Author Habits That Annoy You

[Christopher]

Nobody left to ride the ferries? Nobody left to run them?

But I mean, they would've had them in the past.

Besides, we've seen living Cheronians in the Section 31 movie and Starfleet Academy, so reports of their extinction were greatly exaggerated. Which stands to reason if they were a starfaring people -- presumably they weren't all on their home planet when the end came.

(Which reminds me of my perennial complaint about the Supergirl TV series, which established that Kryptonians had active and routine interstellar travel before their planet blew up, so how come every single Kryptonian in the universe was on Krypton itself when the end came? They never got around to explaining that.)

Every time Charon is referenced, I think of that episode of WKRP in Cincinnati, "A Commercial Break," in which the station staff produce a commercial for Ferryman's Funeral Home, only for Carlson to decide he didn't like the idea of a hip, upbeat ad for an undertaker, and canceled the contract, keeping outright ownership of the ad and its jingle (in the tag, the jingle got rewritten for a tire dealer). I immediately got the joke about the undertaker's name being "Ferryman"; evidently enough people didn't that the IMDB entry for the episode has a FAQ about it (which I found a bit insulting, as it characterized the joke as being elitist).

I have to admit, I'm fairly sure I never got that joke (although I still remember the jingle).

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

I have to admit, I'm fairly sure I never got that joke (although I still remember the jingle).

The only thing I never got about WKRP was the outrage over episodes being redubbed over music rights issues. While there were certainly exceptions, most of the humor, even in the booth scenes, didn't depend on a specific song, and there's a fair amount of the humor that would still work if WKRP were a classical station.

But we're probably annoying the mod again.

Oh, and I almost forgot: BOOGERRRR!!!

 

[Christopher]

and there's a fair amount of the humor that would still work if WKRP were a classical station.

My father worked for a classical radio station in Cincinnati, and I was acquainted with a number of his colleagues in my childhood, but I don't remember them engaging in WKRP-like hijinks. Well, except for Gary Barton, who IIRC was alleged to have a hobby of dropping pianos out of helicopters, though that may have been exaggerated in the retelling. I don't know if that was an inspiration for the turkey drop episode, though.

 

[Tuskin38]

Going back to Stygian for a second (and a bit off topic). I wonder if the Stygium crystals in Star Wars were named after Stygian. They were used in cloaking devices.

 

[Christopher]

Going back to Stygian for a second (and a bit off topic). I wonder if the Stygium crystals in Star Wars were named after Stygian. They were used in cloaking devices.

Stands to reason. Darkness and all.

Wait, they have cloaking devices in Star Wars?

 

[Tosk]

Wait, they have cloaking devices in Star Wars?

From "The Empire Strikes Back":

"Captain Needa, the ship no longer appears on our scopes."
"They can't have disappeared. No ship that small has a cloaking device."

 

[Tuskin38]

Stands to reason. Darkness and all.

Wait, they have cloaking devices in Star Wars?

They've been implied to exist since ESB, and have shown up in several stories.

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Cloaking_device/Legends

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Cloaking_device

 

[Christopher]

From "The Empire Strikes Back":

"Captain Needa, the ship no longer appears on our scopes."
"They can't have disappeared. No ship that small has a cloaking device."

Oh, I remember that now. From context, though, it could be used in the sense of a sensor-blocking stealth device rather than a literal invisibility field.

Although the term "cloaking device" in that sense did originate in "The Enterprise Incident" (after "Balance of Terror" had called it a "cloaking system"), so that was a case of SW directly borrowing from ST.

 

[JD]

Okay, it's a fair cop. But why wouldn't they have ferry service on Cheron? They must've had rivers.

I'm trying to remember if there was mention of rivers when Kirk and Seven were on Cheron in No Time Like The Past, but I'm drawing a blank.

They've been implied to exist since ESB, and have shown up in several stories.

