trek fan fiction

Dec

2012

Portrait of a Character – Michelle (Shelby) Pike

Origins

Keiko Ishikawa O’Brien of TNG and DS9 is a Botanist. Because the NX-01 has real food cooked by a real chef, and it is out there far earlier in time, I figured they had to have someone growing food plants. And, perhaps, studying alien vegetation. Hence I decided there would be a Botanist on board. In my older story, If You Can’t Stand the Heat, the Botanist is named Naomi Curtis. But that is intended to be a different person, and that story has been reworked in order to fit into my regular universe. It now takes place not too long after the initial launch of the Enterprise, and Naomi is meant to be a character replaced at the start of the Xindi war, much like Lili is brought in, to replace Chef’s three helpers. You need room for MACOs on the NX-01, and more skilled people need to be brought on so that there can be fewer of them. Hence Naomi leaves.

As for her name, Shelby’s name is a perfect blending of two canon characters (Commander Elizabeth Shelby from TNG and Captain Christopher Pike from TOS). However, I didn’t name her because of that. It’s just a happy coincidence.

Actually, Shelby was a part of a small universe of original stories I worked on over twenty years ago, which were murder mysteries set in and around Boston. Shelby was supposed to be our heroine’s boyfriend’s impossibly beautiful ex. She was also supposed to be darker-skinned, but was still African-American. And she was a ballet student. Hence the Shelby Pike of my Star Trek: fan fiction is a former ballerina in the Prime Universe.

Portrayal

Portrait of a Character – Michelle (Shelby) Pike

Young Shelby (Erica Gimpel)

Unlike most characters, Shelby is portrayed by two separate people. As a young girl, I see Erica Gimpel from Fame. I well recall seeing this actress – this was the first time I had ever seen a ballerina who was not Caucasian, and she stuck with me.

I had a vision of a stick thin young girl dedicated to her craft.

Adult Shelby (Aesha Ash)

But then personal disaster strikes, and she blows out her knee, and has to quit dancing. What to do? Shelby goes back to college, and gets hooked on plants. She becomes a Botanist, never dreaming that that would get her into space. For an adult Shelby, I chose ballerina Aesha Ash.

Either way, Shelby is delicate and beautiful.

Personality

Friendly and smart, Shelby keeps to herself quite a bit of the time. It’s a necessity when your closest companions, most of the time, are living things that cannot speak. She is unused to formal meetings, so she ends up embarrassingly raising her hand during the meeting shown in Shell Shock. She is more than competent, and Malcolm brings her on board the USS Bluebird where she continues to work as a Botanist.

Relationships

José Torres

During Temper, it’s revealed that they dated. Due to the height difference, Malcolm and Lili joke that the mechanics are somewhat confusing. At the end of the E² stories, José reveals that he’s considering asking her out.

Travis Mayweather

In Fortune (and earlier, in Apple, which takes place during Reversal), Shelby makes the first moves with Travis. However, by the time of the events of Equinox, he has instead married a woman named Ellen Warren (also referenced in Day of the Dead).

Andrew Miller

In the E² stories, because the kick backs in time occur before Lucy Stone joins the crew, Andrew and Shelby get together in both iterations. As two mid-level Science people, they have a lot in common and are thrown together quite a bit whenever the full senior staff meets.

Doug Hayes

In the Mirror Universe, Doug reveals Shelby’s background to Lili, and notes that, while he often had girlfriends during the time he knew her (including the Redheaded Bombshell, Jennifer Crossman), he would inevitably cheat on all of them with Shelby, and that there was just something about her that appealed to him, and he was incapable of staying away.

Francisco (Frank) Ramirez

By the time of The Point is Probably Moot, they are together and are trying to figure out how to get away from the Empress Hoshi Sato. For that couple, they cannot be open about their relationship, so life is filled with stolen moments. In Bread, they’re almost caught.

Mirror Universe

Mirror Shelby (Erica Gimpel)

For the Mirror, I’m back to Erica Gimpel portraying Shelby. Because no one cares about Botany, she works as a pilot. And because no one cares about ballet there, her earlier profession was far different.

Doug confirms that she worked as a prostitute, and more or less still did, when he knew her.

Doug notes that there were ways to see her without really being with her, and is essentially describing the future Mirror Universe take on phone sex.

Quote

“I have pumpkins ripening in the Botany Lab. They’re so pretty. Would you, uh, want to see them some time?”

Upshot

I was thrilled to be able to reuse this character and change her up. I like that she brings a little art and culture to the NX-01 (much like Chip Masterson does) and the USS Bluebird (like Declan Reed‘s drawings do, too). I’m also enjoying getting to know her as a person, and giving her more dimensions than she had in my failed fiction from two decades ago. I’m sure I’ll continue to learn more about Shelby.

Dec

2012

Inspiration – Exercise

How does Exercise fit in with Creation?

For the past five years, I have become much more of an exercise devotée. I had needed to lose a lot of weight and, through exercise in part, I was able to accomplish that. Hence working out has become a part of my life.

