Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Ok, I’ve succumbed to the infectious first lines
meme, but only so far as to post some first lines from my
stories. The first set are what was intended by the meme; the rest
are there for fun. Feel free to fic with any of them.

Generic first lines:

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A BRAD meme, by way of Rocky:

Who was your first beta?

Jade.

What was the story and fandom?

The fandom was Voyager, but I was writing a few stories at once. It may have been The Unity of the Multiverse.

Are you still writing in that fandom?

I try not to. The muse has moved on and it’s always best to move on with her.

Which beta(s) had the most impact on your writing?

I’d have to say Jintian, for pointing out my wandering POV. But see the question below about qualities I look for in a beta reader.

What is your favorite story or series of what you’ve written and why?

I’m fondest of the filks, really. Although the musicals are my greatest filky achievement, the Khan-filk I Will Revive is currently nearest and dearest to my heart.

Who was the beta?

The betas just nod and say “very nice, Jemima” when I send them filks. I’m not sure they want their names involved, but they can ‘fess up in the comments if they’d like.

What are your next two favorite stories or series of what you’ve written and why?

Moving on to actual stories, I pretty much agree with the fans on favorites. People are reccing “The Dance” almost 4 years after B’Elanna the Muse wrote it. Why is it my favorite? Because of the incredible muse high I had while writing it.

It’s harder to pick another. I’d like to name an SG fic, but my favorite is my unfinished SG novel, for its theme. Of things you can read now, I’ll go with another VOY standard: The Museum. It started out as a loosely-linked AU series but then it came together to an unexpected resolution. I got to do all sorts of character assassination and the Borg got to assimilate the Alpha Quadrant along the way, so fun was had all around.

Who beta-ed your most recent story?

Jade and Jerie beta all my Stargate fic. Lately they’ve been doing drabbles in batches of ten and campaigning for longer fics.

What do you consider the most important quality in a beta reader?

The same as in a writer—she needs to love the show. Familiarity with canon and fanon are vital, because a beta reader is not (for my purposes) an editor; she’s a test reader. You can’t know whether a story is coming across well unless you’re familiar with the genre and the background.

What do you consider the most important thing to be accomplished in a beta read? (Grammar, spelling, continuity, plot, character, canon, fanon, hand holding, other?)

It depends on the strengths and weaknesses of the author. Grammar and spelling aren’t a problem for me (though the betas still find stuff), so I just want to know in general that the story is working. I’m behind on Stargate canon, so Jerie is very helpful there. Jade is always on the lookout for good kissyface opportunities.

How has your writing changed from your first stories?

It’s better from a technical standpoint, but it’s gotten worse in some ways. I don’t spend the time on my fanfic that I used to. My SG stories aren’t getting the love that VOY did. Fortunately I’m a faster writer now so things have evened out more or less, but I still haven’t written The Great SG Ship Story.

What do you attribute that to?

The good I’d attribute to practice and learning more about fiction writing (for the sake of my original fiction, but the fanfic benefits, too).

The bad I’d attribute to laziness, shows going off the air, and the flight of the Muse. I feel guilty now about writing fanfic instead of original stories, so I don’t put the work into fanfic that I might have in the past. I’ve also done most of the things I was inspired to do, especially in Voyager.

The kissyface I attribute to Jade.

Here are some fun and handy links I’ve come across recently:

• I am learn: the artificial teenage intelligence weblog.
• Morphases - More Faces: the on-line face-morphing editor
• The Economists: just a little fun with Flash.
• del.icio.us: social links.
• dropload: temporary storage for downloading and uploading stuff.
• zoom: infinite fun with Flash.

This entry inaugurates my new emacs category, which I’ve already stocked with some old emacs-related posts. (Emacs is the infinitely extensible text editor with a soft spot in its heart for elisp.)

The emacs extension of the day is tabbar.el. I was feeling jealous of cool new Mac text editors like TextMate with their drawers and their clickable tab-like buttons. How I wished that emacs had a pop-out drawer, or at the very least, tabs.

