Boldly Gone Posting and Discussion

[cmdrajd]

Comments for "Consequences You Otherwise Avoid."

A lot of the credit for this one actually goes to my wife. She has her own writing project that she's been working on for quite a while now and may have written more pages for than I have for all of the Star Traks I've done (I'm not remotely kidding about that). She's been working through different scenarios for her characters and putting them through different relationship paths. At one point we were talking about it, and I said she should turn it into a choose your own adventure romance novel. We chuckled at the idea, and that was that.

Then I started working on this story. I had a couple of basic goals for it: deal with the destruction of Romulus (again) and have Rosalyn finally tell Bain that she's in Section 31. I wrote the first part of the first scene of this story pretty much as it is now, just from our usual third-person perspective, but then I stalled out. I had a bunch of different ideas for how the story could go, but nothing that was really gelling into a coherent plot. That's when the thought of actually doing a choose your own adventure story with these ideas hit me.

By the way, there are actual Star Trek choose your own adventure books. One is #15 of the Which Way Books series (As in Which Way to avoid being sued by the publisher of Choose Your Own Adventure?). It's called Star Trek: Voyage to Adventure and was published in 1984. The other, #24, is Phaser Fight, which was published in 1986. At some point many many years ago I got my hands on them (I'm not sure when), but I don't think I've ever successfully gotten through either story.



Writing a choose your own adventure story, even a fairly basic one like this, requires a lot of planning. I drew out a branching diagrams of the choices and where the led. I have a huge amount of respect for the authors of the actual books because of all that goes into these. I can't imagine trying to map things out at that scale.

The story in "Consequences You Otherwise Avoid" (The title makes sense (sort of) on its own, but each word also starts with the same letter as the corresponding words in Choose Your Own Adventure.) is fairly simplistic, and readers shouldn't have too much trouble getting to the real ending. I enjoyed writing the other scenes, though, and had some fun with some key moments in Trek history. I had a few more that didn't fit in. I know at one point Q was going to turn you into a cat for some reason. There was a joke that went with it that I've completely forgotten. I also considered including more alternate Bains, but that was really going to make things messy.

Mostly I played fair except for the coordinates bit. I couldn't resist including an actual solvable puzzle there, but it wouldn't surprise me if people just blunder through it.

As for the conversation between Bain and Rosalyn, Anthony and I had decided a long time ago that Bain likely knew about her activities. It doesn't mean he likes Section 31, which he makes clear at the end of Series Seven, heading off her attempt to tell him then. But he also knows and loves her. These are two people who have been together for decades. We weren't about to destroy that relationship over this, particularly so close to the end of the series. If anything, removing this last secret will just make them stronger.

The upshot of all of this (as much as it pains me to say) is that Boldly Gone is officially in a different timeline than Star Trek: Picard and seasons 3-5 of Discovery. The split point is the destruction of Romulus, which was prevented in the Boldly Gone timeline as described back in Series Nine. Does any of that matter? Not really. But we've generally tried to stay true to Star Trek continuity in the past. In this case, though, we just can't.

In case you didn't make it to the end, here's the "correct" path -- 21-15-24-19-28-18-25-16-32

And there is actually a Section 31 to the story (of course there is), but no path leads to it. You'd have to put in the URL manually...or just click here:

https://www.star-traks.com/boldly/stori ... Section31/

[cmdrajd]

Comments on "Born to Rom"

This story might seem like an odd choice for the next to last Boldly ever. It’s a light character piece rather than some big build-up that ends in a cliffhanger. A lot of the reason for that goes back to what I said was our reasoning for not spending the whole run on the Dillon Consortium arc. We wanted the opportunity to tell other kinds of stories. The last one was a choose your own adventure, and this one was…well…this.

Anthony, Brendan, and I have all used Star Traks to talk about events in our lives. At its core, “Please Hold For Oblivion” was really my way of working through some of my feelings about being so far from the friends I’d made in college after I graduated and moved away for grad school. I won’t speak for Anthony and Brendan here, but I know some of the real life events they’ve used in their stories.

