Otter's Rock

My startrekholidays fic is done and posted, and my yuletide fic is at the "bus pass" stage--it's not as polished as I would like it, but if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, it would count as fulfilling the assignment. I also have a treat that I'm working on, which is going well, but I'm sort of concerned about how long it's going to be. I hope it will not turn out to be like From Castle To Palace, a 17k-long treat I wrote in 2016. There are other treats I would like to write!

Speaking of long fic, I am going to do the "digress like Hugo!" festival that petra is going to be hosting next year. You know all those 19th Century novelists like Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens and Herman Melville, where they'd have these long digressions (whole chapters sometimes!) about stuff that was only vaguely related to the story? Like, in Les Mis, you get literally 70 pages in before you even meet Jean Valjean, the main character. There's chapters about everything from the Battle of Waterloo to French religious life, where the action stops completely while the author lectures you about whatever. Melville was the same (wales are fish!). Dickens didn't have whole chapters that were digressions, but he had lots of shorter digressions within chapters.

Some of us have a natural inclination to write like that. For me, worldbuilding is my jam, and I regularly have bits of worldbuilding I come up with that ... I can't actually fit into the story itself. It very much informs how I'm writing the plot and characters, but the reader doesn't need to know it and it would stop the story to go into all that detail. So to have a fic fest where we are encouraged to put in all that stuff, is just going to be so much fun.

I'm going to write Star Trek. My main self-insert OC, back when I was a young otter, was a Vulcan priestess who was also Spock's daughter and married to a human starship captain. Besides the adventures I had them go on (most of which I can't recall, none of which I ever wrote down) I filled notebooks with lore. (backstory! family history and geneology! timelines! etc!) And I still today, when I'm daydreaming, will have T'Amanda and her husband the Captain show up in various Star Trek shows. (They go to DS9! They have a wacky wormhole accident and end up in the Delta Quadrant with Voyager! They have a wacky time travel accident and end up on Captain Archer's Enterprise! They have a wacky time travel accident and end up in the Reboot universe! ... etc.)

I am going to be completely self-indulgent and use them as the base story to do Vulcan worldbuilding digressions around. Marriage customs! The history of various inter-clan disputes! The history of Vulcan/Human romantic relationships (and sexual harassment)! Saavik's history and how it impacts her relationship to Vulcan culture! Religion on Vulcan and what high priestesses do when they're not performing the fal-tor-pan! What aromanticism and amatonormativity look like in the 24th Century!

The challenge is going to be, "can I figure out enough plot to hang the digressions on?" and we shall have to see about that. I'm definitely going to go the Victor Hugo route of "we're not even going to MEET the main character until we get a whole long section of stuff about this other character who is pretty minor in the grand scheme of the story." It's not going to be seventy pages long (I hope), but it'll be there.

Title: Children of the Desert
Fandom: Star Trek AOS
Characters: Original Female Characters,
Author: beatrice_otter 
Rating: kid
Length: 8,203 words
Betaed by: laurajv 
Sequel to: The Desert Between
Summary: There are many hybrid children on the new Vulcan homeworld, including Spock and Nyota's children. Things don't always go smoothly.

AN: Vulcan words are taken/adapted from the Vulcan Language Dictionary. “mekh” means parent, I adapted it to mean “stepmother.”
“Jata” is a girl’s name in Kikuyu, it means “Star”

Sequel to: The Desert Between
Nyota's Choice
House-building


At AO3 or Tumblr



( “But that’s the way Grandma taught me to sing!” )

Kal'i'farr heh T'naehm (11199 words) by sixbeforelunch
Fandom: Star Trek, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Original Female Character/Original Male Character
Characters: Original Vulcan Character(s)
Additional Tags: Vulcan, Vulcan Culture, Alien Culture, Pon Farr, Marriage, The Dominion War - Freeform, world building, action takes place over a single day, tight focus, tight 3rd person POV, Ordinary People, Little Brothers, Big Sisters, architecture nerds, linguistics nerds, Sherlock Holmes fans, Clans, alien ceremonies, Arranged Marriage, Alien Food, Food, Cooking, Telepathy, Mental bonds, Telepathic Bonds, Parents and Children, Communication, no canon characters
Summary:

A meditation on marriage and war, from a Vulcan perspective, on the eve of the Dominion War.
 

Lovely fic! I am fascinated by this picture of Vulcan culture, OCs Veral and T'Lin are interesting, and I really hope sixbeforelunch  has a sequel planned because I would love to read more of their adventures!

sixbeforelunch asks: What Star Trek headcanon of yours has not yet made it into a story?

Most of it is (unsurprisingly!) about Vulcans.  For example, I have some Thoughts about how to reconcile Vulcan culture from Enterprise with the rest of the TV show.  As mentioned in my previous post, the taboo against telepathy there DOES NOT FIT with anything else we know about Vulcan telepathy ANYWHERE ELSE IN ANY OF THE SHOWS, let alone the books.  I would bet you that lots and lots of families (plus of course the monks of Gol and the priestesses of Mount Seleya) just kept quietly keeping on with what they were doing and finding ways to mislead the Science Directorate about it.

I also think that Mestral from that one episode about the Vulcans marooned in West Virginia in the 1960s got married and had kids  who formed a whole backwoods West-Virginia clan of Vulcan-Human hybrids who kept some elements of Vulcan culture and not others, and quietly imported some Vulcan things (possibly musical instruments, crops, etc.) after official First Contact was made.  And possibly also made contact with the V'tosh ka'tur at some point--maybe a few marriages?  Adopting kids the V'tosh ka'tur didn't want to raise on ships but didn't want to send back to Vulcan to be forced into line?  And possibly after Vulcan was destroyed in the Reboot universe sending aid there to help out.  (I am completely ignoring the canonical difficulties in producing a Vulcan-Human hybrid, here, and the fact that if anything the show underestimated it.)

