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a not so good FanFic by me

GShans

Beyond the rim
The subject explains it all, and i don't know how many of you will like it, so far, the chapters are short, and the story, many of you may not like, but i wanted to do this, and put it in a place where it could be accepted, so without further ado, here is my currently unnamed fanfic's first chapter:

Chapter 1:
It is the Earth year 1244, as we are in the middle of our dark ages, there are other races that are prowling the universe, barely aware of our existence, yet barely aware of the great presences around them, and completely unaware of there importance in the coming years.

As a vessel jumps out of Hyperspace and approaches the primary space station above the glorious planet, the captain asks a channel to be opened to the station.

"Channel open captain," said the communications officer.

"Captain Tovol to station prime, respond, this is Hazi-22 to station prime, come in."

"This is Station Prime, commander Selav, what is your destination?"

"Typical, always trying to boss us around, it's our planet as well, very well, our destination is Station Vahlanah, to meet with our central command, urgent business, give us clearance now or be reported."

"You think you can scare us, we know how you are, sacred this, and holy that, hold on while we process your information, uhh... the central computer is running slowly today, it... may take awhile."

"Dammed soldiers, whoever said they can control the military, we have just as much rights to our planet as those guys do, slow computers today, right, they just want us to sit out here waiting for them to give us approval, just to try and show us who's in control."

The first officer, who controlled communications, then spoke up, "yes, it's ridiculous captain, why did our people ever agree to this, it isn't right, they shouldn't be allowed to do this."

"Simple, we were tired of fighting among each other, and they had people who were just waiting to fight, it's there way, it isn't right, but it got most of them out of our cities, most of them are up here now, we've given them something to do."

There was a repeating low chime, and then the COM officer spoke, "captain, incoming message from Station Prime, we've been cleared to proceed to the other side of the planet and to Station Vahlanah."

"About time, proceed, and next time, Lenar, remind me to wait until we're on the other side of the planet before jumping to normal space, a day will come when the Warrior caste no longer tells us what to do. It won't be too far off, our people have had to live under these conditions for over 300 years, our people are growing restless, even the Religious caste has it's limits, I just hope I die before we begin fighting among ourselves again."

Lenar, the first officer, responded, "yes sir, 10 minutes until we reach the station, and sir, there are 3 Torvan Heavy Cruisers following behind us, 5 minutes back, checking, their destination is our station as well."

With a surprised look on his face, Captain Tovol said, "Torvan's, those are warrior caste vessel's, why would they be coming to our station for, they couldn't possibly know, we haven't even told the caste elders yet, this is unnerving, full speed, I want to get there as soon as possible."

"But Captain," said Lenar, "the regulations say to only go at half speed when in planetary grid."

"Warrior caste regulations, we need to get there fast enough so that we can tell the caste elders before they arrive, and like I said, they made that regulation, they won't break it."

"Yes sir, we will now arrive in 3½ minutes, the Torvan's are continuing to approach at ½ speed."
 
Thank you. Interesting beginning. I think I know the time and place, and they promise interesting stories. Should you have time to continue, stories are always welcome. /forums/images/icons/smile.gif
 
I love the banter! It seems both a symptom of a good-natured rivalry and something really, really nasty at the same time.

Of course we'd like to see more. /forums/images/icons/smile.gif

Watch your run-on sentences! /forums/images/icons/smile.gif
 
uh, first off, THANKS, second, i am only, for now, going by what my MS Word 2000's spelling and grammar checker is telling me, though if i notice any very long sentences that it didn't catch, i'll change them.
 
MSWord's grammar checker is about as reliable as Garibaldi in mid-season 5. In other words, it isn't. Don't use it.
 
I've decided to co-opt this dead thread for my own purposes. I don't know why.

Over on the big Stargate website, I tried to get discussions going several times about writing, both original and fanfic. It was frustrating.

As many of you know, back when I was the editor/head writer for Republibot, I used to encourage a lot of people to submit original fiction. If it was halfway decent, we'd run it giving them full credit, an audience, and a defacto web-copyright. If it wasn't halfway decent, we'd help with the editing, point out problems, point out stuff we liked, be as encouraging as possible, and never, ever told the authors what to write. If it was halfway decent then, we'd publish it. If it still wasn't halfway decent, I had the unpleasant job of saying 'no.'