The A plot of “Born to Rom” is me being a bit wistful about the fact that both of my kids are adults now. Several of the bits between Vioxx and Neb are pulled straight from my own parenting experiences. I tried playing Coma with my kids when I was tired. I worked about as well for me as it did for Vioxx. And my son actually told me that I’d done too good of a job of raising him to be independent. As for the rocking a child to sleep while singing the same Pearl Jam song over and over, that also happened…to Anthony. He very kindly came over to watch my son when I needed to take my then wife to the emergency room for a really bad flu. When we came home, Anthony was rocking the boy and singing (Although, I can’t remember exactly which Pearl Jam song it was. He just said it was the only song he knew all the words to), and apparently had been there like that for a very long time. He was willing to stay there the whole night if he had to.

The B plot was us having fun with various therapists from TV, history, and other Traks stories. Hopefully it doesn’t matter too much if you aren’t familiar with them all. Really the end goal was to push Prosak to do something. Maybe not the right something. But it is something.

Next week, it all comes to an end in the series finale of Boldly Gone. And I promise we’ll make up for the lack of things going boom in this story.

[cmdrajd]

Comments on “Going, Going, Gone…”

We’re finally here. I have to admit that for a while there I really thought that we were just going to leave things with Series Nine. True, it wasn’t much in the way of an overall wrap up for Boldly Gone, but it was an ending of a sort and didn’t leave things on a cliffhanger.

We weren’t happy with that idea, though. It may have taken us 13 years to get to an actual ending, but we did it. Between the two of us, Anthony and I have written several different endings for our Star Traks series. Some of them didn’t stick. I’ve ended the original series 4 times, and Anthony is still going with his latest incarnation of The Vexed Generation. The big question in my mind for Boldly was how to leave it. Would we open ended, like “All Good Things…” in TNG, where the crew just continues on to the next mission? Or go with something more final, like “What You Leave Behind” in DS9, where characters move on and things have changed.

Obviously we went with the latter. I may be overstating this, but I chalk some of that up to us being older and understanding more that things don’t last forever. Friendships drift apart, coworkers move on, jobs change, and life can send you in directions that you aren’t expecting. Boldly Gone is about the period of time that these characters spent as a crew on board the USS Anomaly, so for the end of the series, it made sense to show how that time ended.

Some parts of this final story have been in our heads for years and years. The final scene with Tovar and Marsden’s kid coming aboard to serve under Bain has been planned since long before Series Nine even. We just didn’t know the particulars leading up to it. Originally, we were just going to time jump to it at the end, but as we were actually writing the final story, going with the future time (Well, the future of the future of Star Traks’ future) presented itself and worked well for what we were trying to do.

And the basic idea that the finale would involve the Anomaly taking on another ship with an anti-singularity drive has been in place since the end of Series Nine. The circumstances kept shifting, though. When we thought all of Series Ten, the Dillon Consortium was involved, and the fight with the empty suit also happened in this last story. I won’t go into all of the reasons that we changed our minds, since I’ve discussed it previously, but more specific to this story, it felt right to include Thot Phul, since he’s been in the series from the beginning, and Selex, since that storyline was never really resolved and it helped push Prosak to where she needed to be.

Because of that, while the story picks up on characters and events from earlier in Series Ten and across Boldly Gone overall, it’s standalone in some ways. I wanted it to be more like “All Good Things…” (And Voyager’s “Endgame” really). You can jump into that episode with a general knowledge of TNG and the characters and have no trouble understanding what’s happening, unlike “What You Leave Behind,” which is the culmination of a massive arc.

Another thing we wanted to make sure happened in the finale was to give Reginald Bain a chance be Bain. Here he is, in command of a starship but facing steep odds. Bain is in many ways the most capable Star Traks captain that Anthony and I have written across our various series. He’s a bit eccentric in some ways and oblivious in others, but in a situation like this final story, he is absolutely in his element.

Anthony and I have different strengths, and one thing he is MUCH better at than me is titles. I was originally thinking to call it “The Bold and the Deceitful.” It was supposed to be a play on the long-running soap opera “The Bold and the Beautiful” (Which Jimmy Doohan actually appeared on in the 90s), but it never felt right. “Deceitful” and “Beautiful” just don’t sound enough alike for the title to land. Anthony instantly came up with “Going, Going, Gone…” which is, as I said earlier, MUCH better. Anthony’s ideas also led to the name of the Romulan ship, which in turn led to what’s possible one of the stupidest gags we’ve ever done. I love it so much.

As for the actual ending, the goal was to give enough of a sense of where the characters went after their time on the Anomaly to be satisfying without getting too bogged down in the details. I thought of it a bit like the flash-forward sequences in the final episode of “Parks & Recreation” (Sorry if that’s a spoiler for a show that ended eight years ago). We don’t have any plans to follow up at the moment, but if at some point in the future someone did have an idea for a Prosak story or something else, things are wide open for whatever we (or they, if it’s not one of us) might want to do.

