Taking Star Trek Enterprise into New Directions

From 2001 through 2005, Star Trek: Enterprise had its run on network television. I believe the characters were rich and dynamic, and that the show ended far too early. It has been a jumping-off point for fiction for me.

Fan Fiction

Why write it? Why not just create a whole new universe of my own? There's something to be said for pulling out a bit of what others have done, and tweaking it, in an effort to make it more of my own. Fantasy? Sure. But I feel it also gives me a greater way to improve my skills. Writing a Shakespearean sonnet or researching a disease or making compelling dialog is just as interesting if the characters who speak these words or perform these acts were originally made by me or by someone else, or even if they are original characters, if they are in a situation or a place that I have created, or someone else has.

What about canon? I find that canon is not as restricting as you might think. It's actually somewhat freeing to have had some of the major decisions made for me. This does not mean that I am afraid of decisions or creativity! I make characters, ships, planets, alien races, etc. all the time. It's just the overall framework that's decided, and I also use the timeline in particular as a means of shaping my creativity. It's like a hanger -- but I'm the one who grows the cotton, weaves the cloth and then sews it into a garment that actually hangs on that hanger.

What about being able to read it on the go? It's easy. Just go here. Or convert the stories to PDF, or grab (some of) them from Issuu.

The Series and the Extras

When I first started writing Reversal, it was, in many ways, like jumping off a cliff. Every morning, I had new ideas, new inspirations, new things to do. I kept at it, and worked on it, and found that ending it wasn't so easy. I had fallen in love with the characters, and in particular with the new surrogate for myself, Lili O'Day. Now, truth be told, all of my original characters are, in part, me -- even the aliens and even the men. That can't be helped, of course. In the end, when I could finally look up, I had written five books in the first series, plus a prequel, and I had several one-offs or extras that didn't fit into my own canon and another series was shaping up with eight more books in the works.

The muse is like a house on fire for me these days.

This is passion.

In Between Days Series

These stories encompass the time period from about the end of the Terra Prime and Mirror Universe episodes in the Enterprise Series and the last episode, These Are The Voyages. Now, a lot of people despise TATV, and that is mainly because of the (I don't think is a spoiler) death of a main, beloved character. I have found, as I have written -- in particular when I wrote Fortune -- that I could understand the impulse to wrap it all up and make an effort to find the endpoint. It doesn't mean I like TATV that much. I don't, but less for the character's death than for the holodeck conceit. It just seems a lot like the shower/dream scene in Dallas. But I have woven it into my own cloth, into Fortune in particular.

See In Between Days for more information including where to find the stories.

The Times of the HG Wells Series

This series explores canon character Daniels (the show never even gave the guy a first name!) and imagines him in his temporal travels. He is, in some ways, like the James Bond of time travel, at least he is for me. What I am imagining is a few years after any missions he went on which involved the NX-01 Enterprise. The job of the Temporal Integrity Commission (this is canon!) is to restore timelines to their original format. To my mind, that sometimes means letting people die. That's gotta jade you after a while, so this series follows through on that idea.

See Times of the HG Wells for more information including where to find the stories.

Interphases

These are various stories about unexpected temporal, spatial and somatic displacements.

See Interphases for more information including where to find the stories.

Dispatches from the Romulan War

This is a round-robin style series of stories telling the story of the Romulan War (2158 - 2160 or so) using journalistic styles.