WWdN: In Exile

time to write

Working on Leverage inspired and stirred up all those weird things in my brain that make me an artist. In an effort to maintain the creative momentum I experienced while working on the show, I went directly from wrapping my episode to working on this series of short stories I've wanted to write for a long time, but for one reason or another never developed past the beat sheet.

I have a routine that goes something like this: I get up between 8 and 9, grab some coffee, and read some news. About 40 minutes later, I eat breakfast, and then I start writing for anywhere between 4 and 5 hours, usually until hunger drives me away from my desk.

The thing is, it's not non-stop writing for all that time. There's a lot of thinking, a lot of wandering around (mentally and physically) and more than a little bit of goofing off online while I try to stay out of my brain's way long enough for it to cough up the ideas. It's easy to feel like I'm not really working, and I'm sure it would appear that way to the average observer.

In today's Los Angeles Times, writer J. Robert Lennon wrote an amusing and very truthful column about exactly what it is we do when we're writing.

Ask a writer what she values most in her creative life, and she is likely to respond, "Time to write." Not many of us have the luxury of writing full- time; we have spouses, families, day jobs. To the people closest to the writer, "writing time" may seem like so much self-indulgence: Why should we get to sit around thinking all day? Normal people don't require hour after continuous hour of solitude and silence. Normal people can be flexible.

And yet, we writers tell our friends and children, there is nothing more sacrosanct, more vital to our intellectual and emotional well-being, than writing time. But we writers have a secret.

We don't spend much time writing.

There. It's out. Writers, by and large, do not do a great deal of writing. We may devote a large number of hours per day to writing, yes, but very little of that time is spent typing the words of a poem, essay or story into a computer or scribbling them onto a piece of paper.

Maybe it's a little too "inside baseball," to be as funny to normal people as it is to me, but I totally relate to everything he says. In fact, I need extra time to write, so I'm taking June and July off from my columns to write fiction, and get Memories of the Future and the Subterranean Press edition of Happiest Days out the door (Happiest has been held up by me; I had a technology problem that seriously cockblocked me on my edit, and then I couldn't find some important stuff to go in the book, but finally found it about two weeks ago. Those of you who pre-ordered and are tired of waiting shouldn't direct your hate-lasers at Subterranean, and should instead focus them on me.)

Lennon eventually says:

The truth, of course, is that writers are always working. When you ask a writer a direct question, and he smiles and nods and then says "Well!" and turns and walks away without saying goodbye, he is actually working.

If a writer is giving you a ride to the bus station and pulls up in front of the supermarket and turns to you and says, "Enjoy your trip!," she is actually working.

I have to apologize to Anne all the time, because while we may be in the same location, physically, my mind is frequently off in some other place, its hands filled with soft mental clay that it hopes to shape into something recognizable. There's a line in Stand By Me where Gordie's son tells his friend that his dad gets weird when he's writing. I've heard my own kids say that, and if I can confess something real quick ... it always makes me happy to hear that.

While I worked on Leverage, I had a beer with John Rogers almost every night after wrap. We talked about all kinds of stuff, from D&D to comics to our wives to working in the entertainment industry. At least once a night, John would point out how lucky we are to have jobs where we get paid to make stuff up and entertain people. I couldn't agree with him more.

great flash fiction from escape pod

I loved this story at Escape Pod:

“Hey, tell me, this look like Jesus to you?”

I come to Tito’s Tacos for a lot of reasons. The freeway overpass ambience, the way the old men in the kitchen wrap the burritos tighter than Cuban cigars, the shiny Kennedy 50-cent pieces you always get as part of your change. A lot of reasons. But conversation isn’t among them. Nonetheless, I dutifully look up from my lunch to see what the guy at the next table over is talking about.

It's flash fiction, so it's just three minutes long. If you can find three minutes today and spend them listening to this story, I think you'll be glad you did.

