alara_r

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).

I've finally gotten off my butt to put the mature women ficathon I talked about before together. I have no idea of the level of interest, so exact dates are still up in the air, but we'll roughly have prompt collection for two weeks, signups for two weeks, then a month to write stories and have the stories due in September approximately.

Here are the relevant links:

Welcome post

Definitions

Prompts collection

Pimp this around!

You were supposed to be a quick little one-off thing about elderly Hoshi Sato giving her condolences to Spock over Amanda's death. You were not supposed to introduce Spock's entire human family and make him go sit shiva with them for a few days. I do not have *time* to invent personalities for Spock's grandmother, aunt, and two cousins. Now you have gotten yourself put on the back burner until after Remix is done. Happy now?

Dear other story:

Would a character who is half-crazed with grief and horror because his species just invented weapons *actually* be able to explain to a virgin how sex works while he's doing it with her, or am I just doing this because they're aliens and if he doesn't explain to her how sex works for their kind, the reader will have no idea what's going on?

Dear other other story:

You *are* aware I'm supposed to be writing Q and Scorpius right now, right? And then after that Remix? I'm not supposed to be writing you? Good, glad we got that cleared up.

Dear finish-a-thon story:

Yes, I know I promised myself to you until you're done. I lied. It's not me, it's you. You're too damn high maintenance. I'll finish you when I've made some of these other fics go away.

Dear story that I am not writing:

I don't care how badly I want to improve my Bechdel score, I do not have time to write about the heroic sacrifice of Captain Number One, except with real name, and how this inspires her younger sister Christine to ditch her boyfriend Roger and go into Starfleet, with the support of her older sister's Betazoid husband and family, the clan of the Fifth House. Yes, it is very funny to have all of Majel Barrett's roles except the computer tied together in the AOS universe where Majel Barrett can't play any of them, but save the Bechdel score improvements for when I have time.

Dear all the Picard/Q fic I am not writing: shut the hell up. I wrote three smutty ficlets, what more do you want from me? I'm *busy*. Go *away*.

I have never before written Spock.

I don't think anyone who knows me from fandom really knows what a *staggering* oversight this is. Between the ages of about 7 and 14 or so, Spock was *everything* to me. He was like my dad and my role model and the object of what passes for lust when you're 9, all rolled into one being. Every story idea I had featured Spock. Oh, I got pretty consumed by Battle of the Planets and then later X-Men, but I never quite got off Spock.

It is therefore an irony of ironies that I have written Kirk four times now (Jane Kirk's Enterprise: Sacrifice, Judgement Day: Te Morituri Salutamus, Q Interrupted, and Return Engagement) and have NEVER WRITTEN SPOCK. I've written every *other* major Vulcan. I've written T'Pol and I've written Tuvok and I have this horrifically long Q-as-mortal AU novel with spinoffs that has, I think, six Vulcans with speaking parts, one who only turns up in flashbacks and one who turns out to be a Romulan spy, so that's approximately eight Vulcan OCs... But I've never written Spock!

I am correcting that situation right now. Oh, brave new universe that has *two* Spocks in it! Woo!

Really, it'd be much better if I could include my original fic, but as most of that is unpublished I'm stuck with this.

The Bechdel rule, you may recall, is that a story contain at least two female characters, who interact with each other, and talk about something that isn't a man. I interpret this as "a man they are connected to", such as a romantic partner, love interest or family member; two female doctors talking about a male patient would be Bechdel compliant in my view.

I've divided my fic into three categories of Bechdel compliance:

Non-compliant, female protagonist: main character is female (or *a* main character is female), but does not significantly interact with another female character, or interacts with another female character to talk about a man.

Low-Bechdel: story has a female main character or POV who has some interaction with other female characters, but this is not a significant part of the story; or story has a character who is marginally female (ie, Q in female form) strongly interacting with genuinely female characters; or story is from POV of male character but female characters in it interact with each other.

High-Bechdel: story is built around interaction of two or more female characters who are *main* characters or POVs in multi-POV stories.

( Bechdel Non-Compliant With Female Protagonist )

( Bechdel Low-Compliant )

( Bechdel High-Compliant )

This is kind of sad. I mean, sort of to be expected, since my favorite characters are Q, Magneto, Xavier and Scorpius, and female characters like Janeway, Kitty Pryde and Seven of Nine are second-tier. My original fic is chock full of female characters, and in fact The Cold At the Heart Of The Light is basicaly a Bechdel festival in that it's a female character who gets recruited by another female character who is her close personal rival to save the life of another female character who is her mentor and nemesis, and those three relationships are the triangle that a great deal of the book is built on... and I've *tried* to fix the problem with some genderswaps... but really? Kind of sad.

