As has been my pattern recently, June 2016 proved to be a month of very little new writing. Instead, I concentrated on getting older works spread and promoted as school and work at the wedding blog, plus podcasting, took up a lot more of my time and for very good reasons. My summer Capstone project keeps me hopping but the work is of interest and it is bringing in actual paying work. Plus I got a raise at the wedding blog!
Furthermore, at the G & T Show, we are looking to spin off my law and fandom show, Semantic Shenanigans.
See the Stats page for individual read and review counts.
WIP Corner
I continue to work with beta readers on The Enigman Cave. Beta reading takes a while and the story is a long one. I can see it will need some overhauling but I am simply far too busy to do that right now. It will be tackled in late August or in September in anticipation of sending it out for professional editing and then querying later in the year.
Prep Work
I continued to research this year’s planned NaNoWriMo novel, The Real Hub of the Universe. I have also been putting together the outline, which I can see while sprawl over maybe three books.
This Month’s Productivity Killers
School, work, and podcasting – aren’t they enough?
I had had some vague ideas of putting them together, but I had not really acted on them. Couple this with the fact that I had never really written Marci Cavendish, and the only getting together for our two tentative lovers was in Levi and Otra’s own fevered dreams, the construction of such a story proved to be a bit difficult. So I decided to not show their first kiss and instead fast forward to Levi bringing Otra home to meet dear old Mom.
But Mom’s not just any mother.
Plot
Levi takes Otra home to meet his fundy mother, Marci.
Levi is distracted and, frankly, terrified of both of them. Marci is suspicious of this girl with the wacky floral hair. And of course poor Otra, the sanest of the three, is worried about the implications of meeting her new boyfriend’s mother. She smooths the way by bringing homemade gnocchi, and remembers to keep it vegan, just in case Marci is swinging that way that week. That proves to be impressive to the older woman, that Otra would be so effortlessly thoughtful and caring.
I like how this little vignette turned out, in particular as Levi asserts himself and declares, without reservation, that Otra is the best person he knows. In a way, there’s a little sadness to the story, too, as it seems impossible for Levi to share that kind of intimate information with his father, Zach, who is gone, gone, gone.
Noemy Chelenska started off as just a sounding board for Milena.
Origins
As a part of Rick Daniels meeting Milena Chelenska, he is originally hit by a car. Milena, a doctor, thinks she needs to treat him, but that’s unnecessary, given that his blood is spiked with stem cell growth accelerator. As she watches him rapidly heal without any intervention on her part, someone had to take pictures and be the person who she would bounce ideas off. Enter Noemy, who gets her name from a family friend.
Noemy is also seen in Day of the Dead; she’s only fourteen when Tripp Tucker and others liberate Dachau.
Portrayal
Klara Issova as Noemy Chelenska (image is for educational purposes only)
I like to try to get actors of the same or a close ethnicity and Issova certainly fits the bill. It’s a bonus that she was in Anne Frank: The Whole Story, and plays a Holocaust survivor.
Personality
Brittle and damaged, Noemy and Pawel are constitutionally incapable of getting together, or so it seems. Even in the late 1960s, after having known each other for over twenty years, she still can’t call him first. They are at a stalemate until Rick arrives and turns their lives upside-down.
Relationships
Pawel Balcescu
Noemy’s only known relationship is with Pawel. They meet after their liberation from Dachau when they are waiting, with Milena and Mrs. Klinghofer, at a transit camp. This puts their meeting after the end of Day of the Dead.
It may not amount to a terribly glamorous role, but someone has to run things. Enter the administrators.
Background
This role is, of course, canon, although it is not often shown on screen or in any real depth. After all, it is kind of boring.
Who wants to watch someone checking on rations and preparing reports and signing paperwork? But it is still absolutely necessary for someone to do just that.
Appearances
Commandant Kerig
Seen only briefly, Kerig is the warden for Canamar Prison while Eriecho and Saddik are being held there. The meeting of the three of them hints at more than a little corruption. Eriecho’s attacks, recalled in Beats and Recessive, assure that something or other happened, and he looked the other way. Or he was a willing participant, like is seen in Eight, where H’Shema trades sexual favors for powdered milk to feed the helpless Vulcan infant. Kerig is the height (depth, perhaps) of corruption in the timeline.