ETA: I didn't know this when I posted earlier (the joys of quickly posting while I'm on a deadline) but I should point out that Taco was written by Greg van Eekhout, who has a recently-released novel called Norse Code that's getting some nice reviews. Greg says, "You can find some preview chapters online: chapter 1 at Tor.com, chapter 2 at Suvudu, and chapter 3 at Suvudu"

serve the servants

My friend Otis wrote, "I’m in one of those stupid cycles where nothing is quite interesting enough for a blog post. I’m not getting out much for obvious reasons and home life is fairly rote (except for the parts that aren’t)."

I sure am glad he wrote that, because I've been feeling this weird, uninspired malaise for weeks, and I haven't quite been able to identify exactly why until just now: I've been so busy finishing Memories of the Future, I haven't been getting out and doing anything that's interesting enough to warrant more than a passing mention on Twitter. Boy, am I relieved to know that it's not me, it's just my life that's boring at the moment. (Or, um, something like that. That sounded funnier in my head. Anyway, moving on...)

Otis and I are alike in a lot of ways, and often say that I'm the West Coast version of him, and he's the East Coast version of me. The obvious reasons he referred to are all related to the recent birth of his second child, and while my reasons are similar, they are also profoundly different: the child I've been caring for is a bunch of words in a manuscript, not an actual human being in a crib. It's a comparison that probably seems presumptuous and wildly inappropriate to normal people, but if you've ever done work that's creatively demanding, I think you'll be able to understand the parallel.

Speaking of creatively demanding work: Around the middle of the day on Friday, I finally finished all the major rewriting and editing on Memories of the Future, and sent it off to Andrew for judicious application of his Red Pen of Doom. I still need to write the introduction and the acknowledgments, but I think I'm going to put that off for a day or two, because I seriously need to recharge if I want that stuff to be written from a point of view that's enthusiastic and celebratory, not worn down and exhausted.

Before I save this, I wanted to share something I came across this morning that's incredibly valuable for writers. From Ken Levine's blog: What do you do when you get stuck?

This happens often as you write your script or novel. You come to a point where you think you’ve written yourself into a corner. A plot point requires something and you just can’t get there. Wait a minute, he can’t swim to safety; he’s in a wheelchair. Exactly how is she going to get to the Pope to sell him Girl Scout cookies?

This is one of the benefits of a being in a partnership – sometimes he can solve it.

But when working alone, here are four handy tips...

And now, I'm off to write this week's column for the LA Daily. I'm looking forward to that, because there's an arcade machine involved.

I don’t know much about brain scans...

Each entry in Memories of the Future is broken up into sections: the synopsis, some quotable dialog, the obligatory technobabble, a behind the scenes memory, the bottom line, and a final grade.

I'm striving to strike just the right balance among the main sections, and working very hard to be humors, reflective, and insightful in the appropriate places. I'm done with the synopses (the largest part of the book) and today and tomorrow I'm working on the behind the scenes and bottom line sections.

I've worked my way up to The Battle today, and I wanted to share its Behind The Scenes part:

I haven’t watched this episode in over a decade, but it’s probably one of the most important for me to see, because it clearly illustrates exactly why Wesley Crusher went from mildly annoying to vehemently hated character so quickly: First of all, acting ensign or not, having Wesley rush into the middle of the bridge and effectively tell Riker, “Hey, I figured this out before you all did because I’m so fucking smart” is quite possibly the worst way to help the audience accept that this kid is going to be part of the main crew. Having Wesley interrupt the ship’s first officer and then ignore the chain of command to tell another senior officer what to do is equally brilliant. Then the writers go for the win and have Wesley spout off some technobabble about being in Engineering and “playing around with boosting sensor output,” because everyone knows that “playing around” with something as important as the long range sensors is always a good idea.

Look, introducing Wesley – a teenager – as part of the main crew is like introducing a new product that consumers may not like. How the new product is framed and presented is incredibly important, because they must be convinced that the new product doesn’t threaten the things they are used to and love. I don’t think it is possible for the writers to have failed more spectacularly on any of those points than they did in this episode. We only get one chance to make a first impression, and what’s the first impression of Wesley as Acting Ensign Crusher? He “plays around” with things that are vital to the safety and operation of the ship, which implies a lack of respect for them. He barges onto the bridge, where Picard has made it very clear until the previous episode that he’s unwelcome, which implies a lack of respect for Picard. He interrupts and then ignores Riker, and breaks the chain of command to tell Geordi what to do.

