Star Trek books stuff

Here's an edited excerpt of the schedule posted by Marco Palmieri at TrekBBS, Psi Phi, Simonsays, and perhaps others I've missed. I've left out the SCE ebooks because their schedule hasn't changed (and for what it's worth, I've started buying the ebooks since the print schedule was cut), and I've also left out reprints.

JUN
Articles of the Federation by Keith R.A. DeCandido
Tales From The Captain's Table by various (trade paperback)

JUL
Voyager: String Theory, Book 1: Cohesion by Jeffrey Lang
Strange New Worlds 8 by various (trade paperback)

AUG
Vanguard: Harbinger by David Mack

SEP
TNG: Death in Winter by Michael Jan Friedman (hardcover)

OCT
Titan: The Red King by Andy Mangels and Michael A. Martin

NOV
Voyager: String Theory, Book 2: Fusion by Kirsten Beyer
Voyager: Distant Shores by various (trade paperback)

DEC
Enterprise: Rosetta by David Stern

JAN
Titan: Orion's Hounds by Christopher L. Bennett

FEB
New Frontier: Missing in Action (working title) by Peter David (hardcover)

We also remain cautiously optimistic that the Captain's Glory hardcover novel will be published during the last quarter of 2005.

This is where the news of the schedule cutback really hits home. A lot of series are unrepresented there. I read all of them, so I will be buying and reading all of these books

So... in a nine month period, that's three books that can't be easily slotted into any one of the existing TV series; possibly four, if the Shatnerverse book appears. Three Voyager books, celebrating that show's tenth anniversary. One Next Generation novel and two Titan TNG spinoff novels. One Enterprise novel. And one TOS spinoff Vanguard novel.

It's not like I don't have enough books to read already, but I think I may find this one-book-a-month thing more frustrating than I originally thought.

Meanwhile, over at the Complete Starfleet Library website...

As of April 1, the Well, the online system that hosts my website, is upgrading the amount of web storage space its users can have. I will have a lot more space. So I think I may be adding a lot more cover scans to the site over the next few months. I may have to go for a smaller image size, though, or else make some big changes. One possibility is creating tables, so when the image takes up more vertical space on the page than the accompanying text, it doesn't push the next book's image over. Another is moving away from the current paradigm of listing all books by the year they're published. The problem with the latter is that it would be a lot of work. All those index pages I finally redid would be obsolete. So I don't think I want to go that way. Tables? Maybe. That'll be less time-consuming, but not exactly fast. Either way, a lot of work for a site that costs me money rather than makes it... I think I'll go with smaller pics.

Once I get caught up with the things I want to do with the site, keeping it updated is going to be a breeze. Looks like we're going back to pre-TNG numbers of Star Trek books.

(Now playing: Grandaddy, "AM180," 28 Days Later soundtrack.)

Star Trek-related meanderings

Unless you somehow googled your way here, chances are you already regularly visit a lot of the same places I go to, so you already know about Marco's Vanguard announcements not too long ago, and the apparent fact that a new Star Trek movie is being developed, and that Brannon Braga may finally have the X-Files knockoff series that he always wanted Star Trek to be (and it shares a title with one of Star Trek's all-time lowest moments, "Threshold," a Braga classic).

The Vanguard news is interesting, but I'd like it better if it hadn't come shortly after the news about the cutback in the Trek novel line. I no longer think that the news about that cutback is anything but bad. It may well result in better books overall, but I thought Kevin Ryan's TOS trilogy a few years back was disappointingly amateurish, and it's getting a sequel trilogy, so I can't completely buy the "fewer books but better books" line. Many other fans would disagree with me on that, of course. But getting back to Vanguard... it sounds really interesting, and the long wait between books in the series will probably vex me something fierce. I think it may be time to treat the non-TV series as limited series with a finite run, and wind up some of them over the next two or three years so that others can have their chance. The TV series are the core of the franchise. New Frontier isn't.

As for the new movie... I don't think doing a prequel movie is a great idea. Enterprise spent its first three years struggling against the constraints of being a prequel series before a new producer chose to celebrate its status as a prequel instead. Neither approach had much luck in getting people to watch the show regularly. Hard as it may be for a longtime fan like me to admit, most of the current audience knows Star Trek from The Next Generation and any prequel series or movie has to avoid a lot of what TNG and its successors introduced. What's the upside of doing a prequel? Darned if I can think of one, after four years of Enterprise.

(Now playing: Ivy, "I Guess I'm a Little Too Sensitive," Lately EP.)

Why I Don't Read Fanfic: A Bad, Mean, Cruel Person Speaks Out

Here are the first few lines of the first story in a series by a TrekBBS poster:

She was so full of energy and had been sleeping less. Now this!