I think that Saavik and Spock (who eventually got married, in the books) have a daughter who is on track to being the next T'Pau, and will in time become the Eldest Mother of their clan.  I think her name is Amanda.

I think that part of the reason that Perrin (Sarek's second wife) and Spock didn't get along is that Perrin didn't know how to relate to a step-son older than she was, and also (unlike Amanda) was very definitely On Sarek's Side in any disagreements, instead of staying out of them or trying to be a go-between.  And I think on Spock's part he was (however illogically) interested in finding fault with the woman who replaced his mother, and he'd have been a lot less tweaked off if his father had married a Vulcan instead, something logically arranged by the clan.  Because falling in love with a human once is one thing, and shows how wonderfully special Amanda was.  Falling twice just smacks of fetishism, and makes Amanda one in a series.  Meanwhile, Sarek loved Amanda, and he loves Perrin, but in very different ways.  He had to make accommodations for Amanda, and he changed his lifestyle for her (however much they looked like a Perfect Vulcan Couple on the outside), and marrying a Vulcan woman would mean adapting back to Vulcan ways of doing things, and he's old and doesn't want to.  Perrin, however, will maintain the human tone of the household, and she's kind of in awe of her predecessor so things can stay pretty much the same.  (She is not, however, in awe of Sarek, however much she respects him.  Spock thinks she is, and respects his father less because of it, but then he doesn't see the way Sarek and Perrin are when they are alone together.  Perrin, for her part, plays up the Dutiful Vulcan Wife around Spock because she knows it annoys him, which doesn't help his impression of her.)  She knows where she stands in Sarek's affections; she wants respect more than anything else, and he gives it to her, and she's one of those people who falls in love with a culture other than her own and wants a place in it, and he gives her that.  And Sarek doesn't like the friction between Spock and Perrin, but look, he and Spock have always had their differences, and both are stubborn, and neither have ever had to deal with one another without Amanda there to smooth off the rough edges and tell them they're being idiots and cajole them into talking, and he doesn't know how to do it with Perrin fuming about Spock's disrespect.  It's the one thing he regrets about marrying her.

Worf spent a few years as a teen trying to fit in and be more human, but eventually realized that it wouldn't get him any more acceptance from the other kids at school, and so went the opposite direction and tried to be More Klingon Than Klingons.  He doesn't really remember that phase, until Alexander comes along, and even then, he's forgotten a lot more about what he was going through than he thinks he has.

Will Riker gets a lot of crap for staying a Commander for so long.  He should have gotten a promotion to Captain years before he did.  He stayed because he loves Enterprise, and as First Officer he still gets to do the stuff he loves (front lines of exploration, getting to actually GO ON HAZARDOUS AWAY TEAMS and not stay on the bridge all the time).  And it's comfortable there, with all his friends.

I don't have any headcanon for DS9 that I haven't written because the show was so fascinating and well-written I never felt I had to fill in the gaps myself.  And I didn't pay enough attention to Voyager.  Didn't pay much attention to Enterprise, either, truth to tell, but the gaps were SO FRICKING HUGE.

There are still five days open on the January Meme.

Title: The Desert Between
Author: beatrice_otter 
Fandom: Star Trek
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Nyota Uhura, Spock
Word Count: 14,224
Betaed by: laurajv 
Summary: “All Vulcans are constrained. By our biology, by our clans, by our whole society. But women more so than men, and offworlder women married to Vulcan men most of all.” Nyota loves Spock. But she can’t have him without taking Vulcan culture, too.
Note: the title is an adaption of The River Between by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o. laurajv wants me to write a sequel; I may, but it probably won’t be any time soon.

At AO3



( The most important thing for the Vulcans right now is the rebuilding of their culture and society, not the building of the new colony’s buildings. They named their new homeworld ‘rebirth,’ and that’s exactly what they want to happen. )

Nyota's Choice
House-building
Children of the Desert

vulcanreforged is hosting a kink meme--gen, het, slash, all welcome, as long as it's about Vulcans in the aftermath of the new movie.  There are some great prompts up, and room for lots more!  (I particularly am interested in the Vulcans as Space Pirates one on the cracky end, and the Andorian cook finding something that tastes like plomeek and making a killing on the less cracky end.)  All are welcome.  If you don't have a DW, you can participate using your livejournal OpenID.

My absolute main kink, whether fanfic or profic or movies or tv shows, is for solid worldbuilding.  I want to know about culture, government, history, religion, ethnology, psychology--all the soft-science background details.  So, for instance, for the new Star Trek timeline/AR, I have all kinds of ideas about how I think the surviving Vulcans will react.  My impressions of Vulcan culture are taken from all the tv shows and movies, combined with the classic Star Trek books from the 80's/90's (e.g. Spock's World, the Vulcan Academy Murders, Sarek, the Pandora Principle, Dwellers in the Crucible, Strangers from the Sky, etc.  Note that Kurtzman and Orci consider Spock's World to be canon, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.  Here is a summary of Vulcan history interludes from that book.)

( So, here's Vulcan culture as I have interpreted it. )

( How will this affect the rebuilding of Vulcan culture? )

( So, if I were Spock Prime, going off to help rebuild Vulcan society, here's what I would suggest. )

ETA: I've written a Spock/Uhura story that grew out of this meta: The Desert Between.