alara_r

So back in 1992-93, before I got into the Internet, I started writing this really, really awesome cyberpunk-with-psi-powers novel, featuring an albino, neutered telekinetic assassin who's a double agent, and a shapechanger with multiple personalities, one of which is a werewolf, and a teenage girl with telepathy and cyberpathy, who narrowly avoided becoming an ego-destroyed conduit for an artificial sentience and now has a secret that could shake up the world. It had anime physics, it had made-up future slang, it had extra genders and superpowers and multiple double crosses and all in all it was essentially a paean to the Rule of Cool.

And then I got into Q, and started writing Only Human, and ran out of steam on the project. I only ever got two and a half chapters into it.

My top priorities right now are still The Cold At The Heart of the Light and Play Like God, but I think I'm going to resume work on Hands of the Bright. In typing in the handwritten third chapter, I've observed that my writing has improved slightly -- I can tighten things up and remove some "she said" type phrases -- but overall I'm surprised how well the thing holds up. I guess I shouldn't be -- I still like the opening chapter of Only Human and it was written contemporaneously with Hands of the Bright.

Also, I found the opening few pages of an original story set in the backstory to The Green World, which riffs on X-Files rather than on TNG like "The Green World" does. That, too, was pretty good and deserves for me to finish it one of these days (although, honestly, "The Green World" itself probably deserves it more.)

(BTW, all links in this post are going to original work friends-locked on alara_works; I friend everyone who friends that journal, but I do need some way to control who gets to read my original, publishable work before it's published. So if you want to read any of this, friend that journal and I'll give you access.)

New Star Trek fics (at least, new in the sense that I haven't linked them here):

Two for matrithon:
Loving the Alien: Lwaxana Troi's entire life has been about her love for aliens.

Goodbye: The story of Captain Silva LaForge, Geordi LaForge's mother.

One for startrekbigbang:
West: Your Possible Pasts: Second in "West" series (though written third). Q gives Janeway a gift containing all the memories she lost to temporal loops and other such incidents.

One just for fun:
Mad World: Chapter 1, Unreliable Omniscient Narrator: I have no idea how many chapters this is going to be. Dixon Hill's having a day; the cross-town bus has square wheels, his landlady Worf is going to cut him with a bat'leth if he hasn't got the rent, Durango the gunfighter is looking for him, and he trips over a homeless bum who claims to be God.

Not a fic project:
Created trek_bookverse, for fanfic set in or featuring the characters from the Star Trek novels.

Totally unrelated to Star Trek:
In honor of the remake of The Prisoner, featuring Ian McKellan, a 99-word ficlet for the original series:
It's A Beautiful Day

Also, got Chp. 2 of Cold Light finished and Chp. 3 started.

Rant 1:

Why why why why would a bank "upgrade" to an online banking system WITH LESS FUNCTIONALITY than they had previously?

I want my ability to transfer from my lines of credit and my real-time snapshot of my financial data back, goddamn it! Especially the lines of credit; if the bank changed the way it batches transactions so it doesn't actually *know* I deposited to checking until midnight, then they won't be able to show it on the web site, but there was no fucking excuse for removing the ability to manage lines of credit from the main screen and removing the ability to transfer from lines of credit.

Rant 2:

Why do I need to fucking WRITE A LETTER to get a copy of my old credit card statement? You have three of the old ones online; why isn't there a function for "retrieve old archived credit card statement", and assuming you can't do that, why can't I just call you and ask you to mail one to me? Forcing me to submit my request in *writing* is fucked up... the reason I don't *have* the statement is that you pushed your paperless product on me, I signed up for it, and only after four months did I figure out that you only store three months of data. Unacceptable! A paperless statement product, where you never get a physical statement, needs to either email you a PDF of your statement, or needs to make all the statements you ever had accessible in some way -- three on line and the rest archived offline where you can request them with a button click and get them within 24 hours would be ok.

I hate bad system designers right now. I hate them with the passion of a thousand fiery suns and I hope they all have to go work at Dilbert's company and then the pointy haired boss fires them all and hires on a bunch of guys from India and they have to go to work flipping burgers.