A lot of that comes in the form of walking. And by walking around, I see things that I otherwise would not.

And that can sometimes bring on some unexpected inspiration.

Walkabout

For Boris Yarin, I grabbed his name from the Toyota Yaris. I have no particular affection for this car. It just so happened to be a name plate that I saw over and over again for a while there.

Daranaeans are mainly inspired by various dogs I’ve met in my travels.

Exercise also tends to help in terms of working out dialog. I can “hear” it in my head as I walk, and I am away from the keyboard (which means I am away from things like Facebook as well). Plus there’s music. For Pamela Hudson in particular, that character was so defined by her theme music that I received inspiration whenever I listened to Amy Winehouse’s You Know I’m No Good. I mainly listen to music when I am walking, and I would listen to that song over and over again as I was writing Intolerance and then, later, Together, as Pamela has a cameo in that book, too. It was, in many ways, like taking dictation.

Races

I don’t just walk. Sometimes, I run, and it’s was once in the context of 5K races (I ran between 9 and 12 every year until I hurt my knee). Because I was busy dealing with my pacing and timing, I usually could not work out dialog, etc.

However, the sheer act of racing has proven inspirational. I wanted one of the Digiorno-Madden-Beckett offspring to have a weight problem. So I settled on Neil Digiorno-Madden. Neil is the only one of the prime universe/prime timeline children to become a chef (Joss Reed-Hayes also becomes a chef and he even succeeds Lili and Will Slocum in that area, but he is from the first E² temporal kick-back and is not a part of the prime timeline). Hence there can often be weight issues when you are tasting food all day long.

I also wanted Neil to be doing something about it, so he ran a 5K in Fortune. Eventually just that little story was told, in The Medal.

Upshot

I truly believe that working out and getting away from the keyboard have both helped a great deal in terms of keeping writer’s block at bay. Keep putting one foot in front of the other, and one word in front of the next and you’ll get somewhere eventually!

Dec

2012

Spotlight on an Original Nonsentient Species – Malostrea

Malostrea were fun to create.

Background

For the E² stories, I wanted the Amity planet to not have any life on it which had developed a backbone.

Malostrea

Some animals would be just plain dumb, like the procul (similar to Animal Planet‘s The Future is Wild speculative critters, the megasquid).

The procul, to be sure, are not the sharpest knives in the drawer. But the malostrea (pronounced mal-oh-STRAY-uh) were meant to be smarter than all that.

Predators

If procul are prey (and they’re too dumb to be anything else), they needed to have predators.

The malostrea (the name is Latin for evil oysters, and the same word is used for both singular and plural) were meant to be almost the Amity invertebrate equivalent of wolf packs.

Living

When they first get onto Amity, the MACOs spot a number of perfectly circular holes in squishy, swampy ground. The holes are too perfectly round to have just gotten there by accident. Something had to have made the holes.

They see the procul first, and then see the malostrea clambering out of their little dens. The dens are interconnected underground, much like mole tunnels.

Hunting

The first time these animals are seen, they are out to hunt procul. The procul are several times larger than they are, but the malostrea have a secret weapon. They are able to naturally secrete a substance known as tricoulamine. This nerve toxin acts fast, and if a procul is “bitten” (since these animals don’t have teeth or jaws, the poison is delivered by means of having a shell clamp down on a leg), the big beast goes down, stone dead, nearly immediately.

Once the prey is dead, the malostrea set upon it and tear it apart with their little clapping shells. Procul legs can more or less fit inside malostrea den holes, but the bigger parts of a procul have to be torn apart. The malostrea don’t really have any means of slicing straightly and perfectly, so the aftermath of hunting is a bit messy as the game is torn apart for transport.

Intelligence

Spotlight on an Original Nonsentient Species – Malostrea

Clams (source: Wikimedia Commons)

Two malostrea are captured and brought to Sick Bay for study. Andrew Miller and Diana Jones spend the most time with them. In order to tell them apart (they are virtually identical hermaphrodites), the two malostrea are spray-painted with a blue 1 and a fuchsia 2 and are dubbed Thing One and Thing Two (a reference to Dr. Seuss‘s The Cat in the Hat). It’s difficult for Diana and Andy to really study the malostrea as they are poisonous and unpredictable. However, there is a great deal of clapping and chattering going on. The two researchers surmise that it’s a primitive form of communications for, after all, these creatures hunt in a pack. There has to be some form of planning going on there.

Future

The problem with E² details is that most of them can’t, by definition, follow through to the correct timeline. But the malostrea do. In the last of the E² stories, I reveal that, on a planet called Archer’s Planet (the correct name for Amity), Eska hunters call them hard devils.

Upshot

I like them. I’d like to use them again somewhere, but I’m a bit stumped as to where.

Dec

2012

trek fan fiction

Portrait of a Character – Michelle (Shelby) Pike

Portrait of a Character – Michelle (Shelby) Pike

Origins

Portrayal

Personality