Because that’s not bad enough, Wesley comes in at a crucial point in the third act, points out that he “glanced” at some brain scans which he doesn’t “really know anything about,” and magically deduced exactly what their origin is. To complete Wesley’s perfectly brilliant introduction to the audience, they actually have him make a snarky comment to himself after Troi and Dr. Crusher have left the scene. When they get back to the bridge, Troi – who is supposed to be an intelligent, qualified Starfleet officer – doesn’t even know what Wesley was talking about! Gosh, writers, what’s not to like?

The damage is done and it’s irreparable; we’ve made our first impression on an already skeptical audience (who, don’t forget, have had to endure some truly atrocious episodes) and we can’t ever take it back. After watching this episode, I finally understand – no, I grok – exactly why so many people hated Wesley so much. Hell, I played him for seven years and probably have more invested in him than anyone else in the world, and even I hated him while I watched this episode.

And, totally unrelated, in case you missed these two things on Twitter:

Me: OMG I'm trying to work, and the dogs are driving me nuts. Anne: With a little ship's wheel?

RT @AHGreenwood "...sometimes the best thing about following @wilw is Anne." It's also the best thing about BEING @wilw. :)

Anne and I will celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary in November. That's awesome.

As you can imagine, the success of this mission is especially important to everyone on Starbase 420.

Well, the most creatively demanding part is over. About an hour ago, I finished the first round of de-blogging, cutting and rewriting on Memories of the Future.

The next step is to take all the individual reviews (which are in their own files) and combine them into one big document so I can see how it all works together. Based on my first round of rewrites, I'll be watching for a few things:

* Duplicated jokes that need to be cut. The original reviews were written months apart, so I used a few things – like "Bat Country" – more than once without realizing it. That's forgivable online, but it doesn't really work in a book.

* Places where I can examine something from Behind the Scenes a little bit more, or places where it's just not that interesting and can be cut out.

* How The Bottom Lines all interact with each other. They should reflect how the series and we who made it evolved and developed over the course of the first season, and I'm not entirely sure I accomplished that in the first draft. I have to make sure it's not repetitive, and that each one truly reflects something unique to the episode and when it first aired. (Yes, this is a very public NOTE TO SELF. Please enjoy it.)

Just to keep with the tradition of posting something from the book with each post, here's a little bit from The Big Goodbye. This is one of those episodes that's actually quite good, so the humor in the recap is entirely different from the humor in, say, The Naked Now's recap:

Picard decides that playtime is over, and it’s time to get back to work, but Dr. Crusher wants to check out his office. Any chance of that being a euphemism is reduced when Data and Whalen tag along. When they get to his office, the euphemism possibility is eliminated completely: Felix Leech, a Peter Lorre-esque hired goon, is waiting for them. With a gun. And he’s pissed.

There’s another great moment here where the gun comes out, and Picard and company all look at each other with this wide-eyed grin, like it’s the coolest thing they’ve ever seen. It’s one of the rare times on TNG when we in the audience feel genuine suspense, too, because we know that gun’s going to go off and someone is going to get hurt. Those of us who are longtime fans also know that, for the purposes of this holodeck program, the part of Ensign Ricky Redshirt will be played by the ship’s 20th-century literature expert Mr. Whalen, who dutifully takes a bullet in the gut from Leech. This leads to another great moment, when everyone realizes that, holy shit, Leech just shot Whalen. Like, for reals.

Dr. Crusher tells them that they have to get Whalen to Sickbay, Picard smacks around Leech, and they can’t get the computer to give them an exit. This is sort of a problem because Whalen is dying, and back in the real world the Jarada will be expecting the Captain to speak to them pretty soon. Just to make things a little more tense, tough guy Cyrus Redblock shows up with Leech and another hired goon. It turns out that Redblock hired Hill to find an “item,” which Hill hasn’t produced. Redblock and his goons intend to help Hill find it, using their guns. After Leech pistol-whips Picard, McNary arrives, and we’ve got ourselves what you could call “a situation.”

