Coming Soon
Back in February, I posted here about a short story I was beginningas a promotion to Echelon’s upcoming release of FORCE OF HABIT.
The story is finished (yay!) and edited (more yay!) and will be released soon (extra big yay!).
But where did FORCE OF HABIT come from? As I posted on my own blog yesterday, it started out as a Star Trek fanfic (fan fiction) story I wrote many years ago. Turning a piece of fanfic into an original story is called “filing off the serial numbers”, but that isn’t really representative of what I did.
I’ve read “original” fiction that was so obviously derivative that the reader would have no trouble placing the work that inspired it. This includes a delightful Regency Romance that stood beautifully on its own but was laugh-out-loud funny if you realized where it began.
Naturally, I couldn’t get off that easily. The only characters who survive unchanged from my fanfic are the ones I made up in the first place–and Tetra Petrie, who was the invention of my friend and fellow writer, star writer/illustrator of Star Trek fanfic, Jane Peyton. She very kindly gave me the character, and I’ve enjoyed working with the formerly Vulcan, now amphibious Gilhoolie (I speak of Tetra, not Jane) very much.
The other characters flatly refused to translate one-to-one. They wanted to be new guys. The irascible Dr. McCoy? No, an Empathetic Diagnostician from the planet Bhat, warm and fuzzy with long sharp teeth. The impassively passionate Mr. Spock, who controls his fiery emotions by force of will? Not so much, although Tetra’s brother, Quatro, did get the height while Tetra got the personality. The married-to-my-engines Mr. Scott? Hmmm…. Let me see…. Uh, no; a multiply-jointed, red, sarcastic liquor-mooch named Hessaphess.
These are the voyages of the St. Bennedetta Jesuits, folks, and they’re more Keystone Kops than Star Trek. I also had more fun writing FORCE OF HABIT than I did writing the fan story that started it. Hope you have fun reading it.
Marian Allen
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This made me think ‘so I’m not the only one!’. From childhood on I made up stories with Star Trek characters, and ended up with a whole stable of original characters who were friends, enemies or family members of the Enterprise crew, as well as one who started off as an Enterprise crewman and changed radically.
So all I had to do was build a new universe for my characters to live in. No biggie. Particularly as none of them fit very well in the orderly Star Trek universe as they are too prone to steal things, blow things up, or try to kill one another in public places.
LOL! I read a Regency Romance once that made me go, “Hmmm.” The hero was all stiff and formal and repressed his emotions…. And I happened to know the author back when we were both writing Star Trek fanfic….