Category:

Star Trek

On Inventing a Romulan Language

by Diane Duane June 25, 2024

A quick note about this entry:

The material below initially appeared in my very first blog (hand-coded, every page of it…), “Homeward”, at our old owlsprings.com site. That domain—originally sited at the servers that came to house IMDb.com—was abandoned over time, after all the blogs and pages associated with it were combined and moved to their own new domains, or split out into other newer blogs (like this one).

Over time, though, apparently sites interested in acquiring content without the owner’s permission scraped the contents of “Homeward” and my other blogs. So when this nice poster at Tumblr brought up my creation of the Rihannsu recension of the Romulan language, and I went looking for the article I’d written about it and the programs I’d devised to generate Rihannsu words, imagine my annoyance to discover that the only place online the article could be found was Scribd… all festooned with vast numbers of ads, and nearly unreadable. (Or you could pay them virtual blackmail to read it. “Upload five text articles and read this one free! Or look at some ads instead.”)

I… did not sign up for that kind of thing. I originally put the article up for anybody interested to look at for free. So here it is! (And if you want to look at one of my ads, go for it. But I’m not going to hold the content hostage while you do it, ffs.)

Dug up out of my hard drive—because when text files take up so little space, why ever throw writing away?—is the text of my original 1996 post from “Homeward”. Some more recent alterations or additions appear in [brackets]. At the bottom I also add links to the text [or PDF’d] files that contain the (adorably primitive) BASIC programs I built. I’ve also added, via the Wayback Machine, links to those programs’ online CGI versions, which will still produce Rihannsu text for you every time their pages load. (The basic BASIC program has also been ported to C[++?] over time: that link’s down at the bottom, too.)

And now, the article.

***

It should probably be said right at the start that I am not really to be considered any kind of expert on Romulan matters. The final word in such cases always lies with the people who are writing Trek for TV and movies: Trek novels are considered “noncanonical”, not really part of the Trek canon. The real experts on Romulan life remain Gene Roddenberry (God rest him) and D.C. Fontana [ditto], who did the initial work on the race in the original Trek series, and the present writers of Deep Space Nine and the movies.

Now, as to how the novel got started, by way of background: Originally—this was a little while after the first edition of the Klingon Dictionary had come out—I asked my editor at Pocket (Dave Stern, it was then) whether I might do a Romulan dictionary. Dave told me, somewhat to my disappointment, that the dictionaries weren’t selling very well at that point (this was before the present resurgence of interest in the Klingon language, which [hilariously] is now spoken by more people on Earth than Esperanto). Instead, though, Dave said, would I like to do a Romulan novel?…

The idea was interesting enough. I liked the Romulans, always had, and the thought of doing a book about their culture attracted me. Could I just make up the culture, then? I asked Pocket. Yes, they said, I could.

So I got on with it.

Language came up for consideration fairly early, because I like languages. Though I’m fluent only in English, I read Latin well, and German fairly well, and Romansch slightly, and classical [Aeolian] Greek haltingly, and I have a nodding acquaintance with about twelve other languages. (This means I know in a general way how their grammars and syntaxes work, and how their sentences are put together. It also means I know how to say please and thank you and good morning and good night, how to ask where the ladies’ room is, how to ask for another drink, the same as last time, and how to point at things in stores and ask for one of those, please: that kind of thing.) It seemed impossible to write much about the culture without doing at least a little work on the language.

Now, I had just finished working out a language for an alien species in one of my fantasy novels (the Dracon language, in The Door Into Shadow), and was pretty much “linguistically pooped” when it was time to start work on the Romulans. But at the same time, something had to be done for them…so I sighed and got on with it.

The first thing to do was to decide what the language should sound like. It seemed inevitable that it should sound slightly Latinate, since there had always been a slightly Roman cast to the Romulans we saw in the original series. At the same time, a language’s evolution also has to reflect its people’s history: and harking back to the Romulan Commander’s reference to the Vulcans as “our ancient brothers”, it seemed likely to me that Romulan would have at least some grammatical likenesses to Vulcan.

Well, we knew, and know, very little (in the canonical sense) about Vulcan grammar. But what about the sound of the language? If the Romulans were (as I increasingly began to suspect during the writing of Enemy/Ally) an offshoot of the Vulcan culture who might equally have been thrown out, or might have left it on purpose, would they necessarily sound that much like the Vulcans any more? Mightn’t it be possible that they had extensively retooled their own language to emphasize the difference between them and their parent stock? (The history of the Pravic language, in Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, probably gave me this idea.) And if there’s anything we know about the Vulcan language [from ST:TOS], it’s its harshness: full of fricatives and other sharp sounds.

So there at least was a hint. I wanted the Latinate sound, all right, but also intended to suggest that the Romulans / Rihannsu-to-be had purposely gone for a more melodious-sounding language, as a reaction against the hard sounds of Vulcan. So I thought that the language should be strong on liquid combinations and soft diphthongs. Welsh suggested itself to me as an example, right away: so did some of the vocalic aspects of Greek. I started coining some words to get the feel of it, and produced a few pages’ worth.

At this point, I ran across one of my problems with inventing languages. Not grammar—exotic grammars are easy to build. And if you can’t build, you can always steal. Real languages are often much crazier and less logical than anything one would normally invent: look at Irish, or Maltese, for good examples of this. (Indeed, Mark Okrand doesn’t appear to have hesitated in this regard: Klingon orthography looks a whole lot, to me, like some of the orthographies used to write various Native American dialects in the early part of this century.) My problem was that, when coining “alien” words, I tend to get in a rut: they start sounding alike. I don’t know if other writers have this problem. I just knew I was going to have to find a way around it.

And, lazy creature that I am, I found it. One of the other languages I have a nodding acquaintance with is BASIC. I am not a great programmer—I have too many other calls on my time to become really elegant at it—and Heaven knows that BASIC has been bypassed by other languages far more sophisticated. However, it suited my needs. Having decided what kinds of sounds I wanted to appear in Romulan, and how frequently they might appear, and having decided what combinations looked ugly and should be “impossible”, I then spent a week or so writing a quick-and-dirty BASIC program which would take numerous consonantal and vocalic “building blocks” I had chosen, and combine them to create words that would avoid my own “ruts” or repetitive tendencies in word-coining. The program would produce several thousand words of Rihannsu in a given run, in a format that looked kind of like blank verse.

Once it was running, I must have gone through about half a ream of paper this way, generating words, and then going through the output and choosing the words I best liked. Ael’s name came up in one such run [with due consideration of the inevitable pun]. To that word, and others, I assigned meanings as I wrote the novel. And that was all the work I did on the language, except (when Peter and I sat down [during our honeymoon!] to write The Romulan Way) to collect all the words together into a glossary, which appears at RomWay‘s end.

Nowadays it seems unusual for a week to go by in which I don’t get a request for Romulan language information. I don’t have any more, alas, except what you see above, and what’s in the books. But I have no problems with passing my tools along to those who feel like using them.

So, for those who might be interested, I hereby bequeath you enthusiasts (check the links below) the “produce screen print” version of the Rihannsu “language generator.” Its first version was written in the form of BASIC that ran on my first computer, an Osborne. (This is the faithful machine that appears with me in the picture in The Faces of Science Fiction: those with a good magnifying glass might just be able to make out, on the tiny screen, that it’s Enemy/Ally which was being worked on at the time.) Later the program was rewritten slightly, when I moved to a PC, so that it would run in GW-Basic. Having just tested it, I find that it runs happily enough in Microsoft QBASIC as well.

The only thing I’ll ask regarding the program is that, should anyone produce a better version of it, that they please send me a copy, with the code, for my files.

You all have my permission to give copies of this program to whoever you like. Note also that it works well for other invented languages: just edit the data statements to contain different combinations of sounds. (While preparing to write The Door Into Sunset, I plugged the Dracon language “building blocks” into the program and saved myself some time.)

