Fan fiction

31
May
2013

Progress Report – May 2013

May 2013 Posted Works

May 2013 began with my Barking up the Muse Tree | Janet Gershen-Siegel | jespah | Quill | May 2013 hijinks story, Where No Gerbil Has Gone Before, winning the April 2013 Ad Astra challenge. The prize was to select the next month’s challenge topic – I selected forgiveness. For that topic, I wrote Saturn Rise. In response to a prompt about sex, I wrote Complications. For fun, I added a second response, Transported. In response to the flash fiction challenge, I added Conversations with Heroes. Finally, in response to a challenge about childhood, I posted Bribery. In response to a challenge about famous last words, I posted Who Shall Wear the Robe and Crown?

I also finished spinning out The Three of Us on Ad Astra. Also, I added Where No Gerbil Has Gone Before, Conversations with Heroes, Saturn Rise and November 12th to In Between Days context. I added November 13th to Times of the HG Wells context. I began posting Everybody Knows This is Nowhere.

On Fanfiction.net, I finished spinning out Day of the Dead. I added Where No Gerbil Has Gone Before, Bribery and Conversations with Heroes.

Milestones

On Fanfiction.net, Concord exceeded 1,000 reads before the 25th. Temper made it to 10,000 reads on Ad Astra. Ohio, A Long, Long Time Ago, More Than a Will to Live and Take Back the Night are all at over 5,000 overall reads. The Daranaean Emergence series is getting close to 10,000 overall reads. Interphases and the AU series are both at over 10,000 overall reads, the HG Wells series is at over 30,000 overall reads and the In Between Days series has over 100,000 overall reads.

WIP Corner

I continued working on The All-Stars, although I did not always have time for it. For Ad Astra’s summertime Twelve Trials of Triskelion, I elected to work with the bluesman.

Prep Work

I spent time on the website and on some of the pages here (e. g. Accolades).The bluesman and I also had a lot of work to do in order to get our collaboration to make sense. I created a cover for Saturn Rise, to be entered into the cover competition on Ad Astra.

This Month’s Productivity Killers

English: The Bourne Bridge over the Cape Cod C...

English: The Bourne Bridge over the Cape Cod Canal, with the Cape Cod Canal Railroad Bridge in the background. The bridges are located near the town of Bourne in Barnstable County, Massachusetts. These are two of the three bridges over the Cape Cod Canal. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I went on vacation to Cape Cod for a few days, mid-month. It was great fun but I still had to work and I also had to share the one laptop computer with my husband. On Ad Astra, the Twelve Trials of Triskelion prompted some creativity but also smothered some, as time was spent in all sorts of endeavors. Great fun, but the number of hours in a day was still, alas, limited.

Posted by jespah in Fan fiction, Progress, 0 comments
28
May
2013

Review – The Reptile Speaks

Review – The Reptile Speaks

A reptile speaks?

Background

I can’t recall the precise circumstances, but I was a fairly new member of Ad Astra and we were talking about mixed-species couples in Star Trek fanfiction.

Barking up the Muse Tree | Jespah | Janet Gershen-Siegel | The Reptile Speaks

The Reptile Speaks

My point was, as we get deeper and deeper into the future, we’d start to see a lot of – to us – bizarre combinations.

Why wouldn’t a Gorn recite love poetry to a lovely, blushing Cardassian maiden?

And so someone threw the gauntlet down and told me, write this.

Plot

For teenaged boys Bron and Skrol, the upcoming Sadie Hawkins dance is an occasion for nerves. Skrol is trying to make time with his girl, Tr’Dorna. Skrol encourages Bron to ask out Tr’Dorna’s roommate, Etrina. But Bron will have none of that – he likes Sophra.

Oh, and did I mention that the boys are Gorn, Etrina and Tr’Dorna are Xindi Reptilian, and Sophra (and her roommate, Ylinka) is a Cardassian?

Perhaps that detail shouldn’t have been left out.

But, truly, teens are teens, wherever you go, and whatever age adolescence happens for a particular species (for Vulcans, it apparently happens somewhat later). And so there is a bit of a push and pull. Who will end up together? Will she accept or repel Bron’s advances? Bron’s got a secret weapon, but you’ll have to read the story in order to find out just what it is.