Picard tries to talk them out of the situation, using the old “Hey, man, we’re from another world” routine, but Redblock and company ain’t buying. Data tries the well-known, “Hey, man, these characters aren’t even real” line, which all of us actors perfected during years of Star Trek convention appearances. Unfortunately, Data’s effort meets with similar results.

This is so close to being finished, I'm almost ready to go pick out a bottle of Scotch to open when I'm done.

It's misty and stormy, and other words that are not also stage names for strippers

Remember when you had some huge project due in middle school, and you really didn't want to do it, so you just kept putting it off? Then, when you finally get to work on it, it's actually more fun than you thought it would be and you wonder why you didn't want to work on it in the first place?

Welcome to me, working on The Last Outpost. Yes, the episode is still tedious and the Ferengi are so fucking lame if they were horses we'd have to put them down, but once I decided to just relax and not worry about making the damn thing something it's incapable of being, I found some amusing bits.

BEHOLD:

Picard asks Troi is she's sensing anything from the Ferengi ship. That's good, since it's kind of her whole job and everything. She says she's sensing nothing, so maybe they can block their thoughts and emotions. That's bad.

Data says that we don't know that much about the Ferengi, which is bad, but we do know a few things about them that seem to be reliable, which is good. Data says the Frogurt is also cursed.

Riker tells Data to just get on with it already, so Data says Ferengi are like Yankee traders from 18th century America. This indicates that, in the 24th century, the traditional practice of using 400 year-old comparisons is still in vogue, like when you're stuck in traffic on the freeway, and say, "Man, this is just like Vasco de Gama trying to go around the Cape of Good Hope!"

And...

Tasha, Worf, Geordi, Data, and Riker all head to the transporter room, where the writers try to make us believe they’ll be in real danger on the planet, but we know it’s pretty safe when they beam down, unaccompanied by even a single Red Shirt.

The planet looks really cool, and it's one of the first times we can see the difference in budgets and technologies available to the original series and the Next Generation. It's misty and stormy, and other words that are not also stage names for strippers. We discover that energy in the atmosphere has messed up the transporter's coordinates, and Riker's been beamed down alone. He quickly finds Data, who again uses the word "intriguing" to describe things. He keeps using that word. I do not think it means what he thinks it means.

Riker and Data scout around, and find Geordi suspended upside down when – oh! here come the Ferengi! Holy shit! The evil Ferengi! They're finally here, in person! We can see more than just their moderately scary faces, and they are…uh…short. And bouncy. And they wave their hands over their heads a lot. And they don't like loud noises. And they carry whips…and wear Ugg boots. Um. Wow. How…intriguing.

Oh, and one more bit, which – I'm not going to lie to you, Marge – was the part I had the most fun writing, for reasons which will reveal themselves momentarily:

Back on the Enterprise, we discover that, like the script, things have gone from bad to worse. The lights are out, the ship's heating is nearly gone, and Picard has had the remaining power rerouted to the family decks, where he asks Doctor Crusher how Wesley is doing.

Now, listen, fan fiction writers: It's not because Picard is actually Wesley's father, as many of you will argue on Usenet over the coming seven years; it's because Picard knows that Wesley could totally figure a way out of this, and he’s right. Off the top of my head, I can suggest that Wesley would generate some sort of Enterprise-enveloping control field with one of his science projects, using an electro plasma system energy converter, to reverse the polarity of the Navigational Deflector to emit an inverse tachyon pulse through a subspace beacon, while rerouting the power from the impulse engines through the Okuda conduits to the forward sensor array's antimatter pod, using the auxiliary fusion generator to turn the power back on and save the day.

Sadly, we learn that Dr. Crusher left Wesley in their quarters to stare death in the face alone, without even the benefit of a sedative. Picard reassures her that leaving Wesley alone and fully conscious was great parenting, because he has the right to "meet death awake." Legions of Trekkies agree, then curse Picard for getting their hopes up.

It truly is one of the most tedious episodes of the first season, but I realized while working on the rewrite that I'd somehow managed to spread some funny bits fairly evenly throughout the synopsis, so even though it's not slap-your-knee funny, it's not boring, which was my primary concern.