I've finally, finally finished my story for startrekbigbang; the requirement was 15K and the story insisted on being 47K! It's off to beta now, to be posted Nov 10.

I am now going on fannish hiatus to work on professional stuff. I have The Cold At The Heart of the Light to finish, and I may start Play Like God for NaNo (I might not, because I might concentrate on Cold Light instead), and I have a project planned to have 52 short original fic stories in the can by Jan 2011.

I'll probably still generate the occasional short ficlet (particularly about Q, because I'm not dropping my muse communities with him, and I do sort of have an idea for the Rule 63 Watchmen community, watchingrule63), and I may very well still kick off a Star Trek bookfic community, and I'll be doing prompts and such for matrithon as I posted there recently. But I'm not signing up for any new fanfic challenges this year, I'm not expecting to finish or make progress on any of my long works such as Working In Groups, and while I do hope to finish Churchill's Black Dog, I won't be starting a *new* Judgement Day story.

Don't know how long the hiatus will last -- almost certainly through the end of November, possibly until one of the novels is done. The novels will be posted friendslocked to alara_works as chapters are completed; if anyone wants to read them, just friend alara_works and I'll friend back from there.

I'm working on "Your Possible Pasts" for startrekbigbang, due Oct 10. I expect to be done with the story this weekend, and I could seriously use a beta. It's Voyager, Janeway, lots of flashbacks to Voyager events, and pretty much every Q in the Continuum that we know of turns up. No explicit sex; some un-explicit sex in flashbacks. Anybody up for it? This sucker's 30 K and counting.

Sadly, I'm not going to be able to do "War Stories" for startrekbigbang; the entry I had planned for the matrithon, "Your Possible Pasts" (part of the West series), ended up eating all my time and in the end I had to do something else for the Matrithon for the Janeway/Q prompt anyway. That story is *already* at 15K and not done, but I can probably finish it faster than "War Stories", where the problem would not be doing 15K but *finishing* in only 15K... I'm thinking it will be longer than that, and I don't know how much longer, and I've only got 5 days.

After the Star Trek Big Bang, I have committed to finishing "Working In Groups" for the 12 Days of Trekmas E-Book project, for early October, and then I have to go back to Cold Light. At this point I won't have Cold Light done by my birthday as I'd hoped, but I still live in hope of getting it done by the end of October. Then we have NaNo, where I plan to get 50,000 words done on "Play Like God", the original novel where a character who is, essentially, Q, is on Earth in the 21st century trying to track down a corrupt politician of his own kind who he believes to be impersonating the God of Earth's primary religions.

So I won't be getting back to either "War Stories" or "Churchill's Black Dog" until those are all out of my way, most likely; December's probably my month for finishing those.

Why did I just discover st_genderswap's existence when I am on deadline for startrekbigbang and my third matrithon story? I don't even have time to format and repost genderswap ST fics I've already *done*.

Speaking of the matrithon, it's kicked off with a boom, with strong entries by penknife and kernezelda so far, as well as me. My story is:

Options, a Voyager Janeway/Q story, rated R, bondage and sexual situations but no actual sex.

I have Lwaxana Troi done and beta'd for Wednesday and have to finish Silva LaForge's story for Thursday.

Does anyone who is actually really familiar with Lwaxana Troi want to beta this for me? I have, of course, watched several episodes with the character, but most of them were years ago, so a lot of this is going off of Memory Alpha and transcripts, and I'd really like someone with more familiarity to check it over for me.

So the prompt is "Janeway/Q, unexpected", so that's a no-brainer, right? I start one of my West fics for this, a month ago.

At 15000 words and probably only half done, I figured I'd better abandon it for something I could complete faster. So I picked this one idea I had which was rather smuttier (though no *actual* sex), figuring I could knock it off quickly.

It's at 12000 words. Jesus Christ. When will I learn to write short?

