Oh wow you’re making your own digital elevation models, I’m so impressed!!! I had no idea this much background work went into the pictures you make. My computer (after much huffing and puffing) makes these for me at work so I can use them to generate map data but I’ve never made one by hand!
I envy you. I’m stuck doing this the hard way, though: reasons (and illustrations) below. …Though I do keep bitching and moaning about it, because it means I have to keep learningthings. (helpless laughter)
…I mean, not that I don’t keep learning things anyway. Naturally I get shamefully lazy moments when I wish to God (or the Goddess) (or great Thoth) (or whoever we’re invoking today) that I was the kind of writer who doesn’t give a good goddamn about (in concept art anyway) getting as close as possible to what I see in my head. But (a) if I were that kind of writer I wouldn’t be me, and (b) if I were that kind of writer I probably wouldn’t be as good at what I do. Which is something, to quote the man, “up with which I would not put.”
(sigh) Let’s step back a moment for a slightly wider view. (Everybody else who’s bored by mapmaking, maybe you want to look away now. Here, I’ll help…)
A little over three years ago, I started writing on a Star Trek fan sim with some friends. I was nervous as all heck to push out of my comfort zone and tell stories in prose instead of as a comic, but with a lot of help, I found my footing and my own voice as a writer.
We told a TON of stories with out characters on our made-up little ship, and I fell in love with writing just to write. I fell in love with setting the scene with words and making the characters breathe that way. I still love drawing, but in those little fan adventures, I discovered a different way to express myself I hadn’t before truly considered.
Of course, they WERE “Star Trek” stories, and I couldn’t really do anything with them. I had all these characters, themes and ideas I was going nuts with, and writing far more than the other writers were in the group, but they lived and died there, in a world I couldn’t really DO anything with. As such, after I had decided I was done with the sim, and we put the ship in proverbial drydock,
I sat on the ideas for a bit. Then, last October, a few different ideas met in the back alley of my mind and had a weird baby.
Now, to throw a flashback awkwardly into the middle of my story and confuse things even more, about 6 years ago, I was starting to get laser hair removal. See, I’m a transgender woman and that is kinda a big part of this story. As such, I was considering the frustration of the process and technical side of transitioning, along with the social issues and medical ones.
So, during all of that, an idea that had never found purchase in my life planted a seed. Why do werewolves in movies always grow all of that hair, and then it just… vanishes? How do they get their haircuts back after transforming? Seriously, how do well-cropped bangs just… come back after they were just a very large dog-creature?
All those questions suddenly had a new context in my mind as I was paying someone to shoot me in the face with science to get rid of my own “fur”, and that seed began to sprout. Just a tiny little idea about a woman trying to deal with life as a werewolf. I figured out little details like that, since hair is dead tissue, it wouldn’t just grow back in, so it would have to be shed. And hair would grow every time she transformed, ruining her haircuts.
They were details, but no story. So, jump back to the end of my experience writing Star Trek fan fiction. I had, in that time, created a bunch of Romulan characters, using the amazing “Rihannsu” novels of Diane Duane as the basis of how I managed the culture and language. I put my conflicted, emotionally torn little Romulan woman in Starfleet and used the stories to work through some of my own issues coming out as Trans by making her Romulan identity a metaphor. Her journey was one of self-acceptance between two cultures that did not always get along. I loved writing her stories, but they had ran their course.
Now, I still had these idea seeds for werewolves, but no story to frame them on. I also had a realized character torn between to cultures and two families, old and new. Eventually, I realized I could mush the two ideas together, and that I had already done a “first draft” of that story out in the Final Frontier. All I had to do was swap metaphors.
Now, these novels aren’t just re-writes of those stories, but the DNA of that is all in what I’m working on. Rihannsu culture inspired a secret world of werewolves with their own government and history. Alienation and self-acceptance traded green blood for fur and a tail. I had a road map to look at to inspire me to tell all new stories, and I was off to the races.