How to run them:

Load the text of the program file into your BASIC program. It will ask you for a carriage return: this provides a value to the random number generator. It will then ask you for a number seed. Give it a number within the specified range, and hit the carriage return again. A screenful of Rihannsu will spill out. (In the print version, especially if you’re using a laser printer, you may have to give it several seeds one after another before a page will print.)

Continue until you’ve got enough output to make you happy. Control-C should break out of the program (though if I remember right, the program will break [down…] itself after a while, either because of a divide-by error, or because of some other more picturesque error committed by the programmer). I leave it to some other, more skilled programmer, to tinker one or another version of the program into one that produces both screen and print output. I’ve got my hands full with another TNG novel at the moment, and am wrestling with other linguistic problems (such as working out what French swearwords are hot enough to adequately reflect Picard’s feelings without causing the publisher to have a coronary).

At any rate, I hope you have fun with the program.

— Diane Duane
January 6, 1996

***

Addendum: January 28, 1996

Since I posted the material above, other people have begun tinkering with the program and spreading it around in other nice ways. For those who might be interested, I include here a link [via the Wayback Machine] to the online, cgi-bin version of the program written by Joel Polowin. [And it continues to work just fine.] Thanks [again], Joel!

Here, too [as a PDF, because for some reason my media file is objecting to the .txt format), is a “C” port of the program, courtesy of Curt Snyder of “Hot’s Delight” Hot Sauces and Spicy Foods, at hotsdesr@deltanet.com. My thanks to yet another stalwart Chile-Head!

For the benefit of those of you who’re doing other kinds of tinkering, I add this note from Curt’s note to me: “FYI, I found an error in your romulan basic code (small one), lines 4310 through 4370 reference variable ARGH23% when they should be using ARGH22%.” And he goes on to say:

“The following is the C port I did. Feel free to post on your page. You may copyright it with YOUR name, as the original code was yours.”

June 25, 2024

Star Trek TV and film

A shout-out from above atmosphere

by Diane Duane April 27, 2023

Something a little unusual (and delightful!) in the “Meanwhile, on Twitter…” dep’t!

A shout-out to something of “mine” that appears in the final episode of Star Trek: Picard—the Denebian-crewed Federation starship I wrote into the ST:TOS novel My Enemy, My Ally. (And a lot of the people in the comments seem pleased, which is always nice!)

Thanks again to @DaveBlass at ST:Picard for offering me this charming chance to be a little bit involved with something I’ve enjoyed so much. 🙂

April 27, 2023

Books business Process science fiction Star Trek Writing

On becoming a Star Trek novelist

by Diane Duane August 30, 2022

(Ported in from Tumblr, for those who don’t want to deal with its data ToS…)

tall-tree-tales asked:

Hi Diane! I’ve been a huge fan of your Star Trek work for years (and will now be investigating your original fiction I wasn’t previously aware of) and am absolutely thrilled to find you have an active blog.

I did a cursory search through your tags but didn’t see anything answering this so forgive me if you’ve already gone over this, but how do you go about publishing work that belongs to an already established franchise like Star Trek? Is it just through the publisher? Do you go to some branch of Paramount/CBS and get their approval for the story content? I’d love to know the process. I’m assuming with all the new Star Trek content these days, and CBS locking down on what’s “canon”, it’s probably more difficult to get a one off novel published using their IP anymore. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this (or be directed to a post where you’ve already explained).

Thank you for all your wonderful work!

You’re very welcome! I hope you find my original work at least as enjoyable as the Trek. 🙂

Re the business of working with an established franchise: yep, we’ve dealt with that here before, every now and then. But the tagging has been (admittedly) uneven. So let me just come at it again. 🙂 (Always adding the note that this is how I did it, back in the day, and the methods or pathways of access may have changed.)

…So how did I get to be a published Star Trek novelist?

I am a first-generation Star Trek fan. I fell in love with ST:TOS* as soon as it premiered, and immediately started writing fanfic in that universe. (It should be mentioned here that—a couple/few decades before the days of widespread internet-connectedness—not only did I have no idea that other people were doing something very similar, but I had no idea it even had a name. I was writing all alone, in a vacuum, with no support whatsoever… but however accidentally, I’d discovered something invaluable: it made me happy. We’ll come back to this later.)

So. Time went by and I slid from that genre of fanfic-writing into writing fic that was much more Tolkienian in genre, and from there, into writing original fiction that Tolkien would have found, well, rather different. Cutting another longish story short, in 1978/9 I sold and had published my first novel, this one—the initial volume in the LGBTQ-and-poly-ish Tale of the Five / Middle Kingdoms series that would later get me shortlisted two years running for the Astounding Award for best new writer in the SF/fantasy field.

Now when something like this happens to you, it gets a lot easier to pitch new novels to people. I’m not just talking about the increased attention that awards and nominations bring you. But just having a traditionally-published book out tells other potential publishers that you’ve mastered at least some important aspects of the novelist business: (a) being able to conceive of a plot that will sustain a novel-length work, (b) being able to go from concept to starting in on a novel, © being able to finish a novel, and (d) being able to cope with the editorial process—handling suggested edits, dealing with a copyedited manuscript, dealing with proofs, etc etc.

As it happens, while I was dealing with the sequelae to publishing The Door Into Fire—meaning the inevitable question “And what are you going to do next?”—I’d also been doing some typing for an acquaintance who was typewriter-challenged. They were writing a Star Trek novel. And I have to say that what I was typing up for them was giving me hives. It was…not anything like what I thought a Star Trek novel should look like. I remember saying to a friend or two, on the quiet, “I could eat a ream of typing paper and barf a better Star Trek novel than this.” And finally one of them—almost certainly David Gerrold, who (God love him) has a history of daring me into doing things I want to do anyway—turned around and called my bluff and said, “All right, go on then, quit your kvetching and just go do it.”

Which left me staring at the problem with a lot more intent. Fine, you’re going to pitch a novel to Trek: what story are you going to tell? It’s not like you’re constrained by a TV budget here. Stretch out and tell the biggest Star Trek story you can find: one that can only be told, or best told, in this universe. (This being my working “prime criterion” for stories told in other people’s universes. For best effect the story should only be capable of being told within that set of characters and circumstances. The jewel must be cut to suit the setting, not—however counterintuitive it might seem—not the other way around.)

So I sat with that concept for a while, and eventually the right idea, or set of ideas, presented itself. I can vividly remember the moment. I was sitting on a bus bench near Victory and White Oak in the San Fernando Valley when the idea hit. It was a long time before cellphones, so I had to wait an hour or so to get home so I could call my agent and say “Don, guess what? I’m going to write a Star Trek novel!”

There was the briefest pause, after which he said, only half joking: “Do you have to?” Because both of us knew perfectly well that from Paramount’s point of view, Star Trek novels were merely another kind of merchandising, like plastic phasers and James T. Kirk action figures. (And strictly speaking, regardless of how we love them, they still are.) …But then Don said, “Okay, do an outline and we’ll see what they think.”

And so I wrote the outline, and my agent sent it along to the editor of the Trek books at Pocket—who was then Dave Hartwell (God rest him, a fabulous editor of any and all kinds of SF)—and Dave read it and liked it, and he sent it to Paramount for approval, and they read it and liked it, and gave Dave the go-ahead to buy it. And that turned into The Wounded Sky. (A nice overview is here. But I am also charmed to tell you that this book has its own entry at TV Tropes.) As a tied-for-second novel went—So You Want To Be A Wizard was written at very nearly the same time—it doesn’t seem to have done too badly.

Anyway, after that got written and turned in and published, the people at Pocket—somewhat to my surprise—said to me, “Okay, what have you got for us next?” It was that simple… and I was that lucky. I liked working with them: they liked working with me: and they liked what I’d done enough to ask for more. (And…though I have no data on this… I strongly suspect the first book sold well.) So I was in for eight novels more, spread over a fair bit of time. And I have one more plot lying around that I should really get in touch with present editorial about and see if there’s any interest. You never can tell…

So that’s how I did it. Everybody else’s mileage will inevitably vary. But I don’t think there’s going to be much argument with the idea that before working with other IP-holders in their worlds, you might usefully first do as much work as possible in your own. That way potential publishing partners will have something to look at to help them get a sense of what your voice sounds like outside someone else’s world.

