Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I’m back to midnight blogging, but I think I’ve gotten over my bitter maggot phase. No news is bad news on the job front, but I took the personality disorder test Liz mentioned, and I came out far healthier than I expected:

If I genuinely prefer to be alone, what’s the disorder? Isn’t it a free country?

ENT: Well, on to Trekkier matters. I saw “Terra Nova” tonight, and I learned all sorts of things. For instance, did you know human children are immune to radiation? Dunno how I missed that one back in biology class. And that despite having faster-than-lightspeed travel, no one could be bothered to go 20 measley lightyears to check on a missing colony? So what if it would take 9 years? Bring a deck of cards. Better yet, bring a Vulcan to berate 24/7 for the whole 9 years there and 9 years back. You’d hardly get started…

A writer should never ask a question he can’t answer - it’s better to take your chances that the reader won’t spot the plot hole. So mentioning, as I think T’Pol did, that they could have just asked the Vulcans for a lift, for heaven’s sake, rather than let four hundred people die, was a big no-no. While I’m advising the Evil Twins, let me point them in the direction of the Daystrom Institute Technical Library, which they really ought to have checked before they pinned humanity down to seventy years plus at warp 1.5. I check DITL before I write anything brain-numbingly stupid. No wonder the poor things were so excited about warp 4.

I was up on the auction block again today (technically, yesterday)…or in modern terms, I had another job interview. I don’t interview well. When my boss tells me that, it just reminds me of second grade report cards saying “does not play well with others”. Tell me something new. Only time will tell whether I go on being a starving artist or get to be a well-fed artist until this company, like my last one (of the boss with the obvious comments), sinks in the quicksand that passes for the Boston economy.

This real-life example of how you never really escape grade school brings us back to the bitter maggot theme. Liz was kind enough to point me in the direction of ENT fandom, though I did have to beg for two days. I can’t help thinking that no one invited me to the ENT party because I said the wrong thing about someone’s eighties batwing hairstyle or something.

If ASC is anything to judge by, ENT fic is purely reactionary so far. Except for an excellent little T/Tu (funny how that still says Torres/Tuvok to me) by Seema and the ubiquitous Captain’s Dog’s Log, it all seems like an exercise in rehashing the episodes. Was it already a week ago today that I said, “I hate it when people transcribe the show and call it fanfic, without even the humorous stage directions provided by Jim”? And I was thinking of the millions of times I’ve read the Angry Warrior Speech in fan fiction, not a future of rehashes of the Alien Spore Paranoia episode.

Alien spores ought to be more fun.

Jade’s latest story, Bygones is up.

No one’s told me the secret location of ENT fandom yet. I’m waiting…

It’s not really a blog without song quotes, so here’s a topical one from REO Speedwagon (of course) for my fellow bitter maggots:

So if you’re tired of the same old story
Turn some pages
I’ll be here when you are ready
To roll with the changes

Keep on rollin’, folks.

  Puppy: on
  Word of the day: variola

I guess I’ve always had a dim view of mankind. For example, I’ve always believed that my smallpox vaccination would come in handy someday. I find reports that my vaccination may have worn out rather disturbing–but I don’t believe it. I still have faith in the variola of older days. Someone higher up just doesn’t want me to write off everyone born since 1970; little do they know, I did that ten years ago.

And then there was nuclear war: I have to admit it’s been a while since I thought we’d wipe ourselves off the earth that way, but it seems the simple fears of childhood are back. Just today on the news I heard that a nuclear exchange is “likely” within the next thirty or sixty days, and it won’t even be us and the Russians this time.

Ah, the Russians–no one ever told me that they’d been trying to produce weapons-grade smallpox since the day mankind defeated the natural version. I just had a bad feeling… smallpox has a long history of use as a biological weapon here in the United States, most notably in the French and Indian War. At least then, it was more of the same old smallpox, rather than a plot to ressurrect something that took so long to kill. Immunization is not a modern phenomenon; the practice goes back to medieval times or further. It’s a very old dream only recently achieved, and fragile.

Putting aside the annihilation of mankind for the moment, I suppose it’s time to say something about Memory by LMB. Of course I loved it; but why? Memory immediately precedes my favorite LMB novel, Komarr, and may be seen as a dress rehearsal for that book. The situation is the same–an apparent accident that may or may not be a crime, which Miles ends up investigating in his new role of Imperial Auditor. Both novels deal with temptation; Miles begins Memory by sliding, ever so slowly, towards what could be considered a white lie or a huge betrayal, and even more temptations follow this initial battle. Both the temptations and questions of identity are more pressing in Memory, while in Komarr and the sequel, A Civil Campaign, the theme shifts to honor.