I’ve always loved werewolf stories, but never felt they told the angle I wanted to. Eventually, it took warping to Romulus and back to discover that what I needed to do, was tell my own story through the wolves. Hopefully, it’s a story you all will enjoy. :)
imagine you start watching this new show and it’s a silly little show about space set in the future then they announce the next season so you wait excitedly for five months and finally it’s here… you all sit round the tv and suddenly one of the main characters who is known for being unemotional starts going mad because of “biology…” and you slowly realise that he needs to have sex or he’s going to die so the other main character risks his entire career to help him out then they start ‘wrestling’ on the sand and the one going through the mating fever ends up killing the other guy which ends the fever but now he’s depressed because he just killed his best friend but wait he’s not actually dead the unemotional one is overjoyed everything’s fine and then they go back to work like nothing happened… you look at everyone else sitting in stunned silence thinking “did any one else think that was a little… yknow” then you accidentally start modern fandom and shipping culture
very much enjoying the tags thank you everybody
Wait till they all actually watch it and see the unnecessary titty window situation.
[ID: A collection of tags that read:
#THAT was the plot?? #and they wanted us to believe the guy didnt have sex with the unemotional guy?
#star trek is so so gay
#ive seen some posts. but i did not realize it was….. that gay.
#only halfway through did i realise that this was star trek #i thought at first op was watching some freaky ass gay scifi and i was fully prepared to try find it #but lo and behold #ive already watched the damn show
#star trek #are they… you know… ♀️
(In caps) #what #star trek invented fuck or die?????
#what the fuck is going on in star trek
#i have no idea what happens in star trek but uhm. #this is a little (long string of ellipses followed by semicolons)
#they didnt… they wouldnt… #you cannot be serious is that how all the startrek slash started? #spock went into heat???
#i would need to be lobotomized for my own health
#what the fuck is star trek about. End ID]
Based on some of the first-hand accounts I’ve read, fans already had thoughts in that direction but were very cautious about expressing them, because, you know, it was 1967 and they were nice suburban ladies. They referred to the idea of Spock and Kirk being in love as The Premise. One little housewives’ fan club in California wrote to Leonard Nimoy in the hiatus between seasons one and two, and he was very pleasant and agreed to come and meet their group and tell them about being in the show. They didn’t say anything about The Premise directly, in case it offended him, but of course they expressed their enthusiasm for the rapport between Kirk and Spock and how curious they were about Spock’s background and inner life. And Nimoy, who was working on season two by that time, said that he couldn’t give away any specifics but there was an episode coming up that would focus more on Spock’s personal life and the planet Vulcan, and they were naturally delighted and intrigued.
So when they sat down to watch season two, episode one, “Amok Time,” they were primed for an important Spock episode, and then that played out before their widening eyes and I think it’s safe to say it blew their beehives clean off their heads.
…And this is exactly how some of us got onto the path toward getting into SO MUCH [GOOD] TROUBLE later in our lives. Handwritten fanfic… pages and pages and PAGES of it. Tens and hundreds of thousands of words of fanfic. In looseleaf binders.
Just remember: “The first million words are for practice.” :) After that… all bets are off.
And it’s also worth bearing in mind that Amok Time was written by Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon was a bisexual writer (according to his friend, gay author and academic Samuel R Delany) who wrote “The World Well Lost” (1953) which may have been the first SF story about homosexuality to be published in a mainstream SF magazine, not to mention gay-coded stories like “The Saucer of Loneliness”. Ted Sturgeon was a brilliant writer about love, and he knew exactly what he was doing in Amok Time. Although he might not have known what it would spawn.
And if you are curious to read some of his fiction there’s a Selected Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon out there, and the novels The Dreaming Jewels and More Than Human appear to be in print.
imagine you start watching this new show and it’s a silly little show about space set in the future then they announce the next season so you wait excitedly for five months and finally it’s here… you all sit round the tv and suddenly one of the main characters who is known for being unemotional starts going mad because of “biology…” and you slowly realise that he needs to have sex or he’s going to die so the other main character risks his entire career to help him out then they start ‘wrestling’ on the sand and the one going through the mating fever ends up killing the other guy which ends the fever but now he’s depressed because he just killed his best friend but wait he’s not actually dead the unemotional one is overjoyed everything’s fine and then they go back to work like nothing happened… you look at everyone else sitting in stunned silence thinking “did any one else think that was a little… yknow” then you accidentally start modern fandom and shipping culture
very much enjoying the tags thank you everybody
Wait till they all actually watch it and see the unnecessary titty window situation.