I don't include many bits that aren't in the synopsis, so here's part The Bottom Line:

TNG's struggle to find its way continues with this episode. Obviously, it fails spectacularly with its introduction of the Ferengi, who were intended to replace the Klingons as a terrifying and worthy adversary to the Federation, but were a total joke until Armin Shimmerman brought Quark to life on DS9, and repaired much – but not all – of the damage.

However, If you take away how outrageously lame the Ferengi are, this episode has some cool elements to it. The planet looks great, and the effects that lead to the revealing of the Portal, its point of view about itself, and its interaction with Riker are straight out of classic Star Trek. In fact, the entire story of the titular last outpost would have been a very strong one, had the Ferengi not been so weak and laughable. Imagine, for example, the relationship between Kirk and the Romulan Commander in Balance of Terror, and put them into this situation, where they are forced to cooperate.

See? It's not all jokes and snark. I manage to sneak some semi- thoughtful stuff in there between the facepalms.

When I send this to Andrew, I'm done with the bulk of the work on this book. All that's left is transcribing some interviews I did with friends from the show so I can include a few of their thoughts (I'm not saying who I talked to, nyahh nyahh) and then I have to put everything together in one big tile and read it all, looking for jokes or phrases that I repeated and areas in the behind the scenes stuff where I can add additional material.

Yep, this is dangerously close to being finished.

Boy, there sure is a lot of pain, and it is painful. For Troi and the audience.

...let me tell you all about the pain.

I've written enough books and things to identify a few milestones along my creative road. When I was ... well, I almost said 'still figuring this out', like I have it all figured out, which I don't, so I'll try again: When I had even less figured out than I do now, it would freak me out when I was convinced that something was horrible and I sucked and I was stupid and they were all going to laugh at me and cover me with pig's blood. Now I know that feeling that way is just a landmark on my creative path, and when I feel that way I can recognize it as just part of the birthing process.

This isn't to say that I don't know how to recognize the difference between feeling like something sucks when it actually doesn't, and feeling like something sucks because it really does suck and it's time to let it go and move on to something else. I think it's really important for all artists, especially those of us who work independently, to train the hell out of this skill, and get good editors (or the editor-equivalent) to make sure we use it.

I've recently discovered two new labor pains, and they're driving me crazy: "I hate this and I just want it to be over so I can do something new," and "I hate the sound of my own stupid fucking voice." Unsurprisingly, they arrived together and made a lot of noise until I recognized them for the labor pains that they are.

Speaking of labor pains, I have accepted that the Farpoint entries in Memories of the Future aren't going to be as funny as Justice or Naked Now. I was making myself crazy trying to force into being something hilarious, when all it's going to be is amusing, which was wasting my time and annoying the pig, so I've put the Farpoint entries to bed. Here's a little bit from part two that I think doesn't suck:

Picard bids farewell to the Hood and walks onto the bridge, just in time for Q to appear on the main viewscreen. Worf, full of Klingon piss and blood wine vinegar, leaps to his feet and draws his phaser. Picard whacks Worf on the nose with a newspaper and tells him to put his toys away, because blowing a hole in the viewer isn’t going to get rid of Q any faster. (It is at this very moment that the Big Dumb Stupid Old Worf drinking game is born, one of the few Star Trek drinking games to span multiple series and movies, joining the infamous “Transporter Has Capabilities Never Seen Before Or Since” and “Scene With The Character The Writers Really Hate But The Goddamn Suits Made Us Include” hangover-makers.) Q tells Picard that he needs to solve the Mystery of Farpoint within 24 hours, or he will be summarily judged by Captain Q's Kangaroo Court, where he faces death beneath an avalanche of ping pong balls.

And...