Story Postings

Rating

The story is rated K.

Upshot

Finally, Gorn are nearly universally hissing, sneering bad guys, and I wanted there to be a way to redeem them. After all, they’re not too terribly different from Xindi Reptilians, and that species saw redemption by the end of ENT. Plus, I would hope that, eventually, the entire galaxy will be at peace. That means breaking bread with Gorn. And if they are at all like Bron, and even Skrol, it’ll be easy.

Posted by jespah in Fan fiction, Mixing It Up Collection, Review, 7 comments
14
May
2013

Portrait of a Character – Izo Sato

Portrait of a Character – Izo Sato

Izo Sato brings up the rear of the Empress’s family.

Origins

In canon, at the end of the second Mirror Universe episode in Star Trek: Enterprise, the newly-proclaimed Empress Hoshi Sato has taken a new lover, Travis Mayweather. However, I realized that, in a Machiavellian sense, this would not necessarily be the best move for her, to only be with him, and stay with him. After all, people would be constantly gunning for her – and that’s canon, anyway. Superior officers are always in danger of being knifed or phasered by ambitious underlings.

Hence I decided that a hot, young and round-heeled Empress (also canon) would likely cement her partnerships with her senior staff via the bedroom. If most/all of them are male, all she’s got to do is sleep with them. And with the Y Chromosome Skew, if she gets pregnant by them, they will keep her alive, at least for a while. This is in order to ensure the continuing survival of their children. Therefore, she’d plan to have several children by the various male members of her senior staff. She selects Travis as a sire last, because she is most confident in his compliance and loyalty. Their son together is Izo Sato.

Izo’s very existence almost does not happen. This is because, during pregnancy, it’s discovered that there is a hole in his heart. The choice is given to Travis – fix the hole and the Empress goes on, or let the Empress die on the table and, presumably, become the next Emperor. Travis doesn’t want to rule and be constantly watching his back and so, in Coveted Commodity, he decides to allow Izo to live, even as Hoshi names the child and Travis has no say in the matter whatsoever.

Portrayal

It’s incredibly difficult to find a part-Asian, part-African actor.

Matsu as Izo Sato

Matsu as Izo Sato

I selected Matsu from the Japanese singing group, Exile. His real, full name is Toshio Matsumoto.

Matsu is an actor, too, and reportedly has a starring role in a futuristic drama (it’s difficult to get information as a lot of it’s in Japanese, and I have to rely on Google translations). In this video, he’s the guy with the multicolored headband and the dreadlocks: Carry On by Exile.

Personality

Portrait of a Character – Izo Sato

Matsu as Izo Sato

Nasty and bratty, like all six of the Empress’s children, Izo is also dangerous, and grows up to run the Empress’s secret police. In Temper, in the first alternate timeline, he stays out of the fight for Marie Patrice Beckett but he does tangle with someone else.

The name Izo means “iron“, but Izo is far from being honorable or morally strong.

Relationships

According to Richard Daniels, Izo eventually marries in the correct timeline, but he dies childless. I don’t have a name for his wife yet.

Leah Benson

In Bread, it’s 2192, and she’s in her mid-seventies and is a lesbian, but it doesn’t matter, as Izo is interested anyway. Given the lack of women aboard, it would appear that this is either before Izo’s marriage or he is cheating. He’s thirty – she is over twice his age – but he still, at the very least, wants her to service him. Furthermore, he has had several failures and so is looking for what he believes will be a compliant, easy score.

Pamela Hudson

In the first alternate timeline in Temper, once José Torres is killed, Pamela, Blair and Karin are freed and take up with other partners.

Portrait of a Character – Izo Sato

Matsumoto Toshio as Izo Sato

Karin goes with Josh, Blair goes with Dr. Morgan, and Pamela ends up with Izo. Again, she is a lot older than he is – she is over fifty, whereas he is still a teenager. But it does not matter to him. During this alternate, during a Calafan-style dream, Pamela gets a chance to do to Izo what, presumably, most people, both male and female, would want to do.

Prime Universe

Izo does not have a prime universe counterpart although, like the other Sato offspring, he does have an analogue in the Beckett–O’Day–Madden–Digiorno–Reed family. That person is Tommy Digiorno-Madden, as they are both impulsive warrior types.