[ID: A collection of tags that read:
#THAT was the plot?? #and they wanted us to believe the guy didnt have sex with the unemotional guy?
#star trek is so so gay
#ive seen some posts. but i did not realize it was….. that gay.
#only halfway through did i realise that this was star trek #i thought at first op was watching some freaky ass gay scifi and i was fully prepared to try find it #but lo and behold #ive already watched the damn show
#star trek #are they… you know… ♀️
(In caps) #what #star trek invented fuck or die?????
#what the fuck is going on in star trek
#i have no idea what happens in star trek but uhm. #this is a little (long string of ellipses followed by semicolons)
#they didnt… they wouldnt… #you cannot be serious is that how all the startrek slash started? #spock went into heat???
#i would need to be lobotomized for my own health
#what the fuck is star trek about. End ID]
Based on some of the first-hand accounts I’ve read, fans already had thoughts in that direction but were very cautious about expressing them, because, you know, it was 1967 and they were nice suburban ladies. They referred to the idea of Spock and Kirk being in love as The Premise. One little housewives’ fan club in California wrote to Leonard Nimoy in the hiatus between seasons one and two, and he was very pleasant and agreed to come and meet their group and tell them about being in the show. They didn’t say anything about The Premise directly, in case it offended him, but of course they expressed their enthusiasm for the rapport between Kirk and Spock and how curious they were about Spock’s background and inner life. And Nimoy, who was working on season two by that time, said that he couldn’t give away any specifics but there was an episode coming up that would focus more on Spock’s personal life and the planet Vulcan, and they were naturally delighted and intrigued.
So when they sat down to watch season two, episode one, “Amok Time,” they were primed for an important Spock episode, and then that played out before their widening eyes and I think it’s safe to say it blew their beehives clean off their heads.
…And this is exactly how some of us got onto the path toward getting into SO MUCH [GOOD] TROUBLE later in our lives. Handwritten fanfic… pages and pages and PAGES of it. Tens and hundreds of thousands of words of fanfic. In looseleaf binders.
Just remember: “The first million words are for practice.” :) After that… all bets are off.
And it’s also worth bearing in mind that Amok Time was written by Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon was a bisexual writer (according to his friend, gay author and academic Samuel R Delany) who wrote “The World Well Lost” (1953) which may have been the first SF story about homosexuality to be published in a mainstream SF magazine, not to mention gay-coded stories like “The Saucer of Loneliness”. Ted Sturgeon was a brilliant writer about love, and he knew exactly what he was doing in Amok Time. Although he might not have known what it would spawn.
And if you are curious to read some of his fiction there’s a Selected Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon out there, and the novels The Dreaming Jewels and More Than Human appear to be in print.
imagine you start watching this new show and it’s a silly little show about space set in the future then they announce the next season so you wait excitedly for five months and finally it’s here… you all sit round the tv and suddenly one of the main characters who is known for being unemotional starts going mad because of “biology…” and you slowly realise that he needs to have sex or he’s going to die so the other main character risks his entire career to help him out then they start ‘wrestling’ on the sand and the one going through the mating fever ends up killing the other guy which ends the fever but now he’s depressed because he just killed his best friend but wait he’s not actually dead the unemotional one is overjoyed everything’s fine and then they go back to work like nothing happened… you look at everyone else sitting in stunned silence thinking “did any one else think that was a little… yknow” then you accidentally start modern fandom and shipping culture
very much enjoying the tags thank you everybody
Wait till they all actually watch it and see the unnecessary titty window situation.
[ID: A collection of tags that read:
#THAT was the plot?? #and they wanted us to believe the guy didnt have sex with the unemotional guy?
#star trek is so so gay
#ive seen some posts. but i did not realize it was….. that gay.
#only halfway through did i realise that this was star trek #i thought at first op was watching some freaky ass gay scifi and i was fully prepared to try find it #but lo and behold #ive already watched the damn show
#star trek #are they… you know… ♀️
(In caps) #what #star trek invented fuck or die?????
#what the fuck is going on in star trek
#i have no idea what happens in star trek but uhm. #this is a little (long string of ellipses followed by semicolons)
#they didnt… they wouldnt… #you cannot be serious is that how all the startrek slash started? #spock went into heat???