…Now as for working with someone else’s IP—anyone’s—this is how I manage it.

(a) Remember it’s theirs. They were there before you arrived and will doubtless be there long after you’re gone. They own that property, are likely enough to have worked hard on it in their time, and—whether they originated it or are just its buyers—are almost certainly powerfully protective of it. You can press against the edges of their envelope—quite hard, if you’re careful and have permission—but break through the fabric of their corporate reality without warning and you are going to be in deep trouble.

Do your homework. Know your licensor: know their history with other creators. Find out where there have been problems in the past and keep your eyes open for warning signs that you may be about to discover some new one. If you were lucky enough to be invited in, act like a considerate houseguest (creatively speaking). While working in that universe, don’t (for example) sneakily attempt to jettison parts of the property that annoy you, or covertly subvert bits that seem to call for subversion. (Overt subversion is a different story. Be in communication with your IP owner about this, and you may be able to win them over. [Though you should be prepared for them to take credit for this after the fact.] But I have seen people disinvited from franchises with extreme prejudice after they were caught trying to pull one or another kind of “fast one” on their publisher.) If there’s a work-with-us guide or in-house bible, sleep with it under your pillow.

(b) Know your subject/universe. KNOW it. It is an absolute certainty that no matter how well you think you know it, there are fans out there who know it better than you do—massively, obsessively, eat-drink-and-sleep-ively better— and if you put a foot wrong, they will come for you. Leaving aside the issue of not wanting to be left looking like an idiot on the Internet, you ought in any case to be deeply cognizant of your host-world’s internal verities before you can expect to write it flexibly and well.

—And add (b1) to this: Know your characters’ voices. Not just the way they phrase things, but the way they think about things and (possibly more importantly) feel about things. It’s not you the readers will have come for. It’s them. You must channel the core characters at the very least authentically, and (ideally) affectionately, or it’ll all end in tears.

For the duration of this work, you are in service to them. Treat them courteously and give them your best words to speak; but always in their own voices. Don’t be afraid to let them be more real than you are. For a lot of people, unquestionably, they are. If that’s a problem for you, you shouldn’t be doing this kind of work. (At least not more than once.)

© Don’t do it for money. Don’t do it for fame. Do it for love or not at all. …Let’s be realistic: any licensing IP is likely to (in the great scheme of things) be far better and more widely known than you are. You may acquire some positive press for your work with it, but in many people’s minds the positivity will have to do far more with the property than with you, regardless of your gifts or how much you love that universe, or whether or not you “came up through the fandom.”

As regards money, some licensed work will pay competitively with original work done in the same genre, but most will not. Not even being a Hot Name with a given IP will necessarily guarantee you any kind of serious money. (In particular, IP licensors have a historical tendency to pay lower-than-normally-accepted royalty rates, and in the past it has taken very energetic and insistent agents to break them of this habit, even if only temporarily and on a case-by-case basis.)

It therefore stands to reason that, for the sake of your own best functioning as a writer, you need to be doing work of this kind because you really need to do it (or to have done it) to make yourself happy: to scratch a creative itch, or to give something back to a property/universe that you love.

Now, “do it for love” can cover a lot of ground. You don’t have to be head over heels in luuuurrrrve with a property to write for it well. (In fact I suspect this state could hinder a writer’s ability to do their best work for an IP. You need at least a little separation from it so that you can realistically evaluate how what you’re producing is stacking up.) You can just be in really strong like with a given property. But you ought to be in at least some kind of like. A personal commitment to the stylistic, rational or emotional core of a given property will get you through the times of challenge that will inevitably surround your involvement with it far better than any unrealized hope of a big payday or of more widespread recognition of your own talents.

Finally: This may sound heretical, but I don’t believe that licensed work is necessarily most fruitfully viewed as a natural stepping-stone to doing original work. (Or even to becoming a licensor yourself, though that does happen.) I think that, well and thoughtfully handled at both ends of things—the auctorial as well as the editorial—not-your-own-IP-work can be entirely worth doing wholly for its own sake. To write for the enjoyment of readers who’re using licensed work to scratch the same itch or feed the same passion that fanfic readers/writers know—of just wanting more good story in that universe? That’s entirely honorable employment, in my book. You’re an entertainer! Entertain, and fear nothing.

(And read your contracts closely.) 🙂

HTH!

(ETA: for the interested or curious, another post looking more at the issue of how IP-adjacent book editors pick the writers to work on them is over here.)

*Isn’t it wonderful to have to specify which kind of Star Trek you’re talking about? The times we live in… 🙂

August 30, 2022

Sespe Wilderness (via Wikimedia Commons)

books Star Trek Star Trek and other licensed properties Travel USA Writing

Star Trek and Sespe

by Diane Duane September 20, 2021

(Note: This post is ported in from one that sprang from an ask-box question at Tumblr, and is reproduced here for those who don’t care to deal with Tumblr’s data-privacy requirements. [And who could blame them.] The question that came up is this:)

severeannoyance asked:

My Enemy, My Ally has been one of my very favorite books ever, since I first read it as a Star Trek-obsessed eleven year old and fell in love with it (and Ael especially. I wanted to be her when I grew up, and now I’m technically grown up and still want to be her). My copy, the cover replaced multiple times, went on many adventures with me, including backpacking in Alaska and paleontology fieldwork in the northern Sierra Nevada, until it wandered away with an unscrupulous housemate in grad school. I just reread it and realized that the Sespe is in my figurative backyard. The Los Padres National Forest and associated wilderness areas is a place I’ve been enthusiastically exploring in the last few months while pandemic stir crazy and avoiding humans, and I love it dearly.

As a result, I was wondering if the place where Jim hangs Ael’s pennon is based on a real place (and if that place is within the condor preserve and not somewhere a member of the public can/should be going…! I’ve no desire to intrude where I’m not wanted!)

I’m pushing deadline at the moment, but this is such a great question that I want to take a moment to deal with it.

My one and only visit to the Sespe Condor Preserve—or Condor Sanctuary, as it is now—would’ve happened in mid-1976 sometime. I was living in Northridge in the San Fernando Valley, working as David Gerrold’s assistant, being then in the process of giving up private duty nursing as I started to contemplate the possibilities of becoming a writer. (While I was writing then, as I had been doing since I was eight, I wouldn’t be sold-for-publication for another year yet. The early Middle Kingdoms material was in the process of coalescing into its first fully-realized work, The Door into Fire. Later on, one of the doors [chuckle] that Fire and its ensuing Astounding Award nominations would open for me was the one to the Pocket Books editorial offices that were handling the Star Trek novels. So we see, once again, how everything is connected.)

There came a point in mid-’76 where I just wanted a little bit of time off. Condors were on my mind, for whatever reason; and the Angeles National Forest, and Sespe, weren’t all that far away from Northridge as the crow flew. I didn’t have a car, though, so as I started my planning for what would be a four- or five-day hiking trip, I asked David if he’d be willing to run me up Route 33 north of Ojai, and drop me off at some likely trailhead. From there, I’d hike into the wilderness for a couple days and a half, pause, and then turn around and go back to where I started. Then he’d meet me at a prearranged time, pick me up and take me back to Northridge.

Examined from this end of time, this was plainly one of those things you do when you’re in your mid-20s and perceive yourself not only as a candidate for the One Of The Smartest People In The Room award, but also as more or less indestructible, or at least relatively impervious to harm. (eyeroll) Whatever. I got together my backpack, my hiking boots, a good supply of trail rations/camping food, a tiny little camping stove, a terrific sleeping bag, and all the other necessities (especially the USGS maps). And then the chosen day in midsummer came along, and I set out.