Annette ‘Windy’ Bradley Pollan
Windy attends Kent State during the 1970 massacre and meets Rick (in Ohio). In an alternate timeline, she and her friends fight for social justice, including Alison B. Krause, who is a real-life victim from the shooting. But that timeline has to be altered and, instead, Windy is restored to her original destiny, which is to rise through the ranks at the Ohio Department of Motor Vehicles. She ends up as the epitome of the soulless bureaucrat. Her less than optimal fate prompts Sheilagh to redouble her efforts to allow the new timeline. Not only would it save Alison’s life, it would, in a way, save Windy’s.
But that cannot be, and so the restoration sticks and Windy is back to being a paper pusher.
Arashi Sato
Empress Hoshi‘s child with a mystery father is good with numbers. Arashi doesn’t really want to become Emperor, even though he is certainly smart enough (and may very well be the smartest of her offspring). Instead, he performs collections, often sending his younger half-brother, Izo, out to do the strong-arming. But Arashi would never sully his hands with such a task. He’s far too busy counting money.
Colonel Jacob ‘Jack’ Shaw
Shaw is another methodical type of leader. In a way, he is a kind of counterpart to Kerig in that he is also a kind of ‘keeper’ for Saddik and Eriecho. But if he’s at all corrupt, it’s only minimally (it’s been suggested to me that the gamete trading he engages in with his fellow sanctuary administrators isn’t completely on the up and up). Shaw is motivated to try to save the Vulcan race.
Upshot
They might not be glamorous, but nothing will ever be properly funded without them. Administrators make things go!
For a prompt about the parental point of view, I decided to go with a short story about perhaps my second-favorite (with the favorite being Lili) rebellious teenaged character, HD Avery. So just how does a pair of staid farmers deal with their rock and roller musical genius son?
Plot
Clockworks
On October 12, 3104, a teenaged HD Avery makes it clear that he will never become a farmer like his parents.
I had had Hank Avery III and Bev in my head but there weren’t a lot of opportunities to write them. In fact, they weren’t originally farmers. At first, when the HG Wells stories were more original than Star Trek fanfiction, the Averys were suburban New Jerseyites, and Beverly was a bit of an alcoholic cougar.
However, in the newer version, they are a much starker contrast to HD, who seems almost like he was found under a cabbage leaf rather than be their biological son. For people who aren’t so sure they even like music or art as worthwhile pursuits, they get a child who can sight-read music and play perfectly by ear, with ideal pitch and tone.
Music
The music is, of course, Pearl Jam’s Last Kiss.
And I’m not even so sure why this was the song. It was just in my head at the time but, truthfully, it could have been nearly any song with a fairly spare melody line. In addition, the video is not official; I can’t seem to find an official music video for this song.
So I would like to, at some point, return to HD’s teen years. I describe him quite a bit as being an obnoxious, immature kid, but I don’t think I quite captured that here.
In order to get the open marriage/arrangement really going among Lili, Doug, Melissa, Norri, and Malcolm, and to really amp it up and certainly require that Melissa have a connection to the Beckett marriage, the best and easiest way of accomplishing that was for her to conceive Doug’s child during Together. There is no planning for Tommy at all (or for Kevin).
But the truth is, the arrangement cannot exist or at least begin without him. He is absolutely indispensable at the beginning of his life and, it turns out, at the end of it as well.
Portrayal
Kiefer Sutherland as Thomas Digiorno-Madden (image is for educational purposes only)
Tommy is played by actor Kiefer Sutherland. I had originally thought of Tommy as being dark-haired. But I thought of Sutherland in 25, and could not get him out of my head.
I love this image of the actor, and I have used it, with a flame in place of the ’24’, as the cover of Seven Women.
Personality
Duty-driven and honor-bound, Tommy is the kind of person who Erika Hernandez utterly depends upon and, later, so does Captain Robau. If you don’t know who Robau is, Google him. I can wait.
Relationships
Cindy Morgan
Tommy mentions her in Seven Women, that it was sort of a secondary relationship versus Joss and Jia. They were essentially forced into a one-room schoolhouse on Lafa II, and there were few romantic prospects. But she wasn’t the one, and they both knew it.
Takara Sato Masterson Tucker
Takara, the Empress Hoshi Sato’s only daughter meets Tommy in a dream during Fortune. I had originally decided that that would be it, and they would not see each other again. Temper would remain an outlying temporal fluke. But then the idea of then being together in dreams was be a good one. So I wanted her to be his only semi-attainable love match. During Eight, in the Out of the Caves of Lafa II chapter, she reveals that she believes her son is really Tommy’s. I’m not so sure how I feel about that, as there are virtues to making Tommy the father or making Charlie Tucker IV the father.
