kathleen_dailey

In honour of the lore and symbolism of the season, a few links:

"Proserpina" by the extended McGarrigle-Wainwright family. I first saw this performance on a 2015 CBC special, and I've never forgotten the power and beauty of the song, and of the family.

"Spring Shall Bloom," by the Elektra Women's Choir. This site has a link to Christina Rossetti's poem so that listeners can read along.

The Rite of Spring, by the London Symphony Orchestra. As one of the commenters says, "... spring and human sacrifice just go so well together." In 1987, the Joffrey Ballet presented a reconstruction of Nijinsky's choreography. It's easy to see why the original performance would have caused a riot.

Finally, here's a link to my short story about two participants in a self-help class for the unwillingly resurrected--led by an expert--who get to know each other during a coffee break.

brekth has written a short (2,000-word) post-"Metamorphosis" TOS story that, to my mind, pretty much illustrates the whole point of fan fiction. "Flesh of My Flesh" looks at Nancy Hedford's life with The Companion after Zefram Cochrane's death.

In my comment to the author, I said, "This is first-rate storytelling and first-rate science fiction." I don't think that's overstating the case. Recommended reading.

Too many medical appointments and complications, publishing deadlines, and social promises made but not yet kept. Nonetheless, these three things caught my attention:

( Robin Curtis; Lichtenberg & Lorrah; and the guild of energy vampires )

More medical stuff is coming up next week (I thank every deity in this universe for the continued existence of OHIP), and then maybe there'll be time for some actual real-world fun.

Via

scarfman, I saw a very funny Tumblr post about Diana Gabaldon's "do as I say, not as I do" stance on fanfic. Gabaldon wouldn't be pleased to know that if it wasn't for the (helpful and generous, I have to say) advice she gave when I was a member of the Craft of Writing board on CompuServe back in the 1990s, I might not have written the second novel about the Romulan Commander. (Of course, the word "fanfic" and the subject matter of the story never appeared in the discussion threads.)

She'd probably be even less pleased to know that I acknowledged her in the foreword. :-)

What a pleasure to see

cgabriel's collection of TOS short stories, Quartet Plus Two, posted to AO3.

The work isn't a standalone novel, as the single chaptered posting might suggest, but rather a collection of separate stories, backstories, and side stories about Sarek, Amanda, Spock, and Kirk, with significant appearances by others (including an alien OC whom I'd love to see again). The last story in the collection is "The Thousandth Man," which was published in Star Trek: The New Voyages--in substantially different form--as "Ni Var."

As I said in my comment on AO3, I hope that eventually Claire's other two TOS works--"Home Before Home" and "The Porcelain of Twilight," both of which are set in the Simple Gifts universe--will also be made available.

Claire's writing is outstanding on every level.

There's too much tragedy and loss and general awfulness in the greater and smaller world to bear in this so-called season of joy, so I'm practicing a rigorous discipline of RL avoidance and trying to think about nothing but fandom right now.

( Some upliftingness follows )

Now to see whether I can persuade my ancient Walkman that it remembers how to play cassettes.

Salon has a fun article on Christopher Pike's practice of cooking for his nearest and dearest.

( Read more... )

The article includes Leah Chase's recipe for jambalaya, which inspired the dish served in "Under the Cloak of War." SNW's food stylist, Tanya Osmond, "confirms that choosing to have Pike cook jambalaya for this occasion is a small homage to ... Benjamin Sisko, the son of a New Orleans' chef for whom the dish holds tremendous family significance." The recipe sounds delicious, and I foresee a trip to the St. Lawrence Market in the near future.

1. Sometimes when I'm faffing about on AO3, I accidentally discover an old story by a new (to me) author and then wonder why I'd never heard of them before. That happened recently when I found "Even Archangels Get the Blues" by

RevDorothyL. The author says that this was their first fanfic, and I am impressed--not just because the story touches on some of my favourite themes (theology, eschatology, the rebirth of heroes) but because the characters' voices are interesting and fun. Recommended for fans of Xena, Buffy, and/or metaphysics.

2. While purging a storage closet, I came across a surviving copy of an old letterzine that I once subscribed to. The editors of letterzines would collect typewritten submissions, paste them up, photocopy them, and mail the finished zines out to subscribers several times a year. This was how we exchanged LOCs, reviews, illos, opinions, and personal news with other fans across the country and around the world. Rediscovering the letterzine made me remember how enjoyable it was to see this type of fannish ephemera turn up in the actual, tangible mailbox.