Sespe Creek, on which my trip centered—at least, on one of the western parts of it—is one of the last truly wild rivers left in California. I’ve since hiked and camped other wilderness, but there have been few others (except maybe the Swiss National Forest) that exude the same general atmosphere of Wilderness Doesn’t Give A Fuck What Happens To You as the Sespe Creek gorge does. You have to be very careful how you go. That said, my experience during those five days was absolutely nothing like the experience of (to pick a random example) these guys. That may be because there was a lot less testosterone involved. I honestly have no way to explain the discrepancy. Maybe it’s just kindest to say that not all hikes are good hikes, and leave it at that.

What I did have was five days of extraordinary peace, quiet—in terms of the kind of quiet that you get out in the wilderness—and relatively little excitement. Yeah, sure, there was the night the bear tried to eat my backpack. (Or at least what was in it. It had no luck with that; I knew my way around bear bagging, and everything of any interest was hanging by a long rope from a nearby piñon pine. The bear had no interest at all in me, on the ground, in my sleeping bag, ten feet away… a fact over which I remain relieved to this day.)

Things I didn’t see far outnumbered the things I did… either because I was making too much noise accidentally, or because I was making too much noise on purpose. I did not see any rattlesnakes, which frankly in that neighborhood is kind of extraordinary. I did however hear plenty more bears, numerous mountain lions, and more kinds of yelling raptors than I could possibly identify. I saw more bears, though always at a distance. (But then again I was only ten miles or so from a place clearly labeled on the USGS maps as “BEAR HEAVEN.”) And I did not see any other human beings whatsoever unless I was actually walking on a road… which suited me fine.

I did, however, finally see a condor: exactly one. I almost missed it. What alerted me was a massive shadow passing over me, like a cloud coming between me and the sun. It made more noise than a cloud, though: it was so quiet that afternoon that the wind passing through the “cloud’s” primary feathers was clearly audible. I looked up, and there it was. It cocked an eye at me as it passed over, sized me up, visibly went “Ehh…”, and flew on over the next hill and out of sight.

That was enough for me. I’d seen what I’d come to see, and later that afternoon made my midway camp before turning around to head home.

About Ael’s tree: even at this distance in time, memory of a real thing has a different tang or “taste” in the mind for me than the memory of something I made up for literary purposes. (Though some of those memories can get pretty intense or specific, I can reliably tell them apart.) And the memory, especially the visual memory of the tree, tastes real.

My guess is that I didn’t follow the Sespe Creek gorge proper much further than ten miles or so east before doubling back. So there’s no telling whether or not the little watercourse where I saw the tree was the Creek proper (which gets surprisingly narrow sometimes) or one of its many tributaries that run down to it from the Angeles National Forest’s hills to the north and the Topatopa Mountain and Devil’s Heart Peak area to the south and east. All things taken together, the odds are higher that the tree was located overhanging one of the smaller tributaries. If I drew a circle on the map to estimate where I might’ve seen that tree, it would look like this. (Click here for the full-size image on a separate page.)

(The full Lion Canyon quadrangle map can be found here in various formats.) My sorrow that I can’t be more specific.

…That’s such a beautiful corner of the world; a couple of the sunsets I saw there still sometimes illuminate the back porches of my mind. The next time you’re out that way, please greet that space for me, if you would. The odds are low that I’ll ever be there again physically, but I think of it often.

September 20, 2021

Fandom fiction Finance Star Trek Writing

Forbes: not a bad way to start the day

by Diane Duane February 11, 2017

I wouldn’t say that Forbes would be daily reading for me, but when Google tells me I’ve been namechecked there, I pay attention. Here’s the article:

Fifty Shades of Green: How Fanfiction Went From Dirty Little Secret To Money Machine

…Granted, I’m still trying to figure out how to make the money machine part work. But it’s nice to be mentioned in the same breath as Bujold and Moffat.

February 11, 2017

Books Star Trek Star Trek and other licensed properties Writing

RIHANNSU: SWORDHUNT and RIHANNSU: THE EMPTY CHAIR; the outline

by Diane Duane September 29, 2016

Every now and then over at the Tumblr I wind up chatting with people about various aspects of writing, the writing business, and technique — usually under the “writing advice” tag. Some weeks back (don’t ask me when, it’s been busy around here) a question came up about outlining, and various people suggested that they’d like to see what one of my outlines looked like. So I made a note to myself to find an outline at some point and post it for those who might be interested.

Today I was going through one of the smaller portable expansion drives we keep around the house for temporary data storage, with an eye to cleaning it out so it could be used in updating my old laptop to run Windows 7. While I was sorting through the directories (and again and again muttering “Why the hell have I been hanging onto this…?!”) I came across what appears below. This is the outline for the Star Trek novels Swordhunt (later subdivided into Swordhunt and Honor Blade) and The Empty Chair.

This is an example of one of the ways I outline. It’s not a “beat outline,” in which every scene is laid out in book-chronological order and with considerable detail about action and sometimes even dialogue. I suppose it could be considered more of a “pitch outline”, intended to indicate both a story’s background and its foreground issues and action in broad strokes. It’s also intended for an editor already thoroughly familiar with my writing style and the way I handle a given license and its characters (in this case Star Trek).

One of the reasons I allowed myself to submit something so (relatively) relaxed in format is that I knew my editors — first John Ordover and then Marco Palmieri — were confident enough about what I would do with the actual novels to not mind an outline of this kind. It does however begin with a brief recap of previous work in the series for the benefit of anybody in the Trek offices (either at the book end in NY, or the licensing-and-approvals end in LA and elsewhere) who might need to be brought up to speed on the background; as Trek editors in general and the faithful and long-suffering Paula Block (routine overseer-of-things on the licensing side) always have so much other work on their plates that a reminder of the details might be welcome.

The outline weighs in at just under 3700 words, or about eight single-spaced 8.5″ x 11″ pages. Needless to say, if you have not read the Rihannsu sequence of Trek novels and you’re planning to, and you don’t want to be spoiled, then you should avoid reading any further….

September 29, 2016

science fiction Star Trek TV and film

Fifty years

by Diane Duane September 8, 2016

It’s the best kind of day, and I barely know how to begin describing how I feel.

Star Trek is fifty, and I’m sixty-four… and I’ve been lucky enough to be able to watch this whole long story arc unfold from the start. More the point, beyond all dreams, all possibility, over the years I’ve become a little part of it. And that is so cool.

I remember when I first saw the description of this new show in the TV Guide in 1966. And for the quiet, geeky kid who grew up reading Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov and Andre Norton, it sounded almost impossibly good. When it was finally time for the show to come on, and the teaser ran, and the titles ran, I sat there completely spellbound. I can remember right here and now exactly what I felt then: amazement, and delight, and so much excitement… because there was going to be more of this. I didn’t know how much more—but I couldn’t wait.

The next three years brought their ups and downs, especially when the series was almost canceled, came back, and then didn’t last beyond its third season. But the dreams it left in its wake were more than enough to keep me going for a long time. I started writing Star Trek fanfic before I knew there was such a thing. (Rarely, from now till then, have I been happier to be able to say that all that fiction is gone forever. Believe me, some things are better lost.)

And though the series had died, it refused to stay quiet in the grave. First came the miracle of syndication, of reruns… for which we have to thank the foresighted Lucille Ball, Star Trek’s too-often unsung fairy godmother. And then, with the reruns, came the people who loved Trek too much to let it die, and decided to stand up and do something about it.

Sheer luck—the happy accident of being in the right place at the right time in the early 1970’s— meant I was able to be at those first great New York Star Trek conventions. At those cons I met so many terrific people, and forged connections that were about to start having a profound effect on the rest of my life. Because of Star Trek I found a skilled and endlessly committed mentor for my writing (and a good friend too). Because of Star Trek I started finding my voice as a writer. Because of Star Trek, I got published and was nominated for awards. Because of Star Trek… I started writing Star Trek.