I forget who, but someone here said they were interested in a P/Q rec list, so I put one together. This is based on my personal opinion, not word of God (or word of Q, for that matter.)

Alara's Picard/Q recs

Some of these contain adult content; ratings are given by the stories, using the American MPAA standard.

Also, since I cannot fairly rec my own fics, I created a separate list of all of my Picard/Q fics:

Alara's Picard/Q fics

This list, too, contains stories with adult content.

Two more to finish off with. The Porn Battle ends today, as does my personal experiment to see if I can write interesting smut on short notice with a limited word count (answer: yes, or at least I think it's interesting.) With the kind of writing I do, I need to be *able* to write smut, although most of the time I eschew PWPs because I prefer my smut to be surrounded by a plot. So this was a test of my boundaries and writing ability, and I think I pulled it off.

Return Engagement: This is a smutty sequel to the slightly risque but not explicit humor piece Q, Interrupted. Q resurrects Kirk to demand a finish to the interrupted encounter they had years ago in the previous story. K/S is pretty much stated as background (also K/Mitchell and K/Imaginary Finnegan from the shore leave planet); P/Q is strongly implied. The prompt was "Q/any, genderplay", so it contains genderswaps and as such is both het and slash. Brief nod to AOS at the end.

The Teasing Game: Picard/Q. Prompt was "teasing". After a P/Q AU where they're both women and a P/Q AU where Q is mortal, I wanted to do one where the only AU about it was that they're actually having sex and it's otherwise our normal, canonical Picard and Q. Picard is on a potentially dangerous mission that Q happens to know isn't dangerous at all, and Q is bored. Games ensue.

And that's it for the smut, folks. Now back to "Churchill's Black Dog", my second Multiverse prompt and the remix.

My first fic for multiverse5000 is done, a Star Trek/Firefly crossover for the prompt "Wash becomes a Q". Of course I sort of cheated in that he didn't *become* a Q so much as that he always was one; for some time I've wanted to play with the concept I've hinted at with some of my Suzy-Q fics that a Q "role playing game" is inserting oneself incognito into a mortal life and playing it out without using your powers, so that death is the end of the game.

Game Over

A couple of P/Q ficlets for Porn Battle 8, both NC-17:

Brought Low: Prompt was: Picard/Q, gender-change. So I changed them both. Jeanne-Marie Picard's always been a woman, Q's always taken female form. And the episode "Q-Pid" goes... differently.

Need: Prompt was: Picard/Q, mortal. So Q's human now. More emotional than pr0ntastic but I did try to get some sex in there.

You know, I really need to do a response to a prompt where they're both still guys, Q has his powers, the Enterprise isn't populated by pink fuzzy unicorns... the AU stuff is fun but why is it all I'm doing?

So at the moment the Porn Battle is going on over on Dreamwidth. Thus far I've done a Janeway/Q (prompt was: Janeway/other, power) and a Picard/Q (prompt was: Picard/Q, gender-change), and I may do a couple more. But there is one that I desperately want to see that I am totally unable to write, and I live in hope that someone, *anyone*, will write this pairing.

The fandom and prompt(s) are: Doctor Who/Star Trek: The Next Generation, Tenth Doctor/Q, apotheosis, corinthian, crystal fields, risa, sonic screwdriver, author's choice (stories are generally based on just one of the words or phrases)

I have no idea why I am so desperate to see Ten/Q. I don't even *watch* Doctor Who. I have seen, like, maybe five episodes with Ten and three with Nine and four, total, of all the previous Doctors and I can't even remember which ones they were. So I am totally and completely not qualified to *write* Ten. (Or any Doctor.) But for some reason I have had a serious kink lately for seeing Doctor & Q stories, especially Ten and Q... and *porn* would just be the awesomest thing ever.

The battle runs until June 15th, 9 pm UK time (which I think is GMT actually, so that's convenient.) I *know* there are people on my friendslist who write Doctor Who fic. Isn't there *anyone* out there willing to write one of these prompts? (Which, for the record, are not mine and I actually have no idea whose they are... and I would be fine with Ten/Q that has nothing whatsoever to do with one of the prompts... I just wanna *see* it dammit.)

So a while ago I posted about starting a mature woman ficathon, where the idea would be that the stories have to be about a woman 40 or over.

