Need help putting my TNG Novel together
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Hm. Let's say I write a Star Trek novel that uses the Federation, Starfleet, etc... but features an entire new cast of characters, a new ship, etc... I don't own that? There's got to be something that protects your own creations, even if you play in someone else's sandbox.
And is a Trek proposal a once-in-a-lifetime-attempt or can you keep submitting stuff without having to fear it hits the trashcan unopened?
No, Only Superhuman will be my first original published novel.
Write, submit, get rejected, learn from the rejections, repeat as necessary for several years. Once you've managed to get some stuff sold, try to get an agent for novel-length work. That's the tricky part, since you generally need to have made a name for yourself before you can get an agent, but it's hard to make a name for yourself without one. That's one advantage of writing tie-ins -- you don't need an agent. Writing ST let me establish myself and make connections, so that when Greg Cox started acquiring novels for Tor on a freelance basis, he was aware enough of my skills to be willing to take a look at Only Superhuman, and the rest is history. It's important to make connections, in this as in most any other field. Part of the reason for agents is that they have connections -- they have the trust of editors and publishers and can convince them to give you a chance (or a better contract) more effectively than you could on your own.
Nope. If it's a STAR TREK novel, it's strictly work-for-hire. At least in the USA, you don't get to claim ownership of any characters, ships, or planets you create for STAR TREK.
Ditto for any other work-for-hire project.
Only Superhuman is the only novel-length original work I've ever submitted. As for shorter fiction, rejection is always disappointing, but at least you can try again with another market. So the most frustrating rejection is the one from the last available market for a work of a certain length or type. But then you just move on and write another story. If you can't accept rejection, chalk it up to experience, and keep going, perhaps eventually finding a way to rework your past unsold ideas, then you've got no future in writing.
So it would be impossible to remove all Trek references while keeping the new characters and elements, and submit it as original work? When it gets rejected as Trek novel, I mean.
Oh absolutely. Being able to manage rejection effectively, is key to surviving in a very competitive industry, such as fiction writing.
I'm can't remember who it was, but a well known writer said something along the lines of "For every published page, there are a hundred that I've thrown away". Obviously, even an unpublished novel would be difficult for the author in question to throw away. After all, it's part of one's portfolio and even if it isn't published, it can say a lot about the depth of a writer.
You don't throw those unpublished novels away. They just sit at the back of your closet forever. 
(Hmm. Maybe there's a children's book there. "The Forgotten First Novels.")
Jarod: Sure, you can certainly try to turn a rejected Trek proposal into an original novel, but you need to do more than simply change the names; otherwise, your submission is just going to read like a thinly-disguised TREK ripoff. And, trust me, there are already more than enough of those filling the slushpiles.
I still remember a slush ms. that had a "Klargon" battle cruiser raising its "stealthing" field on page one. I rejected it pretty fast.
And then there was the guy who submitted his Janeway/Seven slash fiction to Tor but insisted it was okay because he had changed their names slightly. (I swear, I'm not making this up.)
You'd want to thoroughly rework the material to make it your own before submitting it to anyone else.
(Hmm. Maybe there's a children's book there. "The Forgotten First Novels.")
Jarod: Sure, you can certainly try to turn a rejected Trek proposal into an original novel, but you need to do more than simply change the names; otherwise, your submission is just going to read like a thinly-disguised TREK ripoff. And, trust me, there are already more than enough of those filling the slushpiles.
I still remember a slush ms. that had a "Klargon" battle cruiser raising its "stealthing" field on page one. I rejected it pretty fast.
And then there was the guy who submitted his Janeway/Seven slash fiction to Tor but insisted it was okay because he had changed their names slightly. (I swear, I'm not making this up.)
You'd want to thoroughly rework the material to make it your own before submitting it to anyone else.
No, you wouldn't, but additionally, why would you want to? If you're going to create an entirely new cast anyway, why not create a whole new universe too? Why settle for borrowing someone else's?