And that was genuinely kind of unexpected. But I still bless the day when (while reading someone else’s Trek novel) I got so annoyed with what they were doing that I threw the poor book at the wall and declared, in the full of my writerly arrogance, “I could eat a ream of typing paper and barf a better Star Trek novel than this!”

And if something like this actually happened eventually—without my even having to actually eat the paper—it was because I wasn’t at all concerned about looking better than that other writer, but seriously concerned with doing better Star Trek. In retrospect, judging from my mailbag, it seems like I may have succeeded at this at least once or twice (or maybe more). That’s honor enough for me. I’m delighted and humbled to be counted among the number of the many gifted people who find serving the same purpose—making better Star Trek—to be both privilege and pleasure.

Many amazing things have happened along this journey. I met my husband of (now) thirty years because of Star Trek. I co-wrote a Star Trek novel with him on our honeymoon. More or less accidentally, I ascended to possibly the peak of achievement for a nursing professional and cured Dr McCoy (or, all right, DeForest Kelley, just as you prefer…) of a sore throat. I’ve heard Leonard Nimoy speak words I’d written for him. I’ve seen George Takei eat my husband’s cooking (and go back for seconds, and thirds: but then George is a perceptive guy).* I’ve had the honor to be walked through other people’s Star Trek books, specifically and especially one by the wonderful John M. Ford—one of the best of all Star Trek writers, and taken from us far too soon. Over the years I’ve met and been befriended by amazing names, both people who’ve written for the shows or the films, and people who’ve acted in them—open and warmhearted people all endlessly devoted to bringing joy to the viewers and readers who’re also in love with this particular universe. They know how lucky they are to be able to contribute again and again to something so big, and so loved, and so meaningful.

Such contribution isn’t always easy, and doesn’t always go the way you wish it might. Naturally Trek hasn’t always been perfect. Crass reality has more than occasionally gotten in the way of the storytelling. Trek’s been jerked around by interoffice politics and all-too-human blindness and people besotted by money and power, and has been beset by plain old misunderstanding of the basic concept—exploration, discovery, diversity, delight in the different. Sometimes something goes wrong with the storytelling, and parts of the puzzle just don’t quite fit together, or look bad when viewed later. In the Star Trek universe as in the real one, entropy is running and no matter how you try, you can’t win ‘em all. But the times when Trek does get it right (in my opinion) far outnumber the times when it doesn’t, because the people working on it are aware that they have a certain level of excellence to match, and a well-established, much-loved vision to evoke and sustain.

In this regard, over the years I’ve been asked as often as anybody else working in this universe, “What is it that makes Trek so special, and why is this particular vision so evocative? Why does it appeal to people so?” There are a hundred possible answers, but mine is simple and clear. I’m a member of the last US generation that was asked to believe, as kids in school, that hiding under your desk would actually protect you in some way from a nuclear bomb. The aura of hopelessness and terror that hung over the Cold War period for many of us was powerfully opposed by what Star Trek seemed to be saying from the very beginning: that humanity would get through this, that we would get past it—and that human beings were, actually, better than this, if we would just allow ourselves to act as if we were.

And this message seems still to work for subsequent generations introduced to Trek. Despite the terrors of the present— which are by no means to be dismissed—Star Trek did a lot in its earliest generations to dispel some of the terrors of the past. I firmly believe that if Trek is written with what Harlan Ellison calls “clean hands and composure”, it will continue to do the same in the future. Storytellers who come to Trek meaning to serve the vision of human exploration and compassion honestly will, in my opinion, do so even more successfully than they might expect.

It’s my sense that the longer story lasts, the stronger it gets. Well-loved universes and the stories told in them, I think, have a way of furthering and protecting themselves. From the very beginning there has always been so much love and hope and enthusiasm surrounding Star Trek, the stories it tells, the people who tell the stories, and the people who act the stories, that it has become much stronger with time than it was when it started—tougher to kill and quicker to bounce back from failure, and not just because of the financial opportunities involved.

Every new generation of Star Trek will inevitably have its own difficulties, its own exigencies, its places where things go very wrong or seem to. But I strongly believe that there is something about this particular vision of the future—of a future, of a future that works because people are consciously working on making it work—that means it will just keep on coming back. The power of the vision and the stories that have lasted this long and keep getting refined and expanded is not to be dismissed, not to be discounted. Yes, story can sometimes wither and die young if its roots don’t delve deep enough. But there is something about Star Trek’s roots that seems to have delved very deep.

Since everybody else will probably be saying better, smarter and more clearly articulated things about Star Trek today than I’m likely to be able to, I want to wind this up and go read what they’re saying. But backtracking briefly to the personal end of things, I can say there are very few parts of my life—professional, personal, emotional—that Star Trek has not touched and will not continue to. For those who were going to ask the inevitable question: yes, I do have one more Star Trek novel in me. I have my own universes to tend to at the moment, but I really do need to get in touch with whoever’s handling Trek at Pocket Books and see if they can work me in sometime in the next year or three. Because some of the very best times of my life have been spent standing (in imagination) on the bridge of that starship… working out what happens next, and what the person sitting in that center seat will do. And the next-best times have been spent seeing Enterprise pass by low overhead—on the home screen or in the theater—and feeling that old familiar shiver of awe and hunger and delight go down my spine. To me she will always be Star Trek’s biggest character, and of all of them, my favorite.

In the meantime, to all the many friends and acquaintances—there are so many of you, too many to name—whose paths have crossed mine in the service or enjoyment of Star Trek, I just want you to know that I’m thinking of you today, with affection and so much gratitude. You’ve made my life, as Trek has, a better and happier place. Without Star Trek I couldn’t be many things I am. And I can’t wait to see what comes of all our work next, and where it goes now. That particular frontier—not all that final, after all—just keeps stretching out further and further ahead of us, and looking more and more interesting all the time.

Fifty years… Early this morning I thought, “You know, with medicine being what it is these days, it’s not completely beyond belief that I might see Trek turn one hundred.” But whether I do or not, some of you will see it. I wonder what those celebrations will look like, a bit; and (just a little) I envy you.

…But only a little. My job as a Trek writer is after all to look ahead—one of my favorite parts of the job (besides keeping company with one of the most extraordinary casts of characters ever devised). So for the moment, let’s concentrate on enjoying and celebrating the first fifty years of Star Trek. The next half-century can wait… but only until tomorrow.

*BTW, will somebody please have George tweet me at @dduane? I just remembered that I promised him that recipe. 🙂

September 8, 2016

Science Star Trek

Star Trek predicts it again

by Diane Duane April 25, 2015

The US Naval Research Laboratory announced a major breakthrough in materials science on Thursday. After decades of research and development, the NRL has created a transparent, bulletproof material that can be molded into virtually any shape. This material, known as Spinel, is made from a synthetic powdered clay that is heated and pressed under vacuum (aka sintered) into transparent sheets. “Spinel is actually a mineral, it’s magnesium aluminate,” Dr. Jas Sanghera, who leads the research, said in a statement. “The advantage is it’s so much tougher, stronger, harder than glass. It provides better protection in more hostile environments — so it can withstand sand and rain erosion.”

Source: Fark.com

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April 25, 2015

Discworld Germany publishing Star Trek Star Trek and other licensed properties things that piss you off

What’s the Rihannsu for “soup”?

by Diane Duane February 14, 2015

If the above (and below) images look a little bizarre, well, they should. They’re from long-ago German editions of My Enemy, My Ally and The Romulan Way into which the publisher inserted soup ads.

Yes, really.

The story came up again briefly in a series of posts over at the forums at Mark Reads, and I thought I’d store the images here now that I’ve got the scanner seeing sense (short version: disagreement between new printer and old legacy TWAIN driver, never mind the long version, too annoying, solved now).