At first it was nothing more than an accident in sick bay. Kes had been asked by the doctor to get an instrument from the tray by the door and it flew into her hand. At first it was an accident in sickbay Kes has been asked by the doctor to get an instrument from the tray, by the door of his office and it flew into her hand. She hand only glanced in the direction of the tray.

The doctor's tone was almost accusing "have you been practising using your powers again?"

"No! I just looked at the instrument tray and it came to me, but I have lots of energy and I've been sleeping less.

As much as this new found ability was useful it was also frightening.

You've heard the old line about never getting a second chance to make a first impression, right? This author is not likely to get that second chance.

There are two attempts at establishing that this is the beginning of the story: the first line and the "At first..." scene-setting sentence. The use of "At first" is kind of a mental reboot, taking you back to the beginning a mere one sentence after the story starts.

Let's look at the second paragraph:

At first it was nothing more than an accident in sick bay. Kes had been asked by the doctor to get an instrument from the tray by the door and it flew into her hand. At first it was an accident in sickbay Kes has been asked by the doctor to get an instrument from the tray, by the door of his office and it flew into her hand. She hand only glanced in the direction of the tray.

Getting a little déjà lu there? (No, that's not a typo.) The third sentence essentially repeats the first two sentences with a little extra bad grammar. Lack of punctuation, shaky awareness of tense, and unnecessary punctuation suggest that this was supposed to be overwritten by the first two sentences. Then we have a typo in the last sentence. The word "hand" was probably supposed to be "had." A spellcheck wouldn't catch that, but a human reader would.

Next paragraph:

The doctor's tone was almost accusing "have you been practising using your powers again?"

First, there should be a period after "accusing" and "have" should be capitalized. Second, though this may be more a matter of taste, that's a pretty verb-heavy question. The same meaning could be conveyed with either "practising" or "using" instead of both.

Next paragraph:

"No! I just looked at the instrument tray and it came to me, but I have lots of energy and I've been sleeping less.

Besides the lack of closing quotation marks, there's another case of déjà lu there. Remember the very first line of the story? "She was so full of energy and had been sleeping less." I'm also not certain that the independent clause after the comma is part of the same thought. Should it really be part of the same sentence? The first clause describes what just happened, whereas the second describes the character's health.

Finally:

As much as this new found ability was useful it was also frightening.

The prose doesn't flow as smoothly as it could. "New found" should probably be either newfound or new-found. I'd also use a comma between clauses.

I've considered how I might rewrite these few lines, and I'm not sure where to start. The use of "At first" and "had been asked" distance the reader from the action, as though we're seeing this in retrospect and we're going to switch to the viewpoint character's current situation, but that's not how the story plays out. I think it might be best to drop that and jump straight into the action.

Maybe something more like this...

The clatter of falling surgical instruments broke the silence of Voyager's sickbay. The Doctor turned and looked at Kes, and saw a surprised expression on her face. The instrument tray he'd just asked her for was in her hand, though she hadn't had time to walk across sickbay for it, and several of the instruments that had been on it were now scattered across the floor.

"It just... flew into my hand," Kes said.

"Well, at least you caught the tray," the Doctor said drily. "Can you help me pick these up?"

Before either could bend down, the instruments rose and arrayed themselves perfectly on the tray.

"I see we've been practising our powers recently." The Doctor's expression shifted from exasperation to concern. "How have you been feeling lately?"

"Fine. I'm just full of energy these days. I haven't been sleeping as much as usual, but otherwise, I feel normal. But I'm worried. I didn't do this consciously, it just... happened. The tray just flew into my hand."

"Yes, you mentioned that. But I don't think the tray is the one with the telekinetic power."

Okay, that could still use some polishing, but it conveys the same information (albeit from the Doctor's POV rather than Kes's this time around) with a little more clarity and less repetition.

Another approach:

It started in sickbay. The Doctor had asked Kes for a tray of surgical instruments. Turning to reach for it, she found it in her hand as if it had suddenly materialized there.

Kes had been feeling almost unusually energetic and she'd been sleeping less than usual. That was why she'd been in Sickbay in the middle of the ship's night shift helping the Doctor.

"Been practising your powers?" the Doctor had asked her. She hadn't, really; she was more surprised than he was.

But before long the surprise had melted away, replaced by a sense of unease... and, later, fear. Wandering through Voyager's eerily deserted corridors three days later, Kes wondered if she could somehow have prevented everything that followed that incident in Sickbay.

This is why I'm not a writer. There are so many ways you can start a story, so many ways to tell it, so many perspectives to choose from, that I've never had a clear enough vision to get me to the point of sitting down and writing. So this fanfic writer is one up on me there. But some of the most blatant problems with the story can be spotted just by reading it. If the author can't be bothered to read the story, neither can I.

(Now playing: Brian Eno and J. Peter Schwalm, "Rising Dust," Drawn From Life.)