Anyway, it's a Janeway/Q set in the alternate future timeline of Endgame, and it could probably really use a beta. Especially one who has read Rocky's Q and Sympathy, because there are only so many ways to handle a Janeway/Q relationship while being respectful of the J/C subtext from the show, and I think I ended up doing a bunch of the same things she did simply because I couldn't think of any other way it could go, and I want to make sure the resemblance is within the range of "so-and-so's great story had ideas that inspired me, but the story is my own" and not "I totally ripped off someone else's story."

Stolen from penknife.

1.comment with any character you know I've written.
2. receive three bits of trivia about their sexuality: practices, preferences, experiences, fantasies, kinks, etc.
3. Profit!

Okay, maybe not so much of the profit. :-)

My second fic for multiverse5000, the Q & Scorpius fic, is finally done and posted on my fic journal:

Everything You Ever

This is Q being a bastard in his uniquely Q way of being a bastard, and Scorpius knowing better and falling for it anyway. It was *really* hard to write for some reason. I'd have thought these guys would have just come jumping out of my typing fingers, but they were very reluctant to talk to each other or me. (Well, Q was willing to talk. I think the reticence was all Scorpius'.)

Like I don't have enough to do, but...

liviapenn mentioned on her journal that she was thinking of creating a TOS Bechdel ficathon. Me personally, I am not interested in a TOS Bechdel ficathon because TOS does not have Gaila and therefore the only possible combination of women who actually have some reason for interacting with each other *and* that I have the slightest interest in, that I can think of, would be Uhura & Saavik, and that's fine and all but no. I want to see a general Trek Bechdel ficathon, because aside from VOY Trek canon fails Bechdel all the damn time.

And then I thought, where_no_woman is great in part because it's a general fic community, *not* a fest, so *any* story you write centering on Star Trek women works. So what if there were a community for Bechdel-compliant Star Trek fic, and then if someone wants to run a TOS Bechdel fest with prompts and all, they could advertise it on the comm and people could post their stories there after the fest, but if you happen to have a Seven & Torres work together to save the ship from zombies fic lying around on your hard drive, you could post there?

So I'm thinking about starting such a community. The definition of Bechdel-compliant, in terms of Trek fic, would be:

- main character is female, and if there are two mains they're both female
- at least 50% of the interpersonal interaction in the story is between female characters
- the female characters are interacting about a subject that has nothing to do with any male romantic interests, family members or friends.

For instance, if Troi and Crusher are talking about the medical treatment of the catatonic PTSD guy they rescued from the alien ship and how they can get him to feel safe and open up about what killed the rest of his crew, that's not "two women talking about a man", that's two women talking about their job. However, if the conversation's about Wesley, or Captain Picard in a non-job-related way (not "Deanna, do you think Captain Picard's been replaced by an alien shapeshifter?" but "Deanna, do you think Captain Picard's acting like he's under a lot of stress lately?"), it doesn't count.

Femslash counts because it's *male* romantic interests that are excluded. If the women want to talk about how much they've secretly wanted to boink each other but couldn't because Our Duty Stood In The Way, that's still Bechdel compliant.

All Trek would be welcome, as would AU-always-the-other-sex-genderswaps (I personally think that genderswap, very often, is specifically undertaken as a tool to redress the massive gender imbalance of canon, and on a comm that's all about female-female interaction I wouldn't want to exclude it. But only if they were always the opposite sex, because just changing James T. Kirk into a woman won't make him *be* a woman.)

Would anyone be interested?

(Xposted to where_no_woman as well as my personal LJ.)

Q and Scorpius for multiverse5000: was due June 24, is massively late, but I'm almost done - deadline ASAP

Churchill's Black Dog: wrote 13K words for Finish-A-Thon 2009, but story may have as many as another 13K in it before it's done -- no specified deadline anymore, but it's holding up Judgement Day and I can't post it anywhere but my writing journal until it's done, so ASAP

A Janeway/Picard/Q fic for Trek OT3's prompt challenge -- kind of cheating because it's my prompt and I put it in knowing I had a fic idea for it, but hey, prompts aren't exclusive for that challenge -- no specified deadline

akire_yta's ST09 Full Genderswap Ficathon: I want to do how Commander Georgia Kirk managed to blow herself up saving the crew of the Kelvin and still have baby Jamie get born, 'cause I've got a plan for how that works. Also, female Nero and why her unborn child died on Romulus along with her husband, and no, mpreg is not involved. No specific deadline, but the ficathon's open now, so if I get to this soon I can post it right away.

