DIANE AND PETER PLEASE

(snickering) What…? Seems obvious.

I don't think Sylvia was ever on the ship. That's Isis.

(Whose true nature is less known than Sylvia's, so I suspect OP confused the names instead of the characters)

Damn. Cat who is actually a woman identification failure and Classic Star Trek episode identification failure all in one tiny post.

Happens to us all eventually... :)

(via @neil-gaiman) :)

Doctor’s Orders

Keith Birdsong’s artwork for pocket books’ Star Trek #50 (text-free) From the auction seller: 

Produced in acrylic paint and color pencils on 27.5" x 40" illustration board and it is signed by Birdsong in the lower right. It is dated 1989, however the book was released in June of 1990.

GASP

From the episode of the cansino guy with an alien in Pijamas bff that later disappears after travelling to the beginning of the universe

The alien (and the pajamas) happened in the script’s rewrite, after the TNG office—secondary to interoffice political ructions then going on—cut Michael and me off at first draft and gave our script to someone else to edit. I certainly wouldn’t have forced one of my characters to go to work in his sleepwear.

ETA: before this post starts getting any traction, it seems like a good idea to quickly add some context. I've posted a little about this before (mostly in terms of being a couple of the first writers to work with Wil Wheaton's Wesley), but to sum up:

The ST: TNG offices in their first year or two were, to put it as gently as possible, a dumpster fire. The smell of money was in the water; various less-than-principled people were circling through the environment in a shark-like manner, jockeying for power and control; and staff were being hired and fired seemingly without rhyme or reason, usually due to the inexperience or lack of confidence of the people above them. (Ronald D. Moore had a big piece of butcher paper on which he was saving the autographs and in-and-out dates of staff writers. It was a pretty terrifying document.) To be staffed at TNG was to be caught in a revolving door that might spit you out on the wrong side of it at any moment.

And there was trouble at quite high levels. If you were friends with someone who wound up on the wrong side of the circle of people who'd deputized themselves as the guardians of the upper creative echelon, you could without warning wind up out on your butt in the street (meaning just off Melrose, right about here...), wondering what the hell had happened.

Which is exactly what happened to Michael and me.

We turned in the first draft of "Where No One Had Gone Before" and then, as previously scheduled, went on a moderately extended holiday to the UK with our families, as we were both scheduled to be attending that year's Worldcon in Brighton. As we left, though, we discovered that the Trek front office had exercised its right to say "Thank you for your first draft, here's your money, we'll be handling the remaining edits in-house as we're really pressed for time." And we shrugged—because there's nothing you can do about this; the production end was perfectly within its rights to "cut you off at first [draft]" if they liked. (Especially as regarded time constraints. When story-editing, with endless regret I've occasionally been forced to do that to writers too.)

...Yet we were both a bit bemused, as everybody from Gene down had been very enthusiastic about what we were writing when we were still at the story level of our step deal. Bob Justman, of all people, had declared it "the Star Trekkiest Star Trek story he'd ever seen." An accolade I still cherish.

As usual in this kind of situation, it look some years for us to find out what had happened. Turns out that people very high up in the chain of command had had a falling-out with the person who brought us in to pitch. As a result, that person was forced out of the offices, and all the writers they'd brought in were fired or sidelined. Their scripts were then either scrapped or assigned to other people—some of them not even writers, if you can believe this—to be rewritten.

And that's what happened to us. We were subjected by this particular not-a-writer to a "spite rewrite", intended to get rid of everything possible in it that smacked of the original writing team. And when that person was finished—six weeks later, when it had taken two weeks to complete our first draft after being told "go to script": so much for "time constraints"—and the episode was filmed, there were only two scenes that remained of our original.

One was the extremely lovely scene Michael wrote for when Picard meets his mother...

...and the other was the biggest, broadest in-joke I've ever committed in a piece of screen work. (Apparently I can't post video in a reblog, but the video's in the post here.)

Everything else in our script was changed in content, or tone, or both. Characters were removed, new ones added, and the structure of the story—except for the most basic skeleton of it—was altered to the point of near-unrecognizability.

I remember vividly sitting around with Michael, looking at the rewrite when we finally got our hands on it, and starting to consider what pseudonyms we would register with the Guild so that we could take our real names off it. But as it happened, life intervened in ways that made us too busy to take that option any further... so we never really got around to it. Later, as a result, we had the slightly evil pleasure of seeing s1e6 be submitted by Paramount for Emmy consideration. The irony was choice, because the work being considered had almost nothing of ours left in it, but still had our names on it. So that if it did win anything, we would get the credit, and the minion involved in the spite rewrite would not. (insert bitter-edged smirk here)

...Well, it didn't happen. Probably just as well. But anyway: there are at least "eight million stories in the Naked City" (of Hollywood), and this has been just one more of them.

Those early Next Gen comics were crazy

Yes they were. :)

me taking notes on how to characterize Spones from Diane Duane's The Wounded Sky: I see...so according to Jim, Bones is "geared to receiving" while Spock is "oriented toward giving" understood 👍

Star Trek: Vulcan Academy Murders

I wonder if spock was informed about this by the mother horta, if they even kept in contact

Wanted to add this photo of how they describe him because it's just. So cute to me lol. The author didn't have to make me want to hug a lump of rock, but here we are :)

Naraht has been one of my all time fave chars since I was twelve. @dduane didn’t have to go that hard, but thank God she did.