As a mystery, Komarr is by far the better book–there are plot holes in Memory, the pace is uneven, and the culprit is easily identified–but on the level of character, Memory does for Miles what Komarr does for Ekaterin–almost.

About blogging back, the latest fad: I blogged back to Liz’s bitter maggot blog entry (today), but you have to hit that little [comment] button to see what I said. I really, really hate hitting little buttons. [Insert tirade on click-taxes here, if you’ve heard it.] Anyway, here’s what I said; there’s a general question in there.

I completely agree with the maggot blog entry, even though I have no clue about the specifics Liz was talking about. I guess no one ever told her that the VOY definition of constructive criticism is “what I want to hear, the way I want to hear it”. Some things you learn the hard way.

I thought the same thing when J/C fandom went from tired and old to vicious and angry - it’s time to write that novel. Fame is the best revenge, right? Don’t you want so-and-so to hang her head in shame and say, “I drove her out of fandom, back before she was famous and beloved by all”? The problem is, so-and-so would somehow manage to take the credit for your Hugos. So-and-so’s are that way.

I remember when all this was fun, and here I am, old and bitter, living on the J/P and C/7 fringes of VOY, petrified of getting involved in ENT or Delta Fleet, missing Christine and all the other disappeared VOY people…

There comes a time when you have to consider that maybe fandom is just this way. Maybe Trek fans have always been stark raving mad. Maybe it goes back to sci-fi fandom, that huge clique that considers all outsiders “mundanes” and scolds newcomers for calling it sci-fi instead of sf. Maybe it’s time to go read some Ayn Rand and develop a healthy detestation for the other 98% of humanity.

Maybe it’s time to get back to that novel.

Part of my research for the Seven Saga is a timeline of Seven’s life, especially the major nits. It’s housed at Wikifection, the C/7 wiki, so if you’re a nitpicker, you can add nits yourself.

Site News: My two very short stories are done. I just posted If Ayn Rand Wrote ST:VOY to ASC - it’s a very, very late response to Lori’s If My Aunt from Minnesota Wrote ST Fanfic challenge - and Au Naturel, another C/7 episode addition (guess the episode) to the CSFic list.

My favorite If My Aunt… story was Mike’s If Minimum Wage Cashiers Wrote ST:DS9 (though his Shakespeare parody is a close second). The title is a bit baroque. I would have said, “If Trailer Trash Wrote DS9″, but maybe that’s offensive in other parts of the country. Maybe that’s offensive here, too, who knows?

  Puppy: off
  Word of the day: fidelity

After I got Debbie to read Atlas Shrugged, including the forty-page political speech, we decided that it was a science fiction novel. Somehow I don’t think Ayn Rand had to struggle even as hard as Kurt Vonnegut to avoid the sf brand, as deadly to ’serious’ writers as a role on a Star Trek series is to serious actors. But if 1984 gets any credit for being in the speculative fiction genre, then Atlas Shrugged deserves it too. There’s absolutely no question that Rand’s novella Anthem is science fiction as well.

I have to admit that Ayn Rand impressed me immensely when I first read her, eleven years ago. First of all, I hadn’t imagined that someone could make a moral argument for capitalism, or against communism - I thought all debate on that issue would have to be pragmatic, saying that we are not saints enough for communism so we put our vices to good use through capitalism. That the woman had the gall to make selfishness a virtue, and then devote her life to making a philosophy out of it, and then, on top of that, to write novels based on her own personal aesthetic - good novels - amazed me on all the levels involved, philosophical, moral and literary. That was the day I should have known I wanted to be a writer.

“Katie, why do they always teach us that it’s easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It’s the hardest thing in the world–to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want.” (The Fountainhead)

I’m going to have to hunt down The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature and reread it, since Christine has been quite rightly pestering me for not knowing what the point is I’m trying to make in my stories. Ayn Rand was never at a loss for the moral of the story.

• The Ayn Rand Institute

Is it just me or is fanfiction.net always down? What fanfic needs is a good index site, not another malfunctioning archive. I don’t think a single one of my stories has shown up at Trekiverse yet, and I’ve been posting for over a year. (Ack!) Do I have to come over there and teach you people perl?

Site news: Claudia was begging in ASC so I decided to enter an old story in the Twelve Moons of JuPiter Awards 2001. The new deadline is November 4th, so it’s not too late to write your own J/P story for one of the many underrepresented categories.

I took the other award graphics off the story and made a separate page to house them: B’Elanna’s the Muse’s Award Shelf (not to be confused with the Jemima’s Trek Awards). I used a thumbnailer to make the little award jpegs - more details are available on the Technical Difficulties page. I used the “float” value for the first time, so the page may look odd in some browsers.

Aside from a little more housekeeping, that’s all that’s been updated. I have two very short stories in beta, but my beta reader has been hanging with Abby so it will be a few days yet.