My three matrithon prompts:
Janeway/Q, unexpected, Sept 7
Lwaxana Troi, loving the alien, Sept 9
Silvia LaForge, saying goodbye, Sept 10
All will probably be crossposted to where_no_woman and the last one can be crossposted to andtimetable.

"War Stories" for startrekbigbang: Sept 15

Working In Groups complete for Trek Twelve Days of Christmas eBook project, due early October

The Cold At The Heart of the Light: I want this mofo done by my birthday. Oct 20. Then revisions and second draft and I want to be able to shop it out to an agent by beginning of 2010.

Play Like God: This will be my NaNo project this year. Technically, it's already started so you're not supposed to do that, but I've got maybe 2K words done on a planned 100K+ novel, so all I need is to do 50K *new* words for NaNo.

"Chooser of the Slain": this depends on some more of "West" getting written, but is intended for where_no_woman and andtimetable. Suzy-Q puts together a team of dead mortal women to help her cross over into another universe to rescue Q from 0, after Q and Janeway went to rescue Junior and succeeded at the cost of Q being captured. Janeway's not a main character in "Chooser" because having her would have rendered Rachel Garrett and Silvia LaForge irrelevant, so she's recuperating from getting badly hurt and thus the story's technically not a part of "West", which is all about Janeway, but it depends on more of "West" getting done to set it up. No deadline, not intended for a ficathon.

If you were planning to sign up for the matrithon, today's the last day to claim a prompt. I will probably close it around midnight Eastern Standard Time because it's Friday and I stay up late. So get your prompts claimed now if you haven't already!

Meme taken from astrogirl and selenak: first lines of my 20 most recent stories. I am counting stories that were posted new, not new chapters of ongoing stories.

( 20 lines for 20 stories )

What does this tell me?... well, for starters, that most of my opening lines are boring. The only ones of these that are good hooks are 1, 10 and 13, oddly enough all Voyager stories, and 13 only because of the genderswapping in it. Maybe 2 and 16 explain what's going on enough to grab the reader, but there's not so much oomph in any of them.

Aside from that... most of my fic is third person past tense, which I already knew, and I very rarely open with dialogue.

The Remix reveal was two days ago, and ironically it turns out my remixer is also my remixee, wizefics. The story I did for wizefics was The More Things Change (Blue-Eyed Boy Remix), a remix of wizefics' The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same.

I am a bit saddened and guilty because I think that what Wize did with my fic was much more ambitious and interesting than what I did with hers (I assume hers, 80% of the fanfic community's female, but if I'm wrong please let me know :-)), and I probably could have written a lot more (in fact originally I was tempted to do a movieverse version of Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, the Vision and Scarlet Witch comic in which they invite all their friends from the Avengers to Thanksgiving, and then Magneto shows up. For dinner. But I am not sure movieverse Erik would actually have done that.) But it gave me an opportunity to write Pietro for pretty much the first time ever, and to put him in the movieverse, and now I kind of want to read the story about how Wanda accidentally resurrected their mom for a week, which means one of these days I'll have to write it. :-) Maybe for Halloween.

Over here! We have bazillions of fandoms and lots of great older female characters to choose from, and fic length requirement is only 500 words and posting doesn't start till September, so come sign up! Take a prompt! Take two, they're small.

I haven't had a chance to really read through most of the Remix, but of course I read the story that was remixed from mine. This is the second time "A Confession" was remixed, but this one is TOTALLY AWESOME, taking my dark little vignette and turning it into an action/adventure noir mystery with Jean Grey as a private eye and Charles Xavier as a very very scary villain. It is teh awesome. Go read it.