…And this is why when you’re writing and (being in the heat of composition) you use a “placeholder” term or phrase to mark a spot where you intend to come back and coin something more specific, you make sure to (a) make a note of the placeholder, and (b) actually do the coining in the “cleanup” pass on the submission draft. Otherwise something like “X and Y” may actually make it all the way to press.

(sigh)

And yet X and Y is a believable title for a modern avant garde Klingon opera

wesley was one of the best fucking characters on tng and some fucking people pretend like he acted exactly the same as he did in like the first 5 episodes over the course of all of his appearancez like he wasnt one of the more human deep complex and even more emotionally mature characters on the enterprise ... like can you fucking tell me what you hate about wesley that isnt something that only happened in like 3 episodes out of all 1 billion episodes

I really enjoyed working with him. …Though admittedly the rewrite of ST:TNG s1e6–for which Michael Reaves and I weren’t responsible: we were cut off at first draft due to in-house politics—did take Wes in directions we hadn’t been planning.

ETA: And the Traveller. Trust me, when I send aliens out into the world, I don’t usually leave them in their pajamas. :/

But re changes in Wesley (per a query in the comments about this): The rewrite to which Michael and I were subjected was what we might as well call a “spite rewrite”, intended to get rid of everything possible in a script that smacks of the previous writing team. (Background: upper management had fallen out with the person who brought us in to pitch. So after that person was forced out of the TNG offices, all the scripts by people they’d brought in were either scrapped or completely rewritten.)

Of our first draft script—based nearly beat for beat on the pitch that no less an expert than Bob Justman, when we were done, declared “the Star Trekkiest Star Trek story he’d ever heard”—nothing was left after the rewrite but one shot and one scene. The scene was Michael’s lovely one in which Picard meets his mother.

The shot was mine, in which Picard steps into the turbolift and almost falls right out of the ship through a TNG-universe version of the Door into Starlight.*

...Everything else was changed in content, or tone, or both.

What I can say about Wes is that I think our draft treated him in a lot more depth, and with significantly more nuance, than the rewrite did. (sigh) It was a learning experience. Among other things, I learned that it’s unwise to spend so much time deciding what your Writer’s Guild pseudonym will be that you miss the deadline to actually pull your name off the script. 😏

HTH.

*For non-Middle Kingdoms readers: this was a straightforward visual in-joke on my part, referring to what in that universe is also known as Death’s Door—the gateway to the last Shore, where “the Sea is starlight”, and where those newly dead—or awaiting rebirth—recover from the stresses of human life before moving on...or back for another round of the greatest Game.

Spot’s Day, a short story by Diane Duane

Which somehow still works even though someone in production got confused and REMOVED ALL SPOT’S INTERNAL DIALOGUE EXCEPT WHAT APPEARS IN THAT LAST PANEL.

(sigh)

…Going through some old photos. Here: when your editor pranks you and you don’t notice it for years after the fact…

People need to get over this phase of abandoning fandoms so fast. There are 70 year old women still into Spirk and you people can’t hold onto a man for a month. Shape up and stop abandoning your gently used blorbos in wet cardboard boxes on the side of the highway after a week

As it happens, I’m a 70-year-old woman. One responsible for this.

And I’m…well…  supportive of spirk, at the very least (or K/S, as we called it when dinosaurs walked the earth – and where do you think the now-blanket term “slash” came from…?). Partly because it’s really difficult to parse some parts of ST:TOS without getting a sense of a most unusual depth of relationship underlying the actions of two members of the core triad. It’s (as one of another pairing I’m fond of might say) “not much of a leap” to suspect something more.

But also: I’ve been a fan of this character since I was sixteen. To this day my left eyebrow has more wrinkles above it than my right one because I taught myself to do The Eyebrow before I was old enough to vote. (I can not do The Eyebrow on the other side. No idea why.) I will never give this character up. He’s given me too much.

In relationships (even with the fictional and immaterial), persistence counts. As does constancy, and loyalty, and just plain love. So hang onto your blorbos. You have no idea where they may yet take you… :)

(PS: some other purportedly science-based views in that article are bullshit. For one thing, starships are properly built in space / at the top of a gravity well. Once their keels are flown above their home planet, there’s more than enough gravity nearby to do whatever trivial calibration’s needed. Those lads just wanted that shot with Jim on the motorcycle. [eyeroll] …I could have written them something better, with better science. Ah well….)

(One other PS, an afterthought: there’s a Many Ebooks By Me For Stupidly Cheap sale going on at the moment, if you want some of that action. Not Trek, but all kinds of other stuff. Info here.) 

The Official Star Trek Fact Files’ entry on Galaxy M33 from Next Gen’s “Where No Man Has Gone Before”

IIRC, when we were working on this I said to Michael [Reaves], “You know, the Messier catalog hasn’t been getting that much love lately. Let’s stick one of those in there. 33 might be nice: it’s probably the furthest object that can be seen from Earth with the naked eye.” …And so we went with that.

…It’s a pity they didn’t keep more of our original draft; there was some great stuff in there. But (shrug) …in TV, rewrite happens.