3. I'm sad that Pretty Hard Cases won't be returning for a fourth season. It took me a little while to warm up to the show, but Adrienne C. Moore and Meredith MacNeill brought such realism and chemistry to their characters and their relationship that I became quite invested in them. Many of the episodes were pretty standard police procedurals, but the characters and the settings made the show entertaining and multilayered. Add this to the long, long list of Shows I Miss So Much.

( Cut for talk of loved one's illness, SNW, and Spockfic )

1. I recently discovered that my down-the-hall neighbours, whom I've known well for almost 10 years and whose cats I look after when the humans are out of town, are Star Trek fans--specifically, SNW fans, and more specifically Pike fans. There was much rejoicing when we (first shyly, then squeeingly) disclosed our shared fannishness. Viewing parties are in the works.

2. The Village is definitely perking up now that Pride month is here. It's true that a lot of old-favourite bars and clubs and restaurants have vanished under the unending onslaught of posh condo development, but looking out my living room window I can still see street life of all types at all hours (including participants in this event).

3. Are beta readers a thing of the past for fanfic writers? I've been reading a lot of stories on AO3 recently, and for a surprising (to me, anyway) number of them it's clear that no one was asked to beta. Some of the stories were interesting enough that I could read past the most obvious oopsies (muddled tenses; POV slippage; internal contradictions; and errors in grammar, spelling, and syntax). Others weren't, and I couldn't.

4. My friend K., who has been travelling in Italy for the past few months, will be coming home in time to host her annual Ferragosto party in August. Her enchanted garden is the perfect setting for the mid-August lunch.

5. We managed to summon up energy and motivation to do a thorough housecleaning, which mostly means a temporary defeat of pervasive downtown dust (and, lately, soot from the wildfire smoke). It's pretty easy to keep things tidy, but almost impossible to keep them dust-free. Go us, for now at least.

6. We rewatched Auntie Mame the other night. I'm more convinced than ever that Gillian Holroyd (Bell, Book and Candle) and (the elder) Mame Dennis exist in the same universe and spacetime. I feel certain that there's a story to be told--if only I could find my way into it. Must keep trying!

I've read a lot of TOS Trekfic over the decades, but not much that features the crew interacting with genuinely alien beings. Recently I reread two stories (the first was posted to AO3 in 2011, the second in 2017) that epitomized, for me, the essence of the Enterprise crew's encounters with strange new worlds and people.

Although the stories are very different in tone, structure, and subject matter, both are beautifully written, smart, funny, true to character(s), and IMO completely captivating:

Need to Know by Ellen Fremedon (TOS/Dr. Who crossover, Captain Jack Harkness/Naraht [Diane Duane's tie-in character]; rated E)

The Surface Is a Strange and Wonderful Place by sixbeforelunch (senior crew of the Enterprise, alien culture, alien biology, alien worldview; rated G)

To those who haven't read these stories before: check them out if you're in search of truly original, truly SFal Trekfic. Highly recommended.

It's taken me many long years (since 2009, when AO3 had about 3,000 members, until 2023, when there are almost 5.5 million users) to move my stories from my old and neglected website to AO3. I'm at

Kathleen_Dailey.

As I've written elsewhere, I could never have accomplished this move if it weren't for OTW's Open Doors initiative. The work that Open Doors does to preserve archives, websites, and zines is truly remarkable. I owe Open Doors, and Julie in particular, a debt that I'll probably never be able to repay.

I don't really know what to say. I learned today that Rabble Rouser died in 2018. That news, coming on the heels of the news of JK's death, is shocking and profoundly saddening. RR, along with JK, was a fundamental part of the TrekFest and ASCEM crowd, and I can't begin to estimate how deep her influence, like JK's, was on my writing and thinking.

She was the author of many stories, but the one that has stayed with me all these years is Sympathy for the Devil. Her characterization of T'Pring was, for its time, astonishingly and courageously radical. If I ever finish the T'Pring WIP (now in its 20th year of non-completion), it will be entirely dedicated to RR's memory.

This litany of losses can stop right now, please, goddesses of Fate, TYVM.