To quote the original posting:

...It was in or near this chapter of the German translation [of Terry Pratchett’s Pyramids (“Pyramiden“) that Peter ran into something that made our conjoint blood run cold: a soup advertisement.

Maggi Soups were at that time in some kind of pestilential relationship with Heyne Verlag (then the German publisher of Terry’s books, BUT NOT FOR LONG), and Maggi had taken to inserting little soup ads into the plots of books Heyne were publishing. I knew this because they had stuck one into the middle of the German edition of The Romulan Way (a.k.a Die Romulaner.* One minute things are normal on the Bridge… the next minute, Mr. Sulu is wishing he had a nice cup of soup. GOD I wish I was making this up. …The altered passages were instantly identifiable by page-wide black spacer bars inserted into the text to make them fit into the flow of the printing.

So on the way to the Jungfrau, we picked up this copy of Pyramiden as we were passing through Zurich. In our “base station” hotel that night in Interlaken Ost, Peter was paging through the book… and there were the Black Lines. Peter immediately called the Pratchett residence, and Terry was out, but he got Lyn.

Lyn, being a sensible woman, didn’t believe him at first. Because who would dare pull crap like that with Terry? So Peter read the altered text to her, translating as he went. Lyn’s mouth fell open. She said, “I’ll tell Terry when he gets home.” And when Terry got home, he straightway called Colin the Agent of Doom, and Colin called Heyne, and shortly Terry was not with Heyne any more. AND SERVED THEM RIGHT.

It was a pleasure to do Terry that service, but a pain in the butt that it had to be done. Seriously: SOUP??

…We no longer have that copy of Pyramiden, alas: it was sold long ago at a Discworld convention charity auction. But we still have the Rihannsu books in question, so now you can see what the pages looked like. Behold: one of the more sordid yet somehow mean and small and pitiful examples of corporate greed you’re likely to see.

*I keep thinking the “a” in “Romulaner” should take an umlaut. …Never mind.

ETA: an addendum, 3 October 2023: From a German source, an amusing sidelight on the fallout from the discovery of the soup ads in Terry’s books.

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February 14, 2015

Cool words Language Obscure interests Online life Star Trek Words and usage

Cripes, I’m cited in the Oxford English Dictionary

by Diane Duane September 9, 2014

That’s my year made.

From the Online OED:

phaser, n.

2. Science Fiction. A weapon producing destructive laser or similar beams (of variable phase); spec. a (usually hand-held) device whose output can be varied to produce different effects on a target (as stunning, annihilation, etc.). Also in extended use and in figurative context.First used in the U.S. television series Star Trek.

1966   G. Roddenberry Memo 26 Apr. in S. E. Whitfield & G. Roddenberry Making of ‘Star Trek’ iii. i. 272   Reference the mating of various components of the phaser weapons..when the hand phaser is mated to the pistol, they should appear as one weapon.

1967   Pop. Sci. Dec. 73/2   The main weaponry of the Enterprise is its banks of ‘ship’s phasers’,—artillery-size versions of the hand phasers and phaser pistols carried by the crew. These weapons are, of course, refinements of today’s familiar lasers.

1978   D. Bloodworth Crosstalk xxxiii. 256   The USAAF had brought down the first unmanned plane with a laser, and..had..been thinking in terms of light, chemically-operated versions that could be phased together… ‘Phasers?’ ‘Phasers. Right.’

1984   D. Duane My Enemy, my Ally vi. 85   Mr. Chekov, arm photon torpedoes, prepare to lock phasers on for firing.

1995   THIS Mag. July 21/2   His oddly reserved nature stands out… Whyte sets his phaser on stun, not kill. In print and in person, he usually gives a nod to his opponents before letting fly.

2000   Personal Computer World Dec. 481/2   The phaser rifle..easily vaporises most opponents in a spectacular orange echoey screaming fashion with a single shot.

…I get quoted often enough. (Normally in connection with potato chips.) But to be cited in the single reference that I use more than any other?*

Yeah. 🙂

*And to find out about it on International Literacy Day? There’s a certain pleasure in that too.

September 9, 2014

Europe Film and TV Media Star Trek Star Trek and other licensed properties TV in general Writing

The Starship and the Upstairs Flat

by Diane Duane February 2, 2012

There is a moment in Sherlock‘s second-season episode “The Hounds of Baskerville” in which the world’s first and only consulting detective is attempting to get to grips with the fact that his senses, the tools of his trade, utterly reliable for all his past life, have apparently turned on him and are no longer to be trusted. As have many other artists in similar situations — painters who suddenly can’t paint, sculptors who can’t find the shapes hidden in the stone any more — Sherlock briefly comes a bit undone under the pressure of the untoward circumstance.

[scrippet]
INT. CROSS KEYS — NIGHT

Sherlock sits by the fire in the pub. His breathing is labored as he stares into the fire, and he’s squeezing his eyes shut and opening them again as if his vision’s giving him trouble. This behavior continues while John sits down with him and briefs him on Henry Baskerville’s condition —

JOHN
Well, he’s in a pretty bad way. Manic. Totally convinced that there’s some mutant superdog roaming the moors. And there isn’t, is there? Because if somebody knew how to make a mutant superdog, we’d know. They’d be for sale. I mean, that’s how it works….

John shares a little more info about what may or may not be clues to the present mystery, but Sherlock isn’t engaging with him. His face works a bit bizarrely as he tries to hang onto his composure. And after a moment’s pause he says something that costs him a great deal:

SHERLOCK
Henry’s right. I saw it too.

JOHN
What?

SHERLOCK
I saw it too, John.

JOHN
Just a moment. You saw what?

SHERLOCK
A hound. Out there in the Hollow. A gigantic hound.

He blinks again, the trouble-with-my-eyes expression: but the trouble they’re giving him is that they’ve shown him something he cannot possibly believe. John too is having trouble believing what he’s hearing from the 2012 finalist for the title of Earth’s Most Rigorous Thinker.

JOHN
Um. Look, Sherlock. We have to be rational about this. And you, of all people, can’t — Look, let’s just stick to what we know. Stick to the facts.

SHERLOCK
Once you rule out the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be true.

JOHN
What’s that mean?

Sherlock picks up the glass of whisky sitting beside him and stares at it: stares in horrified fascination and loathing at the shaking of the hand holding it.

SHERLOCK
Look at me. I’m afraid, John. Afraid.

Sherlock takes a big swig of the whisky.

JOHN
Sherlock —

SHERLOCK
(another swig)
Ought to be able to keep myself distant. To divorce myself from feelings.

He holds up the glass. His hand shakes worse. John’s eyes rest on it, on his friend’s desperately working face as Sherlock struggles for control.

SHERLOCK (CONT’D)
But look. You see? The body’s betraying me. Interesting, yes? — emotions? The grit on the lens, the fly in the ointment —

JOHN
(concerned but gently ironic)
All right, ‘Spock,’ just take it easy. You’ve been pretty wired lately. You know you have. I think you’ve just gone out there, got yourself a bit worked up…

SHERLOCK
Worked up?

JOHN
It was dark and scary —

SHERLOCK
Me? There’s nothing wrong with me!
[/scrippet]

…Sherlock then veers into a fairly emphatic anxiety attack with a side order of unusually driven and angry off-the-cuff deduction. But I had to roll the recording back to get back into sync with it, for the narrative had unseated me at the word “Spock” and kept right on running, leaving me sitting there a bit dazed. I’d expected a lot of things from this episode, but seeing two of my favorite fandoms cross the streams with such flair left me shaking my head and grinning.