So I googled for tabbed emacs, and found the magic elisp file at EMHACKS. (Download it from the tabbar files section.) In just a few short moments, I had tabs!

Although it is documented, tabbar has no handy start-up guide for beginners. With the help of Zhou Chen’s Emacs Tools page, I figured out that I needed to add

(require 'tabbar)
(tabbar-mode)

to my .emacs file just to get the tab bar to show up.

Next, I wanted to do a keybinding to get emacs to switch tabs with command-shift-left-arrow and command-shift-right-arrow, the way Safari and iTerm do. With the help of the emacs function keys info node, I found the right combination for my .emacs file:

(global-set-key [A-S-left] 'tabbar-backward)
(global-set-key [A-S-right] 'tabbar-forward)

[The above may depend on (setq mac-command-key-is-meta nil). If you don’t have that setting, then try M-S-left and M-S-right instead.] You can also assign ‘tabbar-backward-group and ‘tabbar-forward-group the same way, but ‘tabbar-backward and ‘tabbar-forward will scroll through groups as well so I didn’t bother.

I didn’t like the way tabbar assigned my buffers to groups, so I wrote my own version of the tabbar-buffer-groups function and put it in my .emacs file, too.
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Neither of these books quite qualifies as science fiction, but they’re close enough for reviewing purposes. I picked up Antarctica by Kim Stanley Robinson for research purposes only. As an introduction to what can be done in near-future Antarctica fiction it was useful; as a novel it left something to be desired.

I was expecting to hate the characters as much as I grew to hate the immortal cast of the Mars trilogy, so when they started out sympathetic and intriguing, I was pleasantly surprised. The novel was fuzzy around the edges, though; I couldn’t tell when this near future was supposed to be happening. No dates were given and it seemed too near in general. The voices confused me as well: multiple characters would use idiosyncratic capitalized expressions like “Ice Planet” and “Götterdämmerung,” or carry on untagged dialogues, making it hard to distinguish between people.

The politics and feng shui weren’t sufficiently integrated into the plot, so whole chapters had a telling-not-showing feel to them. If it were me, I wouldn’t have introduced the ecoterrorists so early on in the novel; I would have let their depredations develop as more of a mystery. Instead of being the climax of the mystery, the man-against-nature results fill out the middle section of the novel. The end is devoted to politics.

That, also might have been more interesting had there been any conflict, but as this raving review points out, Antarctica is utopian in theme. There are no bad guys, so it’s not clear why any political wrangling is necessary. Even the ecoteurs turn out to be good guys who didn’t want to hurt any people in their ecotage. The bad corporations and politicians never appear, so there’s no real conflict after the man-against-ice resolution.

Even though I like feng shui and a lot of the politics involved, the presentation just wasn’t exciting enough for me. I have to agree with Steven Silver’s review that Antarctica works better as a travelogue than as a novel.

Bare-Faced Messiah is an on-line biography of L. Ron Hubbard I’ve been reading in fits and starts for a long time. It just ended at Hubbard’s mysterious death. I recall some wild speculation on the topic of his death from other anti-Scientology sites, so I was both impressed and disappointed with the mild ending of Bare-Faced Messiah. Truth is stranger than theology in this case (and that’s saying a lot when Scientology is involved).

Scientists speculate that the world’s worst mass extinction may have been caused by methane.

Canada boasts two new province-wide smoking bans. It’s nice to know that despite the depredations of multiculturalism, our American Puritan heritage of outlawing other people’s nasty sinful pleasures is still going strong. Maybe soon we’ll be tossing people in jail for nasty sinful opinions, like they do in Sweden.

Boston Common has a new RSS calendar of Boston lectures. You can also submit your own local events.

Ten new drabbles are up on my Stargate fic page, mostly from season 5. Thanks to Jerie and Jade for betaing. They haven’t specified a favorite drabble this time.

Here’s the real home of the Mt. St. Helens VolcanoCam: Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument.

Watch her smokin’! Click on the image to see it full size at the VolcanoCam site. The image refreshes every 5 minutes. See the VolcanoCam Terms of Use to use it on your own site.