General Q & A Session For The Authors

Another question: is it difficult for British authors to write for an American Franchise? As to the linguistig nuances, an as everything is written in American English they are probably lost on me.....

 

Hi writers - first of all thank you for all the great work you do. I feel it’s important to note that especially with everything that’s been going on over the 2 years your passion for producing great books is truly appreciated.

Right 2 questions if that’s ok?
1. What is the 1 x Star Trek work and the 1 x non-Star Trek work you are most proud of having written.

2. What is the franchise you most regret not having written for? For example @Christopher have you ever been tempted to try and do a Doctor Who novel - I for one would be exited to see your take on it!

 

In Trek, I think The Buried Age is probably my most epic achievement, though I'm also proud of my two Titan novels as pure science fiction creations.

In my original fiction, there's not much to choose from, but right now what I'm most proud of is my new audio novel trilogy Tangent Knights. It's a fairly lightweight tale, but I feel it has some of my richest, most emotional character work and storytelling, and I managed to craft a narrative that nicely escalates from book to book and builds to a really epic climax (though only Book 1 is out so far). I had a huge amount of fun doing it, as well as getting to learn how to write in a new medium. And there will probably be more books to follow!

Who would be nice, or DC Comics. Or Stargate. I dunno, I don't really have a single strongest regret when it comes to tie-ins. I see non-Trek tie-ins more as a "could be nice" sort of thing than some yearning need. Heck, I always wanted to be a primarily original author who did tie-ins as a sidebar. My biggest regret is that that hasn't happened, though my original output is certainly on the increase lately.

 

Do you have a favorite character original to TrekLit that isn't your own?

Who would you love to write that you haven't gotten a chance to?

 

For the former, I'd have to say Articles of the Federation, just because of the influence it's continued to have in the 16 years since its publication. For the latter, that's tough, but maybe my Buffy the Vampire Slayer novel Blackout, which was the story of Nikki Wood, the Slayer from New York in 1977 whom Spike killed on the subway.

I really really really wanted to write a Battlestar Galactica novel when Tor got the license. (This is the 2003 reboot.) The editor (with whom I'd worked before, on my Andromeda book) told me he didn't want to use me because my bibliography was almost entirely tie-ins, and he only wanted to use "real" science fiction authors for BSG. (I took great pleasure in that same editor being fired a few years later for multiple sexual harassment complaints......)

Technically original to the comics, not prose, but Jurva, one of Kang's crew, established in the Blood Will Tell miniseries, is awesome, and I got to use her in my Seven Deadly Sins story.

Ensign Naraht, the Horta who appeared in several of Diane Duane's novels and comics.

 

Given that the main difference between British and American English is that we spell a few words differently, especially where we place U's in words and Americans do not or placing letters in a different order such as centre and center.

But if you're referring to the difference between trousers and pants, when it comes up, I want to say they default to trousers.

 

Being interested in variations in the language, I'm always on the alert for britishisms that slip through in Trek novels (or any novels set in the U.S. or featuring Americans. Just in the last year I found out that the raised barrier enclosing a street is spelled "kerb" over there and not "curb," even though the verb "curb" is spelled the same way on both sides of the Atlantic, and I'm pretty sure that's the etymology). It's usually pretty subtle and something that could just be a one-off quirk, a single word or turn of phrase that's more common there than here, but not unheard of. For an instance of the most overt it ever gets, "The Autobiography of Kathryn Janeway" has a use of the word "specialisms" rather than "specialties."

 

I know it seems too obvious to be true, but I'd have to say the Star Trek Destiny trilogy. It affected the overall direction of storytelling in the Star Trek literary continuity in a way few other works have, and while I know it's not everyone's cup of tea, I continue to be proud of the story I chose to tell.

Well, I'm not dead yet, so there's still hope, but I can think of several franchises for which I would be eager to pen a novel or two: Star Wars, Indiana Jones, James Bond, Battlestar Galactica (reboot version), Mission: Impossible…

 

Speaking as an American editor who has frequently edited British authors, I've always tried to take a light hand when it comes to "Americanizing" the text, especially if the book involves British characters in British settings. I can only think of two instances where I tinkered just a little to make things easier for American readers.