Hey, speaking of things that are lame, here comes Wesley Crusher, who is so busy talking about how awesome the holodeck is, he falls right into some of its totally awesome and entirely realistic water, soaking his awesome brown sweater in the process. Luckily for Wes, he has a closet that is filled with those horrible things, and in the very next scene, we see he's changed into a spiffy green number (which, if I must be honest here, was the sweater I hated wearing the least. Yes, it was ugly as hell, but it was much more comfortable than the other ones, and was nearly baggy and lame enough to pass for something you'd wear if you were 14 in 1987 and had a huge crush on Debbie Gibson. Not that I ever did. The posters were just up there for show, man. And I did the autographs myself with the same marker I used to draw tanks for Ogre. Uh . . . I’ve over-shared again, haven’t I?)

So, it isn't hilarious, but it's amusing, and that's just fine with me, especially because it means I'm nearly finished with all the heavy lifting on Volume One. All I have to do is set a course for The Last Outpost and make the synopsis less tedious (very hard to do because the episode is two things: tedious and more tedious). Once that's done, I go through the whole thing one more time to polish it up and make sure that the behind the scenes stuff is just right.

I'm still on my release schedule (well, maybe a few days behind) but it's all coming together. This is pretty awesome, because on the horizon, I can see my favorite milestone on the creative path: "Holy shit it's done and I finally get to share it with readers."

status updates and a keyboard cat

This gets less funny over time, but it made me laugh really hard the first time I saw it (NSFW language):

There are many more, of varying quality and levels of offensiveness, at Play him off, Keyboard Cat.

Somebody once said that you can't successfully write a blog and a book at the same time. I am here as supporting evidence for this claim.

Status updates:

Happiest Days Expanded Edition – This would have been turned in to Subterranean Press 6 weeks ago, but OpenOffice totally fucked me on formatting and notes, so my copyeditor and I have had to go back to the old "print it out and mark it up with a red pen" method of editing that takes considerably longer. I may have to get [choke] Word for Mac [gag] [bloat] so this doesn't happen again. Yes, I am extremely annoyed.

Memories of the Future – Rewrites are almost completely finished. Cover design is pretty much nailed down, and interior design should be finalized shortly. I have to tackle The Last Outpost, which I'm dreading, but if I could make Farpoint entertaining, I'm sure I can do the same with it. I'm still on pace for a late spring/early summer release.

Convert Sunken Treasure to Various eFormats – This is harder than I thought it would be, and is temporarily delayed while I finish the other projects on this list.

Project X – Nothing to see here. Move along.

I'm not going to lie to you, Marge: I'm especially excited about Project X.

(keyboard cat via Fark)

"if you treat her right, she'll always bring you home."

On Twitter yesterday, I said, "And now, a useless fact, brought to you by 'I need a break from rewriting Encounter At Farpoint': I loved Mike Tyson's Punchout on NES."

I was flooded with replies that were variations of "WTF? Rewriting Encounter at Farpoint? Why?" I can see how, lacking context, it would appear that I'm actually rewriting the script, instead of the entry that's going into Memories of the Future.

Whoops. My bad. My efforts to clarify my error lead only to further confusion, so I just stopped talking about it, confident that the Internet would quickly turn its attention to something else. I was not disappointed.

Anyway, as if being sick for five days didn't suck up enough of my time, work on Memories of the Future has brought everything else in my creative life to a complete halt. I'm not complaining, because it's been a lot of fun, but holy shit The Last Outpost and Encounter at Farpoint are just killing me. It turns out that there are "so bad they're good" episodes in season one (Justice and Naked Now, for example) that are a lot of fun to write about, but The Last Outpost is so bad it's just … bad. It's an incredible challenge to find humor in it, and I have a new appreciation for what the crew at MST3K did for so many years with some truly horrible films.

Encounter at Farpoint, which I've been working on exclusively for a little over a week now, isn't the best, but it's certainly not the worst. However, it has given me a new appreciation for the challenges inherent to writing a pilot. A pilot's main purpose is to set up the series, and introduce the characters and the world to the audience. There's a lot at stake, because the pilot also has to convince the audience that the show (or in my case, my book) is going to be worth their time.