Sherlock and Spock. I’ve been a friend of the one since my teens — maybe earlier — and an off-canon chronicler of the other for twenty or thirty years. As such, the confluence of the two universes was hardly news to me: Star Trek (and Star Trek writers) have had the hots for Holmes for a long time, and dialogue references and outright cameos are commonplace. Nick Meyer, the director of arguably the single best of all Trek movies until the Great Reboot, is probably the best-known of the Holmes fans to become involved in Trek’s newer, younger Canon. Data routinely goes sleuthing in the original Holmes’s gaslit London on the holodeck (and Moriarty has escaped from it, creating the predictable mayhem). There’s even the line referred to in the tumblr gif below — which, since all Trek film is canonical, makes the connection concrete: either Spock and Sherlock Holmes, or Spock and Arthur Conan Doyle, are (it says here) related. But whether or not you accept that last statement as gospel truth or a Vulcan “exaggerating”, there’s no denying that 1701/1701A and 221B are thematic and spiritual neighbors. The Trek universe has been nodding amicably toward Doyle’s creation for many years.

But this was the first time the other universe, in mass media at least, had ever nodded back. I don’t know how other Trek fans felt, but I was seriously tickled: as if in some obscure and very satisfying way, a circle had closed.

And of course early in January news got out that Benedict Cumberbatch will have a major role in Star Trek 2. And by all reports, he’s settling into the new job nicely. So as one circle is closed, another one opens. What a world…

(Over here, by the way, is the clip referenced in the script extract above.)

…It’s nice to see the two universes on mutual nodding acquaintance, though. For the great core relationships at the heart of each of them have resonances to each other that may or may not be entirely accidental. The correspondences naturally aren’t exact (and it’d be boring if they were), particularly because in Trek the core relationship is a triad and in Holmes’s world it’s a dyad. But the strength of the similarities is striking.

In both worlds, you could make a case that it’s the rational, logical creatures inhabiting them that give the Enterprise and the upstairs flat at 221B Baker Street their spice and potential drama… for acting reasonably and rationally isn’t normally a favorite occupation of human beings. Though logic is unquestionably a good thing, years and years of Star Trek episodes and many of the Holmes stories remind us that in either past or future, unless tempered by human qualities, the logic becomes a serious pain in the butt and occasionally a stumbling block, or even a liability. So in each world, the most committed humans/”normal people” slowly educate the local logician in the usages and usefulness of the human heart; and along the way, the logician normally manages to teach the humans something about how to really think. Everyone benefits from this arrangement… assuming that they don’t kill each other first. (Cue the iconic music from “Amok Time” here.) But the meat and drama of the stories arises mostly from this learning process, and the ways it goes wrong, or right.

If they don’t kill each other first. This was a close call…

I hardly need to get into the Kirk/Spock/McCoy dynamic very deeply at this late date: the way the characters interact is so well known. Outside of fiction, I’m sure endless reams of material have been written about the putative relationships between the characters seen as id/ego/superego or parent/child/adult or Moe/Larry/Curly or Roddenberry-only-knows what else, mostly as attempts to explain where the Logician fits in and how the others manage to affect him. Some of these theories may actually have some application. On my own time I’ve normally felt that all three characters are too complex to reduce to such simplistic formulae. But there are certainly themes that recur when Kirk is interacting with Spock (in terms of looking past the rigidity of logic toward ways to push out the boundaries of the envelope, or break some otherwise deadly paradigm to save everybody’s lives) and when McCoy is interacting with him (in terms of forcefully putting the emotional/ethical side of a situation and getting up in Spock’s face, sometimes quite rudely, until the message gets across to best effect). And if anything, these tendencies have become stronger and more effective in the reboot, with the reincarnation of Kirk, Spock and McCoy in the personas of younger characters making it plainer that they’re all in the same learning experience together — a three-part work in progress, but with the foundations of a lifelong friendship now firmly laid.

In Sherlock’s boot-forward into the 21st century from the 19th, the same situation obtains, with serious benefits. For example, the unnerving scene above would never have played with a middle-aged Holmes and Watson: to make it work you need two younger men who’re still learning the extent of their powers and settling into their roles. These might at first glance look simpler than those of the Trek core team, since this team’s built for two rather than three — but it actually makes their dynamic even more complicated. Watson, as both doctor and military man, combines the opportunities and challenges of the Kirk/McCoy roles… and winds up being able to affect his opposite number in two entirely different ways.

His own complexities aren’t to be dismissed. Here you have a man disciplined and tough-minded, deeply wounded by his experiences in Afghanistan but not conquered by them — a crack shot possessed of what Sherlock quickly (and almost inopportunely) identifies as “strong moral principle” and “nerves of steel”. But perfectly balancing this is Watson’s slight, charming diffidence, unfailing kind-heartedness, and gentle bedside manner. (Close inspection of the DVD makes available some useful and rather diagnostic background information on him, including his interest in a career in advanced A&E with an emphasis on laparoscopy and other associated styles of “bloodless surgery”. Click here for screencaps with some light clinical commentary.) John’s underlying compassion positions him perfectly to understand and support his scary-smart, “high-functioning sociopath” roommate day by day. Yet he’s both willing and able to kick Sherlock’s butt physically if circumstances require, or to administer him a succinct no-holds-barred tonguelashing that would do McCoy proud. This is no mere sidekick: this is a teammate, well along in the process of being/becoming a rock-solid friend.

He’s got a BAFTA and he’s not afraid to use it

And John’s presence and qualities point up another of the resonances between the Starship and the upstairs flat. Just as you could make a case that the real narrative of James Kirk’s greatness in Starfleet doesn’t get started until he and Spock meet, realize each other’s strengths, and come to initial terms, you could also say that Holmes is just an Annoying Incredibly Smart Guy until Watson’s transformative influence starts having its effect — tempering that awesome intellect and processing ability with more regularly expressed humanity, taught the best way: by example. In all these characters’ cases, the temptation to employ the way-overused line about “they complete each other” has to be resisted at all costs, because any “completing” in the case of these two teams of characters is decades away… if it can ever happen this side of all their graves.

In particular, the Holmes and Watson story, as it’s been reframed, isn’t about completion at all. It’s about growth, and what each of these men has to teach the other over time. It’s equally tempting, in service of this theme, to reach for the old no-brainer mind/heart-duality model and say that each man brings one half of a whole to the table. But there’s nothing so simplistic about this character dyad, who come to us with many layers of history and complexity laid on in various media over the last century, like a much-loved painting that the artist just can’t stop working on. It’d probably be more accurate to say that John has as much to learn from Sherlock about the arts of thought and observation as Sherlock has to learn from John about the uses of concern and compassion. Each man is going to make the other whole — though there’ll be the usual missteps and kicking and screaming along the way. But this is what makes for great and satisfying drama: characters who change each other and are changed themselves — not running together like two drops of water into one, but each growing more perfect in the exercise of some unique gift — say, the conduction of light or the reception of it — simply because of the other’s continued and reliable presence in an otherwise unreliable world.

Maybe that’s a clue to why both these worlds have rebooted so cleanly into this century (besides the fact that both have good solid writing teams, hard at work and intent on taking the time to get it right). Both Star Trek and Sherlock’s world still speak on a very basic level to people who — besides a little adventure and excitement — want and need stories about how friendship and intelligence, working in tandem, have a fighting chance at conquering the world and making a difference, on the small scale or the very large. In both cases you may hear the usual noise about old wine in new bottles. But this presupposes an audience that still thinks the old wine’s worth drinking… and who’re willing to take the chance to see if the new bottles might actually make it taste even better this time round. For such people, it looks more and more like there’ll always be somewhere to beam up to: and a door on Baker Street that, when they knock, will always be answered.

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February 2, 2012

Film and TV Hobbyhorses and General Ranting Home life Media Psychology / psychiatry Star Trek Star Trek and other licensed properties Writing

Notes

by Diane Duane October 31, 2006

There are just a couple of things on my mind that (in light of earlier posts and responses) I want to share before I get back to the various pieces of work I need to be doing today.

Re whatever might have been going on in the ST:TNG offices as the first season got underway: I suspect the full story would probably take nearly as long to tell as it took to unfold. I’ve only heard bits and pieces of the story from those who were there, and I got a sense at the time that the people involved were trying to put it all behind them and didn’t want to go into tons of detail.

