General Q & A Session For The Authors

[STEPhon IT]

For about a decade now, I've been part of a private wine-making group with some of my friends. We've made a number of good wines, and through the process I've learned a lot about wine, and how to pair wine with foods.

As for "clearing my head," I like to read poetry. I tend to favor the 20th-century poets. Some of my favorites are W. S. Merwin, T. S. Eliot, Galway Kinnell, Ranier Rilke, and Philip Larkin.

I also like to just kick back and listen to movie and TV soundtracks and daydream new stories; I've been collecting movie scores since I was about 10 years old. I have at least a couple of hundred by now, spanning a variety of genres and styles.

Mr. Mack, where would you like to see Star Trek go in your vision of the franchise? Moving farther away from Earth where ships would have to take a decade to return, galaxy hopping or further exploring our expanding Milky Way Galaxy? I love your work, thank you for contributing to the Star Trek universe.

 

[Lonemagpie]

Q. It’s clear from your interactions with the fans that you are all massive fans of the shows/genres you write for as well as it being your profession. So what hobbies/interests do you have that are outside of this? What allows you to take a break and clear your head?

I'm a historical fencing instructor, both HEMA and in the SCA, and have been known to fight in the SCA's rattan tournaments, but also have done stage choreography and arranged museum displays of historical fighting and martial arts. (I've also done various trad martial arts, some, such as taekwondo, with black in the belts). I also love open-world videogames, reading, watching TV and movies, and cooking stuff that interests me..

 

[David Mack]

Did you talk with Jean-Luc about it?

In my novel Collateral Damage, I offered a detailed breakdown of how Château Picard went from being based in St. Estephe to La Barre, and how the move (which was prompted by changes in microclimate and terroir caused by the Third World War) affected the blend of grapes in the Picard signature wine. So I guess you could say I conferred with monsieur Picard.

Mr. Mack, where would you like to see Star Trek go in your vision of the franchise? Moving farther away from Earth where ships would have to take a decade to return, galaxy hopping or further exploring our expanding Milky Way Galaxy? I love your work, thank you for contributing to the Star Trek universe.

If you're talking about the tie-ins, they're going to be what they've always been—ancillary to the shows and films on which they are based. I don't think we're likely to see many new literary-original Trek tie-in series while there are new shows airing or in development.

If I were given a chance to develop something new for Star Trek on TV, I'd probably want to update a series that I pitched, along with David R. George III and Kirsten Beyer, to Kurtzman's team back in 2014. I don't want to give away too many of the details about that pitch, but I'd like to see a larger canvas for Star Trek storytelling — a series that can encompass a story line on a starship, another in a segment of civilian life, another set in the halls of Federation government, and also be versatile enough to incorporate alien civilizations, as well as subplots set in different eras of Trek, all while pushing ahead with new ideas and stories. In essence, I would just like to see Star Trek on TV learn to work on a grander scale.

 

[Lonemagpie]

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.....

Nope. In general readers can't tell the difference unless somebody does something really parochial and out of whack, or they already know the writer's nationality and persuade themselves to imagine they spot differences.

 

[Greg Cox]

Q. It’s clear from your interactions with the fans that you are all massive fans of the shows/genres you write for as well as it being your profession. So what hobbies/interests do you have that are outside of this? What allows you to take a break and clear your head?

That's actually a tricky question since I'm lucky enough that my hobbies and interests overlap with my job to a large degree. Let's see: Star Trek, comic books, horror, movies, TV, sci-fi conventions . . . the line between work and play gets pretty blurry there.

That being said, I do a couple crossword puzzles a day, and my girlfriend and I just discovered jigsaw puzzles, which are our current obsession. Not that these don't always overlap with our other interests (says the guy who ordered a "Hammer Horror" jigsaw puzzle on Halloween).

 

[Lonemagpie]

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.

Reservoir Ferengi, and Beautiful Monsters (nonfiction) respectively.

2. What is the franchise you most regret not having written for?

There's still time for me to do any of them... Would love to do Star Wars fiction, and Bond, James Bond.

 

[Little_kingsfan]

I'm a black belt in karate, and while I'm not sure it counts as a hobby anymore -- especially since I'm also paid to teach a weekly afterschool program to kids and I also sometimes teach in our dojo as well -- it definitely qualifies as something I use to take a break and clear my head.

(Currently I'm a third-degree black belt, but I'm preparing to go for my fourth degree, starting on Wednesday the 10th of November. It's a five-day process, and pretty grueling, so please all wish me luck. )

Good luck, sir!

A fellow martial artist

 

[Garak234]

https://www.trekbbs.com/members/christopher.295/
Re:the Regulas conspiracy in Star Trek Captains Oath by Christopher Bennet.
While Diaz repented of her role as a genocide planner, why did she only repent in the second half of the negotiations? Why didn’t she break down in the period between waking up and the negiotions with the Agni?