Imperfect Contrition

As for me, I'm not dead, and yes, I'm still working on the Q & Scorpius fic for multiverse (massively late, but I don't feel guilty because I did do a multiverse fic on time, and this year Multiverse wasn't a fic exchange). But I wrote a short piece for the where_no_woman ficlet challenge, for a new Trek story arc whose premise is a complete spoiler for the Pocket Books novel "Before Dishonor" by Peter David. Short non-spoilery summary: Kathryn Janeway explores the Q Continuum and writes a log about her findings.

West: Strange New Worlds (contains spoilers for ending of "Before Dishonor")

First, my current status:

( The stories I have already committed to: )
And now, the Big Bang.

startrekbigbang is a ficathon for long, new fiction for Star Trek. Their definition of "long" is 15 K. I can't do any of my existing, posted WIPs to meet this because it has to be new fiction, and I have to be careful to pick a plot bunny that I could reasonably get done in close to 15K... if it turns into a novel unexpectedly I'm screwed, because the thing has to be finished by Sept 15th. And it can't be a plot bunny that's best written short, since it needs to be a minimum of 15 K.

So I'm going to poll for interest. I'm not bound to this poll -- if I decide that in retrospect I really don't want to write story X, I won't even if it wins -- but I'll use it in making my decision as to which of my ideas to do for the Star Trek Big Bang.

Untitled, human!Q@BOBW: Either sequel to "Working In Groups" or just generic DQ spinoff. (Dunno if same universe as "Need", but it would be interesting if so.) Mortal Q on the Enterprise during "Best of Both Worlds". Angst-o-rama, either P/Q or P&Q.

War Stories: Part of the universe in "A Doctor, A Q and a Baby". Since Janeway didn't work, Q tries to get Picard to be the father of Q's child. The TNG crew do not believe Q, so Q takes them to the Continuum. Maybe taking them to the middle of a war zone when none of them can use the weapons was not a good idea. Picard/Q with Q genderswapped, also, oddly enough, grudging R&Q. (And background pairing R/T.)

West: Spoilers for "Before Dishonor": ( this story makes no sense unless you know how the book ended or don't care about being spoiled for it. ) Janeway and Q are in it if you don't want spoilers, but not romantically. I need this one done before I can do "Chooser of the Slain", the story I need all the kickass dead women for.

Sadly I can't promise that "Chooser" will be close enough to 15K that I can promise it done, so I can't put it on the list. Likewise, the horror story with the entities that the TNG crew perceive as Cthulhoid extradimensional energy squids that bring insanity and death, and Q perceives as vampires, is probably too long as well. And I can't put any of Judgement Day on because Judgement Day stories can't be done out of order and I don't know when I'll be up to the next long one.

(With only three choices, I'm not going to bother to literally poll. If you have a preference, just tell me in comments.)

For a story idea I'm percolating, I need suggestions for dead badass women in Star Trek.

The timeframe is VOY-era, bookverse, post-"Before Dishonor", and yes, I've got her. (Trying not to give away spoilers here.) So any ENT era character would by now be dead, most likely, as would most TOS humans. But I specifically don't just need dead women, I need *badass* dead women. Women with combat experience. I love Hoshi Sato but a linguist would be totally useless in this lineup (and I'm not sure T'Pol would be of any use, either, given that she's not a combat telepath and I have two dead Vulcans already, a combat telepath and a doctor.) I've got Silvia LaForge and Rachel Garrett, so I don't need any more starship captains, which means Number One isn't of much use to me (I also don't really need science officers.) Got Jadzia, Yar, and every role ever played by Suzy Plakson (one of whom, obviously, is not dead but is in fact putting together this team for her own purposes.) But I can't think of any TOS-era female fighters, and the only one from ENT I can think of is one of the Suzy Plakson roles, and the one who isn't actually a separate being from one of the other ones in my universe (Plakson played four characters in Trek, but in my universe, two of them were the same person.)

I'll take suggestions from the bookverse and minor one-off characters from episodes. Particularly looking for non-humans and ENT/TOS characters. But they need to be women and they need to have combat experience. And preferably no more starship captains, which is why I haven't already gone for the Romulan Commander (who may well not be dead, anyway).