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Cloaking_device/Legends

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Cloaking_device

And to take this back to the topic at hand, I realized I haven't mentioned my biggest pet peeves with creators in any media, when writers write something they don't know about, and don't bother to do the research to get things right. OK that was a lot of writes/rights in that sentence.
Seriously, if a character is supposed to be an expert on a real topic, then you need to at least do enough research to make it believable. There is no excuse for not doing this, especially in this day in age, when the internet pretty much gives us instant access to all of human knowledge.
Oh, and just to be clear there is not a single Trek writer, at least who have written the books I've read who has been guilty of this. I've always been impressed at how well Trek's writers have addressed topics their stories have dealt with.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

. . . when writers write something they don't know about, and don't bother to do the research to get things right.

I agree completely. I was already an organ geek (and more specifically, a militant tracker-backer) when I started writing fiction about a child-prodigy organist, and yet even so, I joined the PIPORG-L list server, and asked someone at Allen Organs whether a scene involving one of their first-generation digital models would actually work as written (it would), and I eventually began organ lessons myself. As a musician, I'll never be more than a ham-handed beginner. But while my "organ princess" fiction may sometimes push the boundaries of what's technically possible, it never exceeds those boundaries.

And I'm sometimes amazed at just how meticulously researched a piece of fiction can be. I grew up -- as many people my age and older did -- on children's novels put out by the syndicate founded by pioneering book-packager Edward Stratemeyer. More specifically, I grew up on The Bobbsey Twins. One of their early 1970s titles, The Red, White and Blue Mystery, is set in and around Colonial Williamsburg. It inspired me, decades later, to visit CW myself. When I did, I found out that I could find my way around the historic area just from my recollections of a book that I'd read as a child. In fact, even the descriptions of the shuttle buses that circulate around the perimeter of the historic area are spot-on. All this for a children's novel, written by anonymous ghostwriters under a house pseudonym.

 

[Avro Arrow]

But we're probably annoying the mod again.

You realize I'm just doing my job, right? Part of our function is to prevent the discussion from straying too far from the topic at hand. I do understand that there are the occasional conversational digressions, and I don't tend to step in as soon as a tangent starts. It's kind of expected there might be a minor detour here and there. But the expectation is that the detour will play out, and things will return to the main topic of discussion. But when the detours overwhelm the main route, that's a problem. Looking at the last few pages of this thread, the off-topic digressions greatly outnumber the actual on-topic posts.

Discussions are organized by topics (and by forums) for a reason. If we're not going to follow the thread topic, why not just have one big thread where everyone can talk about whatever?

(Actually, in Misc, we do literally have a thread that is a Random Topic thread with no fixed topic, where people can just bring up whatever happens to be on their mind. I would invite anyone to participate who wants to scratch that itch of just jumping around from one topic to another.)

We also have to keep in mind the community at large. While some of you do seem to prefer the more stream-of-consciousness approach, there are also posters who, when they go into a thread labelled "2026 Novel Releases", expect to see posts about novel releases in 2026, without scrolling through post after post talking about the best place to get a coffee in Indiana, or which movie or television adaptation of Little Women was the best. (Using non-real examples here, so that I'm not calling out anyone specific.)

and a bit off topic

I mean, what's one more?

And to take this back to the topic at hand

THANK YOU!

 

[DGCatAniSiri]

"Stygian" is a perfectly good word. It makes me think of Grignr the Ecordian.

It’s a perfectly cromulent word. Some people just need to embiggen their vocabulary.

 

[JD]

I agree completely. I was already an organ geek (and more specifically, a militant tracker-backer) when I started writing fiction about a child-prodigy organist, and yet even so, I joined the PIPORG-L list server, and asked someone at Allen Organs whether a scene involving one of their first-generation digital models would actually work as written (it would), and I eventually began organ lessons myself. As a musician, I'll never be more than a ham-handed beginner. But while my "organ princess" fiction may sometimes push the boundaries of what's technically possible, it never exceeds those boundaries.