(The reason why she might break down prior to negotiations with the Agni)
While her best friend was killed and her countrymen gave her an order she is a Starfleet officer, those are supposed to commit no genocide, and put their duty above their personal emotions(many Starfleet officers die in duty yet Starfleet officers don’t go around genociding entire species because of their losses what makes her different?
(Ossof when she issues her announcement is a few steps away from sedition)
Diaz’s deception is similar to the forged tapes of the Leyton coup and the conspiracy in Star Trek the Undiscovered country among other cases of Discipline violations in Starfleet.
Was there a further mitigating factor like Ossof threatening Diaz if she didn’t take part in the conspiracy?

(one insight that is worth noting but is only semi related to the above post is that Ossof as a result of her mutiny got her mind wiped in Tristan Adam’s experiments)

 

[Christopher]

As I said in the other thread, I don't remember the details all that well. Whatever is relevant to understanding the story and the character arcs is hopefully there in the book already.

As for why Diaz was slow to repent, it's not easy to come forward about something like that, especially for a junior officer under pressure from their superiors.

 

[DrBeverly]

Not that it applies to any of the authors represented here - but I wonder, is it possible to write Star Trek tie-in fiction without being a fan?

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

I believe that it actually was done a few times during the Bantam era.

 

[KRAD]

Anything is possible.....

 

[Christopher]

Not that it applies to any of the authors represented here - but I wonder, is it possible to write Star Trek tie-in fiction without being a fan?

Of course it is. Being a fan of something has nothing to do with being able to do it well. It doesn't matter whether you like it, because you're the creator, not the consumer. It only matters whether you have the skill and training to create something that other people will like. Harve Bennett and Nicholas Meyer weren't fans of Star Trek, but they created a movie that most Trek fans love, because they had the skill to create such a thing.

The key to telling a good Trek story isn't just knowing Trek; that's easy enough to learn through research, the same as you'd train for any job you were hired to do. The key is knowing how to tell a good story in general. The fundamentals of good storytelling are universal; the specifics of the series are secondary to that and simply a matter of doing your homework.

While I may be a Trek fan in general, I've written about a number of facets of the franchise that I'm not much of a fan of. I wasn't a fan of Enterprise when I was hired to write its post-finale novels, but I rewatched the series twice and gained a new appreciation of it. I wasn't a huge fan of Voyager, and I wrote Places of Exile basically as a critique of it, a chance to redo it the way I felt it should've been done. I'm not a big fan of the Borg, but I wrote Greater than the Sum to try to reconcile the conflicting information we've been given about them over the years. I'm not crazy about time travel stories, and I wrote DTI: Watching the Clock in hopes of getting my frustration at Trek time travel out of my system by finally making some semblance of sense out of it, while consciously telling a time-travel story that avoided having its viewpoint characters actually travel in time. And all those things were rather well-received. So sometimes it's better not to be a fan of your subject matter, since good fiction isn't just about saying "oh isn't this swell," it's about confronting and challenging and questioning.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

All well and true, but as I recall, there were Bantam ST novels written by people who lacked even a passing familiarity with the series. And it showed.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Not that it applies to any of the authors represented here - but I wonder, is it possible to write Star Trek tie-in fiction without being a fan?

If you can make Star Trek movies without being a fan, you may have heard of one from 1982 that's still popular or another from 2009, then I'm sure you can write a book without a deep love for the source material.

 

[Christopher]

All well and true, but as I recall, there were Bantam ST novels written by people who lacked even a passing familiarity with the series. And it showed.

Which, again, has nothing to do with fandom. It has more to do with the far more limited availability of reference material back then, before there was such a thing as home video or streaming video or wikis. Yes, back then, being a longtime fan of the show gave you an edge in that regard, but it's ridiculous to think the same applies today, when anyone with a browser and a Paramount+ subscription can binge-watch the whole franchise and look up any detail they need on Memory Alpha, even if they never watched a second of the franchise for recreation prior to gettting the assignment.

When I was hired to write a Spider-Man novel nearly 15 years ago, I wasn't that familiar with Spidey except from the '90s animated series, the movies, and the recent J. Michael Straczynski run. But I bought a DVD-ROM that had the complete run of Amazing Spider-Man, got every available trade paperback of other Spidey titles from the library, and tracked down online reference for the issues I couldn't find to actually read. And reviewers praised my book for its fidelity to the continuity. Not because of my fandom, but because of my hard work and study. That's the difference between a job and a hobby.