Quote

“Am I gonna feel good?”

Upshot

I write the Mirror Mayweather as being mainly a loose cannon. Although when he learns that Izo has issues in utero, he does go to bat for the child. Izo carries that to the next generation and continues as a difficult thorn in many people’s sides. While Kira and Jun are almost heroes (at least, for people in the Mirror Universe), and Takara and Takeo have a chance to become almost moral, it’s Arashi and Izo who remain villains no matter what.

Posted by jespah in Fan fiction, Hall of Mirrors, In Between Days series, Portrait, Times of the HG Wells series, 10 comments
07
May
2013

Review – Day of the Dead

Review – Day of the Dead

Background

Day of the Dead. More than just a holiday, it also references the horrors of a particularly infamous period is history. On Ad Astra, there was a prompt about the burdens of command.

Barking up the Muse Tree | Janet Gershen-Siegel | jespah | Day of the Dead |

I had been kicking around an idea about Tripp Tucker being caught in a temporal interphase (which is canon in Star Trek) and liberating the Dachau concentration camp. Hence I decided to put that together with the prompt.

Tying In

The idea about Dachau was to tie into Milena Chelenska, who is Richard Daniels‘s love interest. For her, there would be a bit of a back story, as Tripp would deal with the problems that come along with witnessing just so much horror.

Furthermore, there would be a tie into Wesley Crusher, as I liked the little family and backstory I had created for him in Crackerjack and wanted to revisit some of that as well.

The backdrop to it would be Halloween, and then the Day of the Dead.

Plot

As Halloween rolls around – and this is the last Halloween of Tucker’s life, although of course he doesn’t know that – Tripp arranges with Chip Masterson to have a number of classic horror films shown. On the actual day, they show John Carpenter’s Halloween.

But before that, the NX-01 goes about some of its regular business. And the reader should be seeing that life is going on, and they are all moving forward with their lives.

Malcolm is on Lafa II with Lili, for Declan‘s birth, and Aidan MacKenzie is running Tactical in his stead. Travis has just met Ellen Warren. Jonathan is talking about his new ship, the Zefram Cochrane. Lucy Stone, the new Science Ensign, is catching the eye of both Andy Miller and Chip Masterson, even though Chip is married to the pregnant Deborah Haddon. In short, everyone is going somewhere. But Tripp Tucker is living in the past.

Movie Night

For Movie Night, he can’t ask either T’Pol or Hoshi to join him, as they are both exes of his. These are references to the Star Trek: Enterprise canon relationship with T’Pol and the fanfiction relationship in Together. But he sees MACO Corporal Amanda Cole, and begins to flirt with her rather openly. Phlox is also present, and they talk about the picture.

But then Commander Tucker vanishes.

Meanwhile – well, meanwhile in the story, but not in history – Wesley Crusher is considering the aftermath of a static warp bubble experiment where his mother, Beverly, could have lost her life. But he’s lost the warp bubble, and doesn’t know where it went.

Coincidence?

Review – Day of the Dead

Nope, it’s just another temporal-spatial-somatic interphase, much as happened in Concord.

So, where does Tucker end up? Why, he’s in the Forty-Second Infantry Division, and it’s April 29th of 1945. They are about to liberate the Dachau concentration camp.

The remainder of the story deals with Tucker’s displacement, getting him back, and how both the NX-01 and the Enterprise-D work to solve their own, respective, problems.

Music

As the plot unfolds, classic spooky music shows up, and each chapter begins and ends with lyrics as follows –

Story Postings

Rating

The story is rated K+.

Upshot

I added a number of questions about command and promotions, as characters flirt with garnering more responsibility, and how they will deal with such things. In addition, the changes made during the story have the potential to affect the principals for years to come. The burdens of memory and the horrors of war intersect, as Tucker discards his love of horror, and Wesley thinks outside of his own personal bubble, and they both think and act outside themselves.

This story won the challenge; it was my second win (after Paving Stones Made From Good Intentions). I am immensely proud of it, and have featured it in the second Adult Trek Anthology.

Posted by jespah in Fan fiction, In Between Days series, Interphases series, Review, 25 comments