#i would need to be lobotomized for my own health
#what the fuck is star trek about. End ID]
Based on some of the first-hand accounts I’ve read, fans already had thoughts in that direction but were very cautious about expressing them, because, you know, it was 1967 and they were nice suburban ladies. They referred to the idea of Spock and Kirk being in love as The Premise. One little housewives’ fan club in California wrote to Leonard Nimoy in the hiatus between seasons one and two, and he was very pleasant and agreed to come and meet their group and tell them about being in the show. They didn’t say anything about The Premise directly, in case it offended him, but of course they expressed their enthusiasm for the rapport between Kirk and Spock and how curious they were about Spock’s background and inner life. And Nimoy, who was working on season two by that time, said that he couldn’t give away any specifics but there was an episode coming up that would focus more on Spock’s personal life and the planet Vulcan, and they were naturally delighted and intrigued.
So when they sat down to watch season two, episode one, “Amok Time,” they were primed for an important Spock episode, and then that played out before their widening eyes and I think it’s safe to say it blew their beehives clean off their heads.
…And this is exactly how some of us got onto the path toward getting into SO MUCH [GOOD] TROUBLE later in our lives. Handwritten fanfic… pages and pages and PAGES of it. Tens and hundreds of thousands of words of fanfic. In looseleaf binders.
Just remember: “The first million words are for practice.” :) After that… all bets are off.
And it’s also worth bearing in mind that Amok Time was written by Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon was a bisexual writer (according to his friend, gay author and academic Samuel R Delany) who wrote “The World Well Lost” (1953) which may have been the first SF story about homosexuality to be published in a mainstream SF magazine, not to mention gay-coded stories like “The Saucer of Loneliness”. Ted Sturgeon was a brilliant writer about love, and he knew exactly what he was doing in Amok Time. Although he might not have known what it would spawn.
And if you are curious to read some of his fiction there’s a Selected Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon out there, and the novels The Dreaming Jewels and More Than Human appear to be in print.
So the Washington Post tells us today that President Biden is proposing that Hudson Canyon be designated as a new national marine sanctuary – more or less the undersea equivalent of a national park.
Since this area appears prominently in Deep Wizardry, you might gather that I might be pleased by this. And yeah, I really am!
Meanwhile, this event reminded me that I really needed to dig out my DW maps (for which I still have the originals) and post copies of them to the Young Wizards website. So I’m doing that. Meanwhile, you can see them here.
This one was my initial “draft map” for use while working on the MS away from the library.
…And this was the one that was later used in the Dell hardcover and Yearling paperbacks of DW, and the Harcourt paperbacks that would follow.
…Eventually, since we have so much more data now than we did in 1984, when I drew these, I’ll need to prepare better and more polished versions to go into newer versions of the book. But in the meantime: here these are!
quotes from the star trek novels that makes me feel insane. just bonkers yonkers. absolutely hog wild at 10 in the morning. Like they’re really gonna talk about Spock and Jim like this huh
This is mild by star trek novel standards.
OK, wait, I just looked this up and I think it’s this one where Kirk is – well actually I don’t know what happens to Kirk, but some Star Trek shit, you know the kind, Spock has to fix it – and anyway Jim is lying enchanted science-fictionally asleep in some kind of beautiful room surrounded by flowers and …
But nothing could divert [Spock’s] attention from the slow rise and fall of breath in the broad chest, the flicker under the eyelids in the peaceful, dreaming face.
…
‘Sleeping beauty,’ Omne said. ‘You may perform the awakening - in the traditional manner, if you like.’
Ohhh,that one. (Yeah, Star Trek novels are often Like This.)
Is this the work of a secret slash fan who somehow got hired to write these books? Could that be the case for the other books that are Even More Like This? Because come on. How could it not be?
I would not say “secret”.
@dduane got her start writing Star Trek fanfiction, I believe. And then made the jump to Star Trek novels. That was absolutely a thing that happened a pretty fair deal in Trek fandom back then.
I wrote a lot of (never-published) Trek fanfic in my developmental time, yeah. But to snag a gig as a Trek novelist, you had to have pitched to the editors in the first place (assuming they hadn’t first approached you themselves)… and, statistically speaking, the people most likely to pitch were usually professionals who were Trek fans already. In my case, I was tipped over the edge into pitching by having read one Trek novel that struck me as so substandard that I knew I could do better, and I asked my agent to see if the editors would be willing to look at a pitch from me. They were. …And we all know how that turned out.