Another wrenching loss for fandom. Jungle Kitty, whom I first knew back in the days of TrekFest and ASCEM, died at the end of 2022. During the years that we were on the lists together, she was an unending source of inspiration, critique, advice, and fun.

She was a first-rate writer. Her portrayal of Kirk had, for me, the complete ring of truth, and greatly influenced my perception of the character. The stories from her Invisible Planets website are available on AO3: go to

JungleKitty. I hope that readers who already know JK's stories will revisit them, and that many new readers will discover them.

Lene Taylor has said that she'll keep the podcast up indefinitely, so JK's fans will be able to listen to all 300+ episodes.

JK was a shining light in Star Trek fandom from the late 1990s right up until the time of her death. I wish I'd had a chance to say goodbye.

I'm so happy to have discovered jimmymcgools's Eighty-Six Years on AO3.

The first chapter hits all the marks for me. I've been hoping to find an author who would give us a BCS story with the ring of truth--a story in which the details of setting, characterization, and interiority would demonstrate the command of the craft that this universe deserves. I stumbled across jimmymcgools's fic entirely by accident. I'll be following this one with interest.

Syn Ferguson has died. This news took me by surprise, even though I hadn't corresponded with her for many, many years. I remember reading "Courts of Honor" in typescript, long before it was available on the Internet. From a 2017 viewpoint, it's hard to believe how much controversy that zine generated, but it certainly gave me the impetus to write my own version of the Romulan Commander.

Syn's stories had a great influence on Trek fans in the 1980s and 1990s, and I am sorry to hear of her death.

It's hard to believe, but it's been 25 years since I wrote my LOC on Simple Gifts to Claire Gabriel. If I hadn't written to her, not only would I have missed out on a warm and enduring friendship, but I would never have had the impetus (or the courage) to write fiction. My debt to Claire and her writing is pretty much unrepayable.

Well worth reading:

Seanan McGuire on fan fiction

The comments are interesting. I can understand why some authors are uneasy about someone re/writing their characters in their universes. Writing a fic based on a TV series or a movie seems somehow qualitatively different from writing a fic based on a novel or a short story. I haven't been tempted to write fanfic based on a work of printed fiction (though I've certainly appropriated specific concepts from printed Trek fic in my stories, and I've tried to be conscientious about acknowledging the sources). I haven't really thought through why this should be so. I feel quite protective of "my" characters (that is, the on-screen characters as they are portrayed in my stories), and I would be nervous about a writer I didn't know wanting to write or rewrite them. But I'd be pretty intrigued if someone wanted to make a video of, say, "Done." Somehow it's important to me that the fanfic interpretation be in a different medium, but I'm just not sure why it's important.

Writing fanfic was excruciatingly hard work for me, but man oh man it was also fun. Unspoken Truth was the first fiction I ever wrote, and I didn't write it until I was well into midlife. As I've mentioned before, I earn my living by writing (under another name, and in a field very different from science fiction). Not once have I had the desire to write science fiction for money, and not just because I'd have to write (and oh, yes, sell) a gazillion SF books before I'd come close to earning what I earn at my regular writing job. Pro authors have to travel, meet deadlines, produce output on demand, and cater to publishers' wishes. I have to do all those things all week, and I definitely don't want to do them on weekends. (I never wanted to write pro Trekwork-for-hire for the obvious reasons: I'd heard plenty about the contractual arrangements from a few of those who'd done it.)

Fanfic allowed me to have fun without obligations. I could say anything about, or do anything I wanted with, the characters and universes that I loved. I could speculate to my heart's content about politics and religion and history and personality, and no one except my readers was going to give me a hard time about it.

I recently revisited some of my own work for the first time in a number of years, and it both pleased and saddened me. Pleased because I thought that, on the whole, the stories held up reasonably well (though the temptation to edit was strong, I resisted it); saddened because I miss that time and the whole fanfic experience so much. I'd love to get that special feeling back again, but after 10 years I'm pretty sure that's not likely to happen. I know when and why it disappeared (one word: Voyager), but that's a subject for another post, maybe.

Unbelievably, I'm going actively in search of Trek fic once again, hoping to be inspired to revisit at least one of the bunnies (now sadly aging hares, long of tooth, sparse of fur, and very very crotchety) hanging around my hard drive. What_Alchemy's new T'Pring story "On Restless Pinions" was welcome reading, and made me glad that someone else has recently been contemplating the character's backstory and fate.