And I'm sometimes amazed at just how meticulously researched a piece of fiction can be. I grew up -- as many people my age and older did -- on children's novels put out by the syndicate founded by pioneering book-packager Edward Stratemeyer. More specifically, I grew up on The Bobbsey Twins. One of their early 1970s titles, The Red, White and Blue Mystery, is set in and around Colonial Williamsburg. It inspired me, decades later, to visit CW myself. When I did, I found out that I could find my way around the historic area just from my recollections of a book that I'd read as a child. In fact, even the descriptions of the shuttle buses that circulate around the perimeter of the historic area are spot-on. All this for a children's novel, written by anonymous ghostwriters under a house pseudonym.

And on the other extreme we have Gilligan's Island, mainly with The Professor. As much as I enjoy the show, and I really do, almost everything involving The Professor drives me crazy, because he's supposed to be this big scientist genius, but everything out of his mouth was complete bullshit. They didn't put any effort into getting even the basic facts right on anything he talked about.

 

[Christopher]

And on the other extreme we have Gilligan's Island, mainly with The Professor. As much as I enjoy the show, and I really do, almost everything involving The Professor drives me crazy, because he's supposed to be this big scientist genius, but everything out of his mouth was complete bullshit. They didn't put any effort into getting even the basic facts right on anything he talked about.

Sometimes they got it right. There was an experiment once where they showed one group of students the scene where the Professor showed how to make a battery with citrus fruits, and showed another group of students a standard instructional film about it, and the group that watched the Professor learned it better. I've often felt PBS missed a trick by not hiring Russell Johnson to host a kids' science show.

Anyway, Gilligan's Island takes place in a fantasy universe where 6-foot giant spiders and mind-swapping mad scientists exist and being struck by lightning can turn someone invisible, so maybe science just works differently there.

 

[JD]

That's a pretty good of looking at it, I hadn't thought of that.
I didn't know that about the fruit, that actually is pretty cool.
A science show hosted by Russel Johnson, especially if they got the rights to The Professor and he got to do it in character.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

. . . so maybe science just works differently there.

Toon physics, governed by the Rule of Funny, maybe?

 

[Christopher]

Toon physics, governed by the Rule of Funny, maybe?

My pet theory, largely because of the 6-foot spider, is that Gilligan's Island is what remained of Captain Nemo's Mysterious Island after it blew up.

 

[Stevil2001]

A long time ago, someone complained here that it was used fairly frequently (at least, compared to how often it's used in general) by a specific author, which seems to have led to it being used even more frequently.

Wow, "a long time" is right. It was fourteen years ago.

No, strike that. Eighteen years. I'm going to stop looking at the search results page now, it's making me feel bad.

I also always notice it because of that thread! I just reread Vanguard: Harbinger; there's a "stygian forest" in that one.

Another word that also stuck out to me in Harbinger was "Spartan," used just twice, but noticeable because it was capitalized. This seems to be the usage recommended by Merriam-Webster, but as an occasional copyeditor myself, I would lowercase it if it wasn't referring to actual ancient Greeks, it's jarring. (Interestingly, my browser's spellcheck recommends capitalizing "Stygian" but Merriam-Webster does not.)

There used to be (it seems to be gone now) a Barbara Hambly fan site that chronicled the fact that she used "chiaroscuro" at least once per book; I was the one who contributed the citation for its appearance in Crossroad.

Every writer has their preferred words; when I workshopped A Choice of Catastrophes, a member of my writing group complained that she had read the word "niggling" more time in our draft than in the entire rest of her life put together!

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

There used to be (it seems to be gone now) a Barbara Hambly fan site that chronicled the fact that she used "chiaroscuro" at least once per book; I was the one who contributed the citation for its appearance in Crossroad.

Where is it in Ishmael?

 

[DonIago]

"Chiaroscuro" is great and all, but I'm still waiting for the Trek novel that uses "cucoloris". :|