It wasn't an efficient way to fill space. Honestly, in the time it takes me to read and copy-edit some guy's highly-derivative tale of true love amongst the mauve-colored stone-age felinoids on the moon 'Cornucopia', I could have done a dozen articles. But I felt that I had the ability to help out some aspiring writers a tiny bit, so why not? And I liked reading the stuff, and getting to know the people who submitted it, even if a lot of it would never in a million years be siteworthy.

And then there were the fanfic guys. (Always guys, never girls insofar as I'm aware) The ones who would pick fights about our 'no fanfic' policy, and who would claim that their Star Trek Slashfic was actually superior to anything ever done in real Trek before, and that it was far more deserving of space on the site than a wholly original story. And if I said, "We only take wholly original stories, sorry," then they'd get in nasty arguments and spam my inbox with arguments about 'what is original' and whatnot.

At the Gateworld site, after I left Republibot, I just basically tried to get a conversation going. I missed reading stuff by people I didn't know. I was shocked - shocked! - by the paranoia. "Well, my idea is great, and I don't want to show it to you." Ok, fine. Wanna' read one of mine? "No, because you'll try to steal my ideas." Ok, well I don't see how I'd do that if you read one of mine, but..... "Because then you'd claim your story gave me the idea for mine, and you'd sue me and you'd take it away from me." Uhm...dude, I don't *NEED* to steal your story, I've got zillions of my own. "Yeah, but you want to take my ideas so you can make money off of them." Sorry, pal, I've got three books of my own that no one's buying. I've got a bumper crop of things no one wants. I don't need to poach even more things no one wants from you. "Well then why are you asking?" BECAUSE I WAS GODDAMNED WELL TRYING TO BE FRIENDLY. I WAS TRYING TO SHOW AN INTEREST IN SOMETHING YOU CLAIM TO LIKE TO DO. SHEESH.

Variations on this theme happened a lot. I got the impression that a lot of these people were writing fanfic, and I got the impression that they never showed it to anyone. I dunno. A year of that left a bad taste in my mouth.

So I guess my question is: why are amateur authors so paranoid, do you think?
 
So I guess my question is: why are amateur authors so paranoid, do you think?

You said it yourself - they're amateurs. Amateurs think that an idea is worth something when what really matters is execution. But they constantly get bogged down in protecting the idea instead of actually writing their story/novel/screenplay, whatever.

It can go the other way, too, with somebody seemingly desperate to give their idea away so it can get written and Change The World but then get cranky because their great gift isn't accepted.

I recently had a situation on a board I moderate where a poster complained that JMS was curt with them after he'd sent his Great Idea to JMS in email. After I explained JMS' 'no story ideas' policy, the poster decided to send *me* his idea so *I* could send it to JMS. He was most unhappy when I told him I wouldn't read it, wouldn't send it anywhere and had deleted it.

Jan
 
You said it yourself - they're amateurs. Amateurs think that an idea is worth something when what really matters is execution. But they constantly get bogged down in protecting the idea instead of actually writing their story/novel/screenplay, whatever.

It can go the other way, too, with somebody seemingly desperate to give their idea away so it can get written and Change The World but then get cranky because their great gift isn't accepted.

I recently had a situation on a board I moderate where a poster complained that JMS was curt with them after he'd sent his Great Idea to JMS in email. After I explained JMS' 'no story ideas' policy, the poster decided to send *me* his idea so *I* could send it to JMS. He was most unhappy when I told him I wouldn't read it, wouldn't send it anywhere and had deleted it.

Jan

True. When I was young and stupid I heard Sinclair was leaving B5, and I sent JMS my suggestion on how he could preserve the storyline with a new character in place. He tore into me and then explained that if my idea coincidentally happened to be like the one he was going to use anyway, he basically couldn't use it anymore, and it would leave him open for lawsuit.

I had no idea, apologized, and never did that again. Good lesson.

I guess I don't understand the paranoia because when you're starting out as a kid in college and you decide you wanna' be a writer, you tend to talk out all your ideas so there's no reward in actually writing them. Your friends are already pretty impressed with how clever you are, so why bother? (Bradbury commented on this phenomenon a couple times) But you get older, and you realize words on paper are a lot more important than ideas in your head. Ideas are, literally, a dime a dozen, and they're over-priced at that.
 

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