Heck, earlier this year, I was given an opportunity to pitch a novel for a series I'd never even heard of. The publisher sent me the manuscript of the first book in the series (I was pitching for the second), the series bible, and other references, and I studied them while developing my pitch. I didn't get the gig, but it wasn't for lack of prior fandom, because I was sent literally everything I needed to know. That's how the business works. It's not important if you knew the thing before, because the people who hire you will provide you with whatever you need to learn, rather than relying on you coincidentally having prior knowledge. They hire you for your ability to tell a story, which is more important. All the continuity expertise in the world won't help if you're not a decent writer. And if you are a capable professional, you can gain that expertise.

 

[Greg Cox]

Being a fan can help, but it's not mandatory. You just need to do your homework, which, as noted, is easier than ever nowadays.

True story, not related to STAR TREK: A few years back, an editor asked me if I was a fan of a certain series, which, as it happened, I had never actually seen.

"No," I answered honestly, "but I can be."

Spent a week or so binge-watching the entire series to date, studied fan websites and episodes guides and such, and quickly brought myself up to speed: figuring out not just what the show was about, but also how it worked and what about it seemed to most appeal to its fans. Then I wrote the book, which I like to think turned out pretty well.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Hmm. My own familiarity with Spider-Man consists primarily of what I picked up when the newspaper comic was running in a local paper.

These days, my taste in newspaper comics runs more towards The Wizard of Id, On the Fastrack, Pearls Before Swine, 9 Chickweed Lane, and a couple of old favorites, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith (in case nobody's noticed, Barney Google has made a comeback in recent years after decades of being written out of the strip) and my all-time favorite, Beetle Bailey.

But the point is of course that no, you don't have to be a fan to be good (and I can think of a couple of novelists from the Bantam era, who crossed over into the Pocket era, who were very serious fans, but whose books are generally regarded as -- to put it delicately -- equine scat). And of course, if you're curious about which novelists were fans and which weren't, there's a reference book out there (a bit out-of-date, and probably out-of-print as well, by now) called Voyages of the Imagination.

 

[Christopher]

But the point is of course that no, you don't have to be a fan to be good (and I can think of a couple of novelists from the Bantam era, who crossed over into the Pocket era, who were very serious fans, but whose books are generally regarded as -- to put it delicately -- equine scat).

Indeed. Being a spectator doesn't qualify you to coach the team. Eating a lot doesn't make you a chef. Creating and consuming are opposite ends of the process, so they don't correlate.


I will say that it helps a lot if you love your work, not just for the quality of your work but for your career satisfaction. My new Tangent Knights audio novel trilogy is an unabashedly self-indulgent celebration of the Japanese tokusatsu superhero franchise that I've become a fan of in recent years, and I can't remember the last time I had this much fun with a writing project.

But -- loving your work isn't just about being a fan of the subject matter. It's about being a fan of the craft -- a fan of creating stories, of playing with ideas, of building new worlds, of getting into the heads of diverse characters and understanding the different ways they think and react, of putting those characters together in a room or in a fight and sitting back to watch the sparks fly. If you love writing, you can love writing about many different worlds and sets of characters, not just one. (And heck, sometimes the most satisfying thing for a writer is to tackle a subject matter they hate so they can satirize and deconstruct it.)

Indeed, I'd say you can't be a good Trek writer if knowledge of Trek is the only thing you bring in. Then you're just rearranging the furniture. To bring something new and worthwhile, you need a broader experience of life and storytelling beyond Trek, so you can offer a fresh perspective.

 

[James Swallow]

Not that it applies to any of the authors represented here - but I wonder, is it possible to write Star Trek tie-in fiction without being a fan?

It's possible, but the question that grows out of that is "would it be good Star Trek tie-in fiction?" and that's a whole different issue, and a value judgement that only readers can make for themselves.

My personal take on this... In my career to date I've written for over 20 different intellectual properties and I would consider myself (to a greater or lesser degree) to be a fan of all of them. I've been offered work in the past on IPs that I wasn't a fan of and I've turned those jobs down because I knew I wouldn’t do the franchise justice.

Now, a writer doesn’t need to be a fan to write for an IP - the assumption being that any competent wordsmith can write a solid story given adequate guidance - and there's an argument to be made that a die-hard fan might be too close to the source material, too dazzled by the opportunity to work on their favourite thing, too “inside baseball”... All that is true.

But it is fans who consume these tie-in works, and they can smell a writer who isn’t invested in the IP from a mile away. I’ve seen books written by authors who clearly weren’t into the material get excoriated by readers. The audience know it when they see it.

I believe to truly “get” the voice and texture of a given franchise, a tie-in writer needs to care about the world, characters and tropes of that IP; and that sounds like being a fan to me. And frankly, if you were not a fan of the IP, why would you even want to write for it in the first place?