For me, the definitive T'Pring story is still Rabble Rouser's "Sympathy for the Devil":

www.fanfiction.net/s/452636/1/

"On Restless Pinions" couldn't be more different in plot, subplot, characterization, and style:

what-alchemy.dreamwidth.org/9474.html

Both stories have their structural and stylistic strengths and weaknesses. But they share a deep respect for, and understanding of, the complexities of the principal character.

My own very drafty (as in so full of holes it's gossamerly threadbare) draft of "Aria da Capo" is now in its tenth or so year of non-completion. Every now and again I pull it out and reread it, hoping that an actual story might lurk somewhere beneath all the character exploration. But where the Romulan Commander's story arcs virtually wrote themselves (how could they not, with such a dramatic character and so many galactic-scale events--not to mention a hundred years of rich and malleable canon--at their centre), I find that my T'Pring story is really all about What Makes the Lady Tick. That topic might be fascinating to me, but it's guaranteed to put a reader to sleep in five minutes. As yet, I have no genuine story and very little prospect of one unless lightning strikes.

Part of the problem (maybe most of it) is that I have a hard time writing in any universe that doesn't (at least on its fringes) incorporate my OTP. And while I'm not writing ADC just so I can reunite T'Pring and Spock romantically (too much polluted water under that bridge, prolly), I'd like to know that I'm not automatically closed off from the possibility if the story should happen to head in that direction. I had a minor triumph a couple of weeks ago when I managed to write the last sentence of the story, which is what I've always had to do before I can even hope to get to that point. The line is a poor thing right now, and weak, and a world-class cliche, but at least it's there, which may help. Or possibly not.

I've never forgotten Claire Gabriel's advice from decades ago. You need SUSPENSE--line after line, scene after scene, chapter after chapter. The reader has to be invested in turning to the next page or reading the next paragraph because she just has to know what's going to happen there. I tried to put that advice into practice with every one of my stories, and if I didn't always succeed at least I knew that I'd made my best effort. With my T'Pring story, the only suspense lies in the fact that the protags are older and have had some mighty interesting experiences since their wedding-day; those two things just aren't enough, unless I can convince the reader that the protags are (1) much wiser, (2) not any wiser at all, (3) even less wise than they were in "Amok Time," or (4) mad, bad, and dangerous to know--at least for each other, and in some dramatically interesting way.

I believe that the only potentially productive plot thread in ADC is the last one, and that even if Spock and T'Pring have both gone all respectable and establishment in their middle age, they weren't always like that. I don't want to say too much more about that through-line in case it doesn't pan out, but canon is canon, and even when it's frustrating on its surface, it's still there for the deep and delicious retconning.

Maybe I'll take yet another (sigh) look at ADC and search for some evidence of lightning, or at least faint, distant thunder.

Or, evidently, successfully recreate a remembered reading experience. What I once thought was well written and mind-expandingly imaginative? Either my tastes have changed radically, or my memory really is complete shite. (Most likely both.) I'm distressed at the number of winces, giggles, and outright grimaces my current reading material is triggering. Let's just say I wouldn't have predicted that.

The quest for compelling, page-turning fic continues.

In more satisfying news, the Tibetan food festival has finally arrived:
http://www.sftcanada.org/index.php/component/content/article/95-eat4tibetfesitval

The only thing I'll be passing up is the butter tea--one of the very few food items I can't seem to develop a taste for, despite numerous attempts.

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kathleen_dailey

May 2025

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Entries tagged with fanfic

Spring shall bloom where now the ice is

The whole point of fanfic

Quick fannish olio

"Hilarious hypocrisy"

Claire Gabriel's Quartet Plus Two on AO3

"A splendid vision of tomorrow"

Food is love (and sometimes a plot point)

Three fannish things

Not quite five things

Five things, plus one

Alien aliens: Two TOS recs

My Trek fic has moved to AO3

Rabble Rouser (Harmony_Bites)

Jungle Kitty

Eighty-Six Years by jimmymcgools

Syn Ferguson

The LOC that changed everything

Seanan McGuire on Fan Fiction

Winged pigs, blue moons, hellrinks

You can't go home again