But either way, Tommy and Takara are a bit like what would have happened to the overall storyline if the crossover in Reversal had failed, and Doug and Lili could not truly be together. It made sense for some of the endings to not be such happy ones.
It is impossible for Tommy to have a Mirror Universe counterpart, as he is already a Prime Universe/Mirror Universe crossbreed.
Kiefer Sutherland as Tommy in the Mirror Universe (image is for educational purposes only)
In Temper, though, it is established that he and also Marie Patrice are having the easiest time adjusting, and Tommy is drawn more strongly to that side than any of that crossbred generation. It’s likely that the two things that draw him are the possibility of a much faster command and Takara herself.
Truth is, Tommy in the Mirror is meaner. But he probably would have been similar to what he became, a lifelong soldier. In many ways, Tommy is Doug without real love and a home in his life. The most significant thing he contributes to the timeline (assuming he isn’t Charlie Tucker IV’s father after all) is the sacrifice that ends his life.
Quote
“Here come the flames.”
Upshot
Tommy’s adult life is not well-documented. There is a lot more to tell. He will be back.
Pat the Bunny came about as a strange left-turn style answer to a writing prompt. Hence, in order to write about natural or artificially created disasters, I chose a scenario for the Mirror Universe Borg where they would be defeated by the oddest of foes. And to make it even more interesting, this foe would be about as opposite to a warrior as you can get in the animal kingdom.
Furthermore, it would hearken back, just a little bit, to Hugh and the Borg, the canon episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where a young Borg boy is returned to the collective and starts a sort of individualistic revolution. And it would also be a call back to the canon episode of Star Trek: Voyager, where Icheb is introduced (he was conceived and became Borg as a means of implanting a virus into the collective. Icheb’s own parents considered him expendable).
Plot
Clockworks
In 3104, Richard Daniels and Aramjul Sika find out just why the Borg never really got any traction in the Mirror Universe.
As an earlier mission for Rick (and one where he does not seduce anyone), I wanted a short mission where he and a historian would get in and get out, but there would be one, big, kind of crazy consequence of what they had just observed. Temporal shenanigans aside, history is often strange.
So I liked putting Rick into a new and exceptionally weird situation. And I also enjoyed the opportunity to shout out to the Sika family, a clan of Xindi sloth I had created in The Puzzle and then followed through with in Achieving Peace. After all, it isn’t only Lili‘s family that makes it to the deep future.
The character is canon, from the film, Star Trek: Nemesis. The Barnstorming series takes place after the conclusion of that film. Hence B-4 is a logical addition to the Enterprise-E‘s crew.
Portrayal
Brent Spiner as B-4 (image is for educational purposes only and is courtesy of Memory Alpha)
A bit stiff, and also learning all the time, B-4 doesn’t understand that the crew is somewhat sad to see him. While they don’t blame him for Data’s demise, he is too much of a painful reminder for them. So they unwittingly shun him. Martin Madden is one of the few people who spends any significant time with him; Geordi LaForge also does.
Relationships
B-4 is an android, and at a somewhat lower functional level than Data. Hence B-4 is, as such, incapable of having what we would call a relationship.
Mirror Universe
B-4 and Data don’t have Mirror Universe counterparts. The closest is Lore, who is evil but who comes from our universe.
Quote
“Universe to universe crossovers can currently be divided into four types, with a fifth type being unknown. The first is ancient, and is accomplished only by Calafans. This species originates in the part of the Milky Way galaxy where the septum between two universes is at its thinnest. Amplifying dishes located on Lafa II, at a spot that the natives refer to as Point Abic, help to focus Calafan meditations and dream states. Dreaming and meditating Calafans are able to readily cross over, although only between the home universe, which vibrates on the twenty-one centimeter radiation band, and the mirror, which vibrates at twenty centimeters.
“Prior to 2157, the dishes prevented Calafan crossovers during their conscious, nonmeditative states. However, the mirror High Priestess, known as the teenager Yimar, commanded a change in the frequency emitted by the dishes in her universe, thereby permitting conscious, nonmeditative crossovers, but only by purebred Calafans in either universe.”
Upshot
This highly intelligent and highly functioning android is an integral part of the Barnstorming series. And, as such, will be back.