This I’ll say, though — and it must be clearly understood to be just my theory, one for which I have little concrete evidence, but am basing on gut feeling and later experience elsewhere. I have this feeling that all the trouble boiled down to money, one way or another, and the influence that given amounts of the green stuff have on any given project in Hollywood.

The more money is involved in something, the more people start to have a say in what’s happening to it and where it goes (since often they’re the sources of the money to begin with), and the more people start mixing in and trying to wrest the context in which the money’s being used into shapes that will serve their own agendas, whatever those might be. For the first time, I think, (televised) Trek was perceived as being about to have truly serious amounts of money thrown at it. (I leave the films out of this equation at the moment, as film and TV hold two very different and separate niches of importance and power in Hollywood.)

This being the case, and Trek having the (even then) considerable effect on popular culture that it’s had, the scrum and scramble for power and influence over the unfolding project would have started very quickly — as inevitable as the jostling and clambering-over-each-other in a bucket of crabs. I have seen this elsewhere since then, from the inside, in other productions; and always the cause of the trouble (or the cause of the lack of it) has been the amount of money involved. The more money, the more severe the agida. From this end of time, this realization leaves me suspecting that the same thing was going on in the ST offices, at root. For details of who did what to whom at the time, and why, and how, those interested are probably going to have to look elsewhere: I have only my one data point to contribute…and a certain reluctance to stir the pot.

But the money thing… Let me suggest a backwards diagnostic that I’ve found useful from the writer’s point of view. You can always tell how much money is being spent on a project, and how hard people are fighting over where it goes, by how many notes you get, and from whom, and how hard they are to deal with.

For those who may have missed the definition in an earlier post, “notes” is the code word for the suggestions (read “mandatory corrections”, usually) that the production staff above the writer in the food chain hand back to that writer after reading the submitted material. (This is not like writing a book, where you don’t have to do what your editor tells you. Notes carry more weight.) Sometimes you get notes as a memo or an e-mail, sometimes (in more informal settings) as literal notes scribbled in the margins of what you’ve turned in. Sometimes you’re given them in a meeting, or a phone call, during which you either scribble them down at top speed and hope not to miss anything, or else record the session (if your story editor or producer doesn’t mind) and play it back later. Then you rewrite your material, taking into account the notes that you’ve been given: doing what they say, insofar as your creative instincts allow you: arguing about the stuff you don’t think works, or can’t be made to work as the notes suggest: sometimes ignoring one point or another in hopes that the person(s) who gave you that note will just forget about it. (It happens. There are people who give you notes Just Because They Can: notes are their power trip, their assertion of their “rightful” position higher up in the creative food chain than yours.)

Then you turn your rewritten work back in, and inevitably, there are more notes on that draft. And so it will go from beginning to end, from premise to final draft script.

(Brief joke here: I very occasionally “dream true” — predicting some minor thing that’s going to happen, rarely anything of interest to anyone but me. These dreams have a specific feel to them, one I’ve learned to pay attention to: and when someone gives me advice in one of these dreams, I’ve learned to work hard, on awakening, to remember what that was. It usually pays off. In this regard, a number of years ago I had one of these dreams, and into it walked the much-missed, much-loved Filmation producer and story editor, Art Nadel — mentor and friend to a lot of the younger animation talent who were working in LA in the early 80’s. I was surprised that he should turn up, because Art had died some time earlier, and in the dream I remembered this. “Art,” I said, “I’m really glad to see you!” “I’m glad to see you too,” he said: and he smiled. “And now I have some notes.” …I woke myself up laughing out loud: first of all because Art was always fun to be around: and secondly, because I knew the dream had to be a “true” one, because Art was going to give me notes.)

You get used to the notes over time, truly: and to dealing with them. (Or, if you’re smart, you get out of TV and film before you are driven completely loopy.) Sometimes the notes infuriate you, and you fight as hard as you can to avoid doing what they say. Sometimes you acquiesce to what they require of you as gracefully as you can, because you realize — sometimes very belatedly — that the person giving you the notes was really right. Sometimes you acquiesce as gracefully as you can because, though the other person is incredibly wrong, there’s nothing you can do about it: that person outranks you, and you and your job will be toast in minutes if you rock the boat too hard. In this regard I have a few (until now) unwritten rules which have served me fairly well so far.

Unwritten Note Rule 1: The more money made by the person who gave you the note, the more attention you have to pay.

UNR 2: The more highly placed in the production entity the person is who gave you the note, the more attention you have to pay.

UNR 3: when notes given you by separate people are at odds, you follow the lead of the more highly positioned / better paid of the two, and let them fight it out if they need to.

It’s always a tightrope walk…or maybe better thought of as a gauntlet that you have to run through with every draft. Or, if you’re lucky and your production staffers and higher-ups are good people who’re genuinely trying to improve something which they want to turn out well, it’s a dance: everyone moves through patterns of agreement or civil disagreement, alliances form and shift from day to day as new people are added to the project or drop out of it. Your co-story editor may agree with you that one of your executive producers is insane, and you may band together to make sure that you only get notes from the other one, the sane one. Or you and your producers may agree that there are some of another producer’s notes that you don’t need to pay attention to, they’ll sort that person out themselves. But at all times…the money talks, and you have to listen to it. The more money is being spent, the harder you listen when dealing with the notes.

And another thing: you always get notes. Not to get notes suggests that you are on another planet. Or possibly working for the BBC in some dim and golden past.

I had this happen while working on an educational show called “Science Challenge”, in the early 1990’s. I had it happen repeatedly, to the point that I began to doubt my sanity. I would turn in a script, and my producers would say “Fine, let’s go.” They seemed to have this weird idea that a writer could be trusted to, you know, write. Sometimes the phone would ring and my producer would say, “You know, we’re shooting episode six this afternoon, and it looks like we’re going to come up three minutes short: can you fax us over a few more pages?” “Sure,” I would say, and I’d write three more pages, and fax them over, and they would shoot them. Very, very unreal. After years of working in Hollywood on and off, I would pinch myself. Planet BBC was a very different place from Planet Hollywood. (I understand this has changed, alas.) But at the bottom of this unusual behavior was, you guessed it, the money. Or lack of it. BBC productions were famous for being run on a shoestring: why do you think the old Dr. Who always ended up in the same gravel pit in Wales (or wherever) when they needed a ravaged alien landscape? (When I first started working for the Beeb, I spent some time walking around the neighborhood of the building where my producers were, and laughed again and again as I recognized background after background from Monty Python. Why go any distance to shoot when you have perfectly serviceable suburbia three blocks away? Waste of money…)

The notes are always about the money. The other end of the dear-Ghod(dess)-they-shot-what-I-wrote spectrum is the OMG-how-am-I-supposed-to-reconcile-all-these-idiotic-ideas?! end: the situation you get into when you’re involved with a multimillion-euro multiple-co-production-partner operation like Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King (aka Die Nibelungen, aka many, many other names in many many markets). Some of the notes that came down from our coproduction partners were beyond surreal…yet they all had to be dealt with somehow, because they were giving us the money to make the thing in the first place. Peter and I were lucky in that our producers at Tandem Communications, Rola and Tim, were smart and sane people, good friends, genuinely committed to making something worth watching. They were our lifeline on that project (and will be again some day, I’ll bet).

But at the end of the day, when you’re working in film or TV, it boils down to this: you’re part of a really big committee. And the heads of the committee are the ones who give you the money.

And we all know what art by committee looks like. It’s amazing when it works at all. Every time you get involved, you run the risk of finding your name on something that looks nothing, nothing whatsoever, like what you initially wrote. And them’s the breaks. You pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start looking around for the next project. Or, if you’ve had enough, you get the heck out of Dodge. (“What? And give up show business??”)

…Now I have to go to work on another piece of committee stuff. Right now it’s all mine. Right now it’s still at that pristine stage where there are, as yet, no notes.

But there will be. There will be….

October 31, 2006

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