1) REQUIEM by Graham Joyce (a truly wonderful book, btw) began with a paragraph that was very slangy in ways that might baffle American readers. I pretty much left the rest of the book alone, but did worry about scaring away American readers with the first paragraph of the first page of the first chapter, so I asked Graham to revise it a little.

2).Mystery writer Caroline Graham had a tendency to refer to things by their British brand names, occasionally coming up with the British equivalent of "I took the Dodge down to the Wawa to get some Haagen-Daas." When I pointed this out to her, she confessed that she sometimes had the same problem reading American novels. So we did some tinkering when it wasn't obvious from context what was being referred to.

None of which has anything to do with STAR TREK, of course.

 

It's a convenience store.

It was actually Caroline, decades ago, who quipped to me that, after reading about heroines coping with heartbreak via Haagen-Daas, she was disappointed to discover that it was merely ice cream and not booze or some kind of exotic Swedish massage!

 

HUMOR ONLY AN AUTHOR WILL GET:

In a published anthology I was involved in, we got some low reviews for mistakes in grammar. I asked about this and found out it was because the authors were British and clearly not understanding English.

 

This is sort of difficult, because there’s pride in both the product and in having survived the darn thing. On the latter score, Prey for Trek and Knights of the Old Republic for Wars were both sprawling undertakings for me, and I’m proud of completing them (and doing so in a manner reasonably close to what I had in mind). But as single experiences I’m probably proudest of how Kenobi and Rogue Elements came out — what hit the page was more or less exactly what I’d hoped for.

As to what franchise I regret not having written for, this is sort of a twist on the question: when I did the Crystal Skull comics adaptation for Indiana Jones, it was partially with the expectation that there’d be more tie-ins to follow, so I could write some stories fully on my own. Alas, it was not to be during that go-around. Doing the adaptation was fine, but it’s not the same as doing your own. Someone else gets most of the fun of creation, and there’s not much room for your own voice.

 

I am an American academic who writes about British literature, so I sometimes publish in British journals. The main time this became noticeable (other than having to turn all my single quotes into doubles and all my double quotes into singles) was when the copy editor and I had this whole back and forth on "leverage." It turns out that while in the US, leverage has drifted far enough away from its original gambling roots to mean "make use of something to get something else," in the UK, it still has the gambling flavor, so it only makes sense to use it if there's a sense of something being gambled, that is, that you could lose the thing being leveraged. You can't leverage your skills (as I'd written) because there's no danger that you can lose your skills!

Also my editor for my audio drama reviews is in the UK. Most of the time he lets my Americanisms stand, but every time I write "lease on life" he changes it to "lease of life" because he thinks it sounds "clinical and morbid."

 

Don't they call them "inverted commas" over there?

 

I'm British, and it would never have occurred to me it has anything to do with gambling. I use it all the time to mean what you meant!

 

Ha, as I wrote it, I was like, 'I bet someone will tell me that they're British and don't recognize this distinction.' Well, tell it to the copy editor at the Gaskell Journal!

 

Have a question for Dr @Una McCormack

The Last Best Hope is one of my all time favorite Star Trek novels. I especially like how you portrayed and focused on the Romulans and their culture.

The only thing i found a bit strange and disappointing was that there was absolutely nothing about the Remans and the other romulan subject species in it.

Was there a particular reason for this? Can't imagine that the Federation didn't try to help them too.

 

I can't speak for @Una McCormack but I remember tweets from the Picard season one showrunner basically saying he considered the Remans "a fever dream" and that they wouldn't be appearing on the show.

 

That's unfortunate. The Remans were a great idea, at least in theory. It's ridiculous how Trek gives us all these so-called "empires" that are just the ruling power with no subjects. That's not how empires work! Nemesis was the first time the Romulans were shown behaving like an actual empire, complete with subject peoples made to serve as cannon fodder in their military. It was a long-overdue correction and it shouldn't be walked back.