I'm about ready to do that, but I need a catchy name for an LJ community. I was thinking Matri-thon (matri- from matriarch), trying to find some sort of positive word for a mature woman (our language is scarce on that), but I dunno, is that lame? Anyone got better ideas?

So I'm writing my multiverse5000 story, which is due Sunday, but then I found out that Porn Battle 8 had prompts with Q, and, uh... ok, I've committed smut.

Janeway's Turn: Written for the prompt "Janeway/other, power." Yes, I wrote Q in a prompt that Q wasn't in. (I do think I'll take on some of the prompts he actually *is* in, but I've wanted to write this scene for some time.) This is J/Q, therefore het (I suppose that doesn't go without saying given my penchant for genderswaps), with explicit sex, bondage and power games, but no pain (well, unless you count tickling and teasing as painful.) Janeway's on top. This time, at least. :-) This is totally a PWP.

I've also started writing qcontinuum in an adults-only prompt comm, though so far I haven't gotten him to do anything more than answer questions in list format, albeit questions about sex. I'm hoping to actually get some ficlets out of this, though.

Because a prompt came up that fit it so beautifully, I posted a teaser snippet of an AOS (Star Trek reboot, stands for Alternate Original Series) version of "Dance of Chameleon and Mirror" in which things are TOTALLY DIFFERENT to my Q journal.

Quid Pro Quo

Contains, obviously, spoilers for the movie. The explanation in this story as to what caused the scientifically impossible plot device that drives the plot of the movie is merely my wild speculation. The story this is part of, once more of it is written, sort of treats Spock vs. Q as canon, kind of. But this part of it is deadly serious.

So I have this idea which in premise sounds like total crackfic, but after seeing how Jim Kirk acted in STXI, I am even more convinced that it absolutely makes sense. The trouble is that it starts from my Jane Kirk's Enterprise series, which I have written exactly one story in... admittedly it follows almost directly from that story, but about eleven years later, and then jumps to the main timeline TNG universe to deal with the repercussions, and then maybe back to an alt of the JKE universe where a canon character from main timeline will come in to harass and follow around an alternate self, but that would be between eighteen to thirty-five years after my one story.

So I have *aaaaaallll* this setup work to do. Admittedly setup work I wanted to do eventually anyway to establish the JKE universe and write about their adventures (it would help if I could figure out Spock's frickin' name, because Spock is totally not a girl name either on Vulcan *or* Earth, and doesn't seem to turn into any female analogues, either.) But I want to do the TNG story because I am so goddamn predictable, but I can't do it until I've done the JKE story that sets it up, but I can't do *that* because eleven years after the start of the JKE universe is far too long to jump ahead in an AU as radical as "Kirk and Spock are both women".

And I keep wanting to somehow bring in the AOS (STXI) universe. Because Jane is an AU of TOS!Kirk, not AOS!Kirk, and might possibly be horrified at him, and making them meet would be a totally asshole thing to do which would be completely in character for someone who has discovered to their horror that they have a biological connection to them and wants to learn more *and* torment them at the same time. But, again, all the goddamn setup...

On Sunday I worked on my Finish-A-Thon story. On my laptop, because I was in New York. And then I decided to log in remotely to my workstation at home and copy the file.

I COPIED IT IN THE WRONG DIRECTION.

A day's worth of work, gone. AAAAAAAHHHH! And the deadline's coming up fast...

A Kiss Before the War: Picard/Q. What happens to Picard and Q's dealings with one another when Q is done testing humanity, and we've passed by Continuum standards?

First Born Son: In two parts. The Q have no gender... except for Q's son, who feels himself to be male. Janeway agrees with him that this should not be a big deal. His parents disagree.
First Born Son, Pt. 1
Part 2

I jumped ahead to write a scene (it'll have dialogue marks and non-speech parts when it actually appears in the story, but right now it's a first person monologue) because it fit a prompt for realmof_themuse. This will be close to the end of Working In Groups.

Praying to the Continuum

Stories I have to write, am writing, or really want to write, the "not already part of an ongoing series" edition:

( Have to write: )

( Started, should finish: )

( Want to write: )

I finished my second story for the lgbtfest. I have to post it on Friday because I'm going away for the weekend and Friday's the only amnesty day I'm likely to have internet. It's Picard/Q AND I DO NOT KNOW IF IT WORKS. It feels like maybe I'm doing the fic equivalent of that Far Side cartoon where there's this complicated equation on one side and a complicated equation on the other side and in the middle it says "And then a miracle happens!" I need a beta reader, preferably someone familiar with Picard/Q dynamics.

Crossposting to alara_works as well. HELP!