only 600 to go) when I came across a contest announcement for Winter Magic, a non-J/C winter-theme contest. You can submit up to two stories, previously published or not. The entry deadline is November 30th, a problem for us NaNoWriters. Maybe there will be an extension… (wink wink nudge nudge)

Still open for business is Die J/C Die, which also allows previously published fic and up to three entries. The theme is torpedoing the J/C relationship permanently, though you don’t actually have to do much along those lines in the story itself. The entry deadline is December 15th.

For J/P fans, there’s also TomKat 2002, the new incarnation of the Twelve Moons of JuPiter awards. The deadline is December 15th; the rules are too confusing to say exactly how many entries you can have. It’s anonymous, at least.

Note that it would be simple to write a story or two that fit the first two themes and therefore enter two contests. It would be only slightly more difficult to take a non-J/C work-in-progress and make it fit one of the above. Doing all three would be quite a challenge, since it would involve convincing the first two contest runners to post your story anonymously for you. I have a J/P idea that fits the bill nicely, but I don’t think I’m up for that much run-around.