It's kind of poetic justice that the entry that starts my book, which is one of the most important for me to get just right, is based on an episode that I mock pretty mercilessly for struggling so hard to get it just right. Just like with a pilot, the stakes are really high: It's really important to me that the entry for Farpoint lets the reader know right away that this book is going to be a mixture of memories and insights, wrapped up in a tasty candy shell of snarky humor ... and it's not nearly as easy to do that with Farpoint as it is with Hide and Q. There's a ton of pressure to knock this one into the seats, and it makes silencing the ever-present internal voices of dissent more difficult than it usually is. I got some good advice from a good friend today, though, that I'm attempting to embrace. He said that when you're doing creative things, it's really easy to over think it and talk yourself out of doing things, because nothing is as safe as not taking the creative risk at all. He said that we creative people have to push past that, and take the chances over and over again, because even if things don't work out the way we hope, we'll learn something from the process. I guess it's sort of like Gretzky saying that you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

Well, here's some of the stuff I've been working on lately. It's from Farpoint part one, right after the Enterprise runs into Q's giant computer graphics net thing:

Well, now the Enterprise has a problem: fight, or run away? Lieutenant Commander Bedemere wants to build a large wooden rabbit, but Picard decides that the best way to protect his crew is to do a little of both. He’ll take the ship to maximum warp speed, drive it away from the mysterious net, and separate the saucer section from the stardrive section, because this isn’t your mommy’s Enterprise, bitches. This spaceship comes apart, just like that TIE fighter you got for Christmas in 1979.

All the families head up into the saucer section, which will be commanded by Lt. Worf. (Did we mention that there are families aboard the Enterprise D? Yeah, turns out that there are, because Starfleet did this study and realized that space herpes – also known as Kirk’s Syndrome – spreads considerably slower if its officers have their spouses and children on board their ship. Also, who wouldn't want to drag their entire family with them out into the potentially dangerous and totally unexplored mass of the galaxy? I know, right?!) Meanwhile Picard takes Tasha, Data, and Troi with him into the stardrive section, where he assumes control of the battle bridge, and makes plans for a sexy party, complete with a precious spandex sailor suit.

The mysterious net turns into a mysterious shiny ball that chases the Enterpise at mysteriously fast speeds. After a mysterious minute, Picard orders the emergency saucer separation, a process which, though untested at warp speed and therefore theoretically deadly and dangerous, is made kind of silly by our knowledge as the audience that it's obviously going to work. It doesn’t reach Star Trek: The Motion Picture levels of excess, but it sure comes close, especially when the saucer section pulls away, and the stardrive section makes an actual burning-rubber-hot-rod-racing sound as it turns past the camera and heads back to face off against Q.

Once they get there, Picard surrenders (hey, he isFrench!) and Q transports the crew to a late-21st-century courtroom, where the cast of Time Bandits prepares to watch them stand trial for "the multiple and grievous savageries of the species."

Well, this should be interesting . . . except it really isn't. It's page after page of Q and Picard arguing about mankind. Q says we’re a bunch of assholes, and Picard says that we’re actually pretty awesome once you get to know us. It's not as preachy as some future episodes will be, but it could get to its point much more quickly than it does, and it delays what the audience really wants: getting into far-out situations involving robots and magic powers while solving real life problems. Eventually, even Q gets bored with the scene, and sends them all back to the battle bridge after declaring that the fate of humanity rests on how Picard handles his encounter at Farpoint. Oh? Is that all? Listen, Q, I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, but in Starfleet, we're pretty awesome once you get to know us. We save the universe and fuck the green alien chick twice before breakfast, every day. We’ve got this one, dude.

I'm not entirely satisfied, but it's almost there. I wrote the Farpoint posts for TV Squad after I'd already done like 8 or 9 other entries, and there was a real sense of fatigue in them when I grabbed the originals. I took all of the "omg this is so lame just get on with it" stuff out, because that isn't the tone I want for the whole book, and I didn't want someone who starts reading it to think that this is going to be Wil Slags Star Trek for 50,000 words, because it's not that at all. I still need to find more funny in these two specific episodes, but I think I may just have to accept that Farpoint and The Last Outpost aren't going to be as entertaining as some of the other entries in the book. I have to remember not to let perfect be the enemy of good.

talk about your dream of horses

I'm so close to letting Memories of the Future Volume One leave the nest, I'm already starting to miss the taste of partially-digested bugs in my throat.