As for other Trek novelists of the 80s: Some of that group of writers did indeed come out of the published-Trekfic pool. And some of them, more or less inevitably, were slash fans. Unquestionably the editors would have known about this when they hired them. Now, the attitude in the Paramount offices to slash was ambivalent at best, so a writer with such preferences was pretty much obliged to be cagey about how they expressed them. But in some cases, surprisingly slashy prose did manage to slip through the editorial and Paramount-vetting processes.
In later years, when control from the LA Trek offices and Paramount corporate tightened down, such occurrences became first rare, then impossible. But early on… let’s just say there was a little more wiggle room for the judicious expression of subtext, and leave it at that.
Kit Rodriguez. One of the first Latinx characters I encountered in fantasy/scifi. I related to Nita more when I was a child, but Kit’s existence meant a lot to me because latinx characters in anything was scarce, not to mention a latinx wizard with an accent and who spoke Spanish.
Nita Callahan from “So You Want To Be A Wizard” by Diane Duane. This was a formative book for me and influenced a lot on how i think of magic in fantasy and scifi.
“Once again, the universes remind us of their most basic law: they’re not only stranger than we imagine, they’re stranger than we can imagine. Which is what makes them so much fun.”
– Carl Romeo; The Wizard’s Dilemma, by Diane Duane
“You may be having an effect on [someone] that isn’t obvious to you. The difficulty, of course, is that since we’re not omniscient, we may sometimes do our jobs and think we’ve failed…and still have done massive good to someone we may never be aware of.”
– Carl Romeo; Games Wizards Play, by Diane Diane (the incredible @dianeduane)
I don’t think there’s an applause gif big enough to properly convey my reaction to this.
Also, I love that if anyone tries to say that you’re just “another hack fic writer with no ideas of her own who is jealous of the “real” writers out there”, they could quite literally be crushed under your catalog of award-winning original writing as a response. They can’t dismiss your stance on this topic the way they do to so many unpublished / fanfic writers because you’ve already met all of the standards that they insist someone has before they’ll accept their opinion as worth listening to.
Right?
“Well, fanfic authors never win awards, so–” “WOULD YOU LIKE TO HOLD MY HUGO.” “That’s basically, it’s, you know, the People’s Choice, so–” “LOOK AT MY NEBULA.” “That’s a science fiction award, it doesn’t really–” “LOOK I’VE WON THE ALEX.” “…” “IT’S GIVEN BY THE SAME PEOPLE WHO GIVE THE NEWBURY.” “…” “I’M THE FIRST PERSON TO WIN IT TWICE IN A ROW.” “…well you wrote porn.” “GOSH I SURE DID.”
More attention to this, please. :) From yet another of the I Wrote Fanfic First And I Decline To Feel Shame About It brigade.
(And I also wrote for My Little Pony, which means I may have inadvertently contributed something to Seanan’s state of being. [Which I will file under the “Quiet Unholy Glee” heading.])
Shoutout to Diane Duane, Peter Morwood, and Neil Gaiman for just popping up on my dash and even in my notes every so often with THE most delightful takes and facts about fandom and fandom history. I’ll be reading a response to a fandom post like “go off fandom veteran!” and then I do a doubletake and it’s a beloved sci-fi/fantasy author just delightedly engaging in fandom with us.
I’d heard this was a good book, so I decided to give it a read. However, the first chapter was so chock-full of tech stuff and pseudo-scientific data that I almost gave up on it. Almost. But after I slogged past that first chapter, it became quite interesting.
Various landing parties have been sent to the planet, dubbed Flyspeck because it’s so small, for the purpose of contacting the three indigenous intelligent species and refining their translators. They’re finally making some progress and, deeming it safe for command personnel to beam down, Kirk orders McCoy to write his overdue report from the center seat on the bridge and places him in command while he visits the planet. However, Kirk soon disappears without a trace, a Klingon warship appears in orbit, and McCoy has a chance to test his command skills.
The story is interesting and we discover new depths to the good doctor.
