Mortal Thangs
Several months ago, in the last gasp of pre-blog Scribblings, I serialized a Star Trek: The Next Generation spec script I wrote and submitted in 1993 called Mortal Pangs. Until I spent the better part of an evening reformatting the entire script so that it would display properly on a web browser, I hadn’t laid eyes on Mortal Pangs in several years. And after revisiting it?
I’m both really happy with it, and embarrassed beyond all belief. There’s a certain therapeutic element about the whole thing that makes me cringe just a little bit; I’m a bit surprised how much of my own internal turmoil at the time was on display. It may well be something that I really needed to write, just to get it out of my system, but I’m not sure it’s a story that needed to be inflicted upon another living soul.
And at the same time…with the benefit of a little distance, I enjoyed it. There are some plot contrivances in there (that handy comet was almost as convenient as Data having to leave his crewmates to control a bunch of torpedoes), and there are some things that really should have been explored or explained better (like, maybe, that whole freakin’ alien culture there). But for the most part I got a kick out of it. I feel like I got the characters’ voices right, and for some reason I really dig the Crusher/Riker scene. And as contrived as “everybody controlling a torpedo or two” was at the end, it’d be hard to argue that the script didn’t give everybody something to do. (One could argue that the attempts to give everybody something to do in the post-series movies have been at least as plausible.)
Overall, it’s really not extraordinary in any way, and that’s almost certainly why it didn’t go anywhere: even with rose colored glasses and a bit of “parental” pride, I can see that Mortal Pangs had great potential to be…well…a highly average episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It fit in pretty well with the shows that were airing at the time I wrote it: there was some kind of out-of-the-blue return of one of the regulars’ family member with the attendant conflict, an off-the-wall scientific McGuffin B-story, and an alien race with one notable characteristic who we’d never see again. In a way, I can look back now and see that it was a synthesis of quite a few staple elements of the show at that time. With my own anxieties, neuroses and uncertainties tacked on for good measure. (Sorry about that.)
I tried and tried to come up with a decent spec for Deep Space Nine after getting the rejection letter from Paramount for Mortal Pangs, but with the benefit of hindsight, I have to say that nothing I was working on (the best of which was something hinting at a prejudicial social class system determining who got a Trill symbiont, which is an obvious avenue the show explored anyway) would have fit in with the brilliance that was exhibited during DS9’s run. I wouldn’t have stood a chance. Ironically, it wasn’t until Enterprise that I came up with an idea for another spec – and naturally, by then, Rick Berman and Brannon Braga had closed the doors on the unsolicited spec script program for the first time since Michael Piller instituted it in 1989. And that was heartbreaking – watching what Manny Coto was doing with the show in the fourth season, my story would have fit right in perfectly in terms of re-examining existing aspects of Trek stories past; in this case, there would’ve been a solid connection to a Next Generation episode, not a Classic Trek story. (Though to even mention what that connection is would give it away – it’s a no-brainer that also probably would have been done eventually, and hell, it even would’ve justifiably grafted some extra Temporal Cold War crap onto the saga. Why not?)
And despite the show’s end, I’m actually still tinkering with writing it out, in teleplay form, and posting it here for your amusement. I like the teleplay format. I thought about trying to flesh it out in prose and maybe entering it in one of the Pocket Books Strange New Worlds short story contests, but here’s a little secret: I hate my own prose with a passion. There’s a reason I write factual and/or opinion essays and reviews, and not fiction. I don’t like my own handling of fiction. It reads like a mish-mash of other people’s fiction, usually whoever I’ve read most recently. I’d rather just tell the story in dialogue, descriptions and stage directions with the assumption that everyone knows who the heck I’m talking about. (I think this is also why, for the most part, I’ve abandoned the licensed-property-novel ship, even though there’ve been some brilliant ones – i.e. Paul Cornell’s Doctor Who New Adventures, and Kate Orman’s too – that have transcended the usual mandate of a licensed property novel.)
So might my dramatic-comedic-time-twisting mini-epic ever see the light of day? One never knows.… Read more
So they’re running some new cable here at work, and apparently this is where the cable-running stopped for today. Wow. So…we just leave this hole open, practically exposing my office to the temperature outside, which is pretty low. Normally the equipment in here keeps things pretty toasty; right now, however, I’m wearing the lined denim jacket that you see hanging up in these pictures I took when I first got here.
Maybe my ode to Star Wars figures got me thinking about this, but I’ve had a couple of interesting thoughts after watching 
It all started with this little fellow here – well, okay, not this one exactly, but one just like him who wound up getting dropped in a full bathtub somehow; this is the one who replaced him, and believe me, somehow, my mom figured out a way to make him waterproof. But, after a fashion, this was the first 
I got to go feed horses this morning, something I haven’t had to do on a weekday for over a month. I actually found it quite relaxing as opposed to being at work at mid-day – and everyone just seemed so lovable, so that makes it even better. (Everyone meaning horses, not the people at work.)
On to other news: the video game industry is on track to getting a newer and quite probably stricter ratings system. Not like this is a surprise – I think we’ve seen this coming since…well…since the original ESRB ratings first appeared. I’m not saying every game company in the world has been laughing off the ratings from the word “go,” but there are some companies that have taken advantage of the self-rating system, inevitably leading to the feeling in certain governmental bodies that the fox has been guarding the henhouse all along. Stunts like the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas “Hot Coffee” unlockable have not helped.
I’ve been getting a lot of gaming time in lately, because I’m working on an epic project that you may or may not have noticed. Using as little emulation and as much real original gaming hardware as possible, I’m working on adding actual video of various classic video games in action to 
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But I’m glad she did. The present in question was the “game folio” edition of Scrabble, a game I haven’t played since…well, the last time I played it, I played it with my mother, if that gives you any indication. I used to love Scrabble. Basically, what this edition does is that it packs the entire miniaturized game board into a little unzippable folder thingie, like a notebook case. There’s a hinge in the middle of the game board (but it can be “locked open” so it’s not constantly trying to close on you in mid-game), and the letters even lock into the board snugly, so in theory, you could close the whole thing in mid-game and pick up later where you left off. The four letter racks included also close up with the same thing in mind – you can store them full of your last “hand” of letters. It’s a really, really cool little concept.
Of course, I also got this absolutely unplayable hand, which any 
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