So far, I've shared parts that are from the recaps, but the other half of each entry is more analysis and reflection on each episode, and that's what I think makes this book special. Anyone can tell jokes about the show, but there are only nine of us in the world who can talk about what it was like to be regular cast members. This is from Datalore, which I loved when I was a kid, but is just riddled with plot holes I couldn't see twenty years ago:

The pitch was awesome: “We find Data’s evil twin brother, who he never knew he had, and hilarity ensues.” Sure, there’s nothing original about the evil twin story, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be told again in an interesting way, especially with a cool character like Data, played by a great character actor like Brent Spiner, supported by a brilliant dramatic actor like Patrick Stewart. How could they screw up this story this badly?

I think it comes down to lazy writing that has things happen because they’re supposed to happen, rather than having them happen organically. The characters are credulous when they should be skeptical, the audience isn’t surprised by anything after the second act, and there are story problems that should have never gotten past the first draft.

Personally, I hated the way they handled Wesley in this episode. He’s already on his way to becoming a hated character, and the writers cranked it up to Warp 11. It was stupid of them to have Picard give him an adult responsibility and then dismissively treat him like a child when he carried it out. It undermines both of the characters—how is the audience supposed to take either of them seriously? Maybe the idea was that Wesley would prove Picard wrong, with a big payoff at the end when Picard apologies or something and their relationship grows as a result. But all we get is one line in the cargo bay when Picard says, “Can you return to duty?” Really? That’s it? How about, “Hey, can you kiss my ass, Captain? How does that work for you? I was right about everything, bitch!”

Erm, sorry.

It’s not all bad, of course. The art direction in this episode is some of the best we’ve seen so far. When Dr. Crusher works with Argyle to put Lore together, it’s one of the first times we got to see some really awesome technology on the Enterprise. Sure, we’d seen some spiffy visual effects in other episodes, but this was the first time we got to see just how advanced the Enterprise-D was.

I went to the Nebula Awards dinner on Saturday night, where I got to present the award for best script.

I wanted some kind of introduction, so a few minutes before I walked up to the podium, I came up with this:

"Everyone I know who is successful reads books. Everyone I know who is successful and interesting reads science fiction and fantasy. As a parent, you can imagine how important it is to me that my kids read science fiction and fantasy, so I've used television and movies as a gateway drug.

"The nominees for Best Script are..."

I'm not going to lie: I felt pretty good about that, especially considering that I came up with it pretty much on the fly.

The whole evening was really cool. Because it wasn't awesome enough to be in the same room as Larry Niven, Robert Silverberg, Joe Haldeman, and other authors who I felt unworthy to even look at, much less speak to, Anne and I got to sit with David Gerrold.

Fun fact: David wrote and sold The Trouble with Tribbles when he was 19. Anne asked him how he had the courage to do that, and David told her, "Because nobody told me I couldn't." That's so awesome, and everyone who is creative should commit that to memory.

We were talking about all kinds of writerly stuff, and I mentioned to David that I was working on this book. As I started to describe it to him, I could see that he wasn't into it, but was too polite to tell me why.

After a minute, he said, "You have to be careful with your tell-all book, because –"

"Ah, that's why he wasn't into it." I thought.

"It's not a tell-all book. I hate those things," I said. "It's more like you're flipping through your high school yearbook with your friends."

I called on all my improv skills and held an imaginary book in my hands.

"It's like, 'Hey! I remember this, and I remember that, and did you know that this funny thing happened there, and ... oh god ... I can't believe I thought that was cool...'"

His face lit up. "That sounds like a book I'd like to read."

I've talked to a few of my friends from the show about their memories from season one, and they've shared amusing and insightful memories with me that I think readers are going to really enjoy. It may push the release back a little bit, but I'm going to try to talk with David, too, because he was there from the very beginning. Did you know that he suggested me for the role of Wesley? If he hadn't done that, I don't know that I'd have ever worn a pumpkin-colored sweater.

Despite that, though, I'm extremely grateful to David for convincing Bob Justman and Gene Roddenberry to take a chance on me.