If all you do is change the names and labels and submit the exact same story, it's technically legal, but it's a guaranteed failure. Every science fiction slushpile is overloaded with stories that are just Star Trek with the serial numbers filed off. Editors reject them without a second thought. Because editors don't want to see imitations of existing franchises (especially a franchise that itself is largely a distillation of pulp-SF tropes from the 1930s-'50s). They want to see originality. They want to see fresh approaches. They want stories that will take them and their readers to realities they've never seen before, not ones they've been watching on TV for 45 years already.
That said, it is certainly possible to take the core concept from a Trek story and reimagine it for a different universe. David Gerrold and Philip Jose Farmer have done it. But you need to do more than just rename the characters and the technology. You need to create a distinctive universe and characters, bring a distinctive voice and tone to it, find a way of telling that same concept that isn't the same as how a Star Trek story would tell it.
Well, as you guys said, Star Trek has a distinct tone and feel you can clearly recognize. I can very well understand that people want to create their own characters, world and stories but still set it in the Star Trek universe.
Which can be fun, I admit. I'm enough of a fanboy that I still get a thrill out of writing Trek or Buffy or The Green Hornet or whatever. But, legally at least, you can't have it both ways. You can't play in somebody else's sandbox and have creative control over whatever you come up with. That's not how it works.
Which is kind of bad. If the - unlikely - event happens that they turn a Trek novel into a Trek movie, show or episode, you get nothing, right? Does Peter David have any rights to his creations in the New Frontier novels?
Hey, that's my planet! Hands off. But we want to turn it into... I don't care. I'll sue you. Thus nobody has ever revisited Sherman's planet again. The next exploitaion. What if another turned one of your characters gay or into a traitor or whatever. How would you feel? Sort of like Trek 09 turning Kirk's character inside out into an arrogant bad boy. Sheesh. Who owns this franchise and characters again. I'm starting to wonder if it's Ronald McDonald. No, but seriously, who owns the Star Trek franchise again?
Well, I'm not trying to discourage you or anything. Just trying to clear up some misconceptions about how the tie-in biz works. (I actually did a panel on "Misconceptions about Tie-In Literature" at Shore Leave this year, because there seems to be fair amount of confusion out there. Peter David was on that panel, too.)
Writing tie-ins can be fun and profitable, but don't think that you actually own the books or the characters. At end of the day, the copyright page always cites CBS or Universal or Paramount or whomever.
Writing tie-ins can be fun and profitable, but don't think that you actually own the books or the characters. At end of the day, the copyright page always cites CBS or Universal or Paramount or whomever.
Well, in my own small way, I helped turn Batwoman gay.
(Or at least I wrote the novelization.)
Seriously, it's a collaborative medium. If you want creative control over your own characters, don't write in other people's series. Otherwise, they're fair game for the next writer who comes along . . .
I mean, it's not like I invented Khan or Gary Seven, but I've had fun playing with them.
<blink> Wha? Philip Jose Farmer has a novel that started out as Trek? Novel or episode? I can't belive this is the first I've heard of this.
Sketches from the ruins of my mind - an interesting title that left me cold reading the synopsis. It was as memorable and interesting as reading a dayton Ward interview. Brannon Braga hd nothing to say either. The people who do, don't talk about it, they just do, like real astronauts being the most boring people in the world but have the most exciting jobs.
But really, another stupid question from me, who owns Star Trek? Is it just the monolithic corperation of CBS or Paramount?
But really, another stupid question from me, who owns Star Trek? Is it just the monolithic corperation of CBS or Paramount?
There is. You could simply cross out that clause in your contract. And then CBS would simply choose not to proceed with your book.
After the breakup of Viacom, CBS owns all the ST TV series. Paramount owns all the ST movies. Paramount lets CBS Licensing supervise the licensed tie-ins based on the movies.
So, basically, if you're a tie-in writer with ambitions of publishing your own work some day, don't use any of your ideas for that in your tie-in work, right? It's one thing to take a rejected tie-in proposal and rework it into something original, but you can't take ideas you used in your tie-in novel and reuse them in your own original novel. Er, right? 
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