That’s all I have for the finale. I’ll be back in a couple of days with some thoughts on the series as a whole.

[cmdrajd]

And now a bit of rambling about Boldly Gone as a whole...

Anthony and I created Boldly Gone because we wanted to write a Star Traks project together (beyond the guest stories that we would occasionally do for each other’s series). At the time (1999), we were living approximately 1200 miles apart, so most of the early development on the series was done over AOL Instant Messenger (Remember when that thing was the most popular way to communicate online?).

It’s been a while, so I don’t remember all of the details, like why we decided to jump ahead in time. My guess is that we felt that the 24th century was crowded enough and that it would be more interesting to go farther into the future. We went through a lot of ideas before settling on what became Boldly. At one point, the ship was going to have been built by an eccentric scientist and then found by Starfleet after the scientist died. One chief engineer idea was for a multi-tendrilled robot that I don’t think was actually able to leave Engineering.

Gradually, we zeroed in on the various characters (Boldly was the first series that had original characters created for it rather than being populated with characters based on people we knew in real life), but we still couldn’t figure out the captain. We considered not having a permanent one and just rotating them through like Spinal Tap drummers. Eventually, though, we came up with Reginald Bain, and I absolutely cannot imagine the series without him. He’s such a big personality on his own, and he gave us a wealth of story ideas between his family and his past history. If I ever get around to the Reginald Bain entry in the Traks Wiki, I’m going to have to gather up all of the mentions we tossed in about things that he experienced over the years, which is going to be a lot!

Once we had the concept and characters, actually writing Boldly presented several challenges. First was the distance issue. Anthony came to visit for a few days over the summer in 1999, and we cranked out the first story and at least half of the second while he was there. After that, we would plot out the events of a story or series together and then divide things up between us. Sometimes we’d split up the subplots in a single story. Others we’d split up a series and each take on some of the stories. It really depended on what else we had going on at a particular time.

Another issue was fleshing out our setting. Yes, leaving the 24th century got us away from the other series, but it also left us needing to figure out what the early 26th century was like technologically and politically. Looking at the first few stories, we kind of avoided the problem in the first 3, hit it head on in the next 2, then created a bigger problem for ourselves in the Series One finale by jumping to the Andromeda Galaxy, where we spent all of Series Two.

In retrospect (and I have no idea how Anthony feels about this), I think we probably should have spent one more series setting things up in our home galaxy before running off to Andromeda, but putting the ship off on its own like that really got us to work on the character dynamics. I would also admit that commpips aren’t remotely practical, but they weren’t meant to be. It was a silly idea built off of wondering what would be even smaller than a commbadge.

Really, though, I’m very happy with what we did with Boldly Gone. Sure, I could wish that we’d finished it a decade or so ago when there was some momentum (and readers), but I wasn’t in a place then to complete the series. I also don’t know if the stories would have turned out as well. I certainly doubt that I would have come up with the idea to do a choose your own adventure story.

I’m also happy with the way we left things. We accomplished what we wanted to accomplish. There’s closure for our characters, but still a lot more to explore in this era if we (or someone else) decide to come back to it. I also had a great time writing these with Anthony, which was our main reason for doing this in the first place.

So that’s Star Traks: Boldly Gone… I hope you enjoyed it!

[b-guy]

I'll admit that I'm a terrible Traks author and haven't finished the last couple of stories yet. But the CYOA story was quite a bit of fun! And I just noticed one some Internet page that apparently Lower Decks is getting one as well?

...we need to start going through our access logs and see if any of the IPs of recurring readers line up with Paramount's location...

Anyway, sitting down to think about it, this was the first CYOA story I've done since I was a kid...in book form. But it's a format that's become increasingly popular in video games. And I don't just mean games where you customize your character, or maybe you choose which missions/quests you do and which you leave, I mean games like The Pandora Directive, the Mass Effect Trilogy, or Fallout 4, where choices you make can have big impacts on the fates of characters, whether or not certain events happen in-game, and the relationships you have with NPCs. All that to saw, peeking at the planning process for a short story gives just the smallest taste of how complicated that sort of planning must be.

Looking forward to reading the last couple of stories...eventually...

[cmdrajd]

I'll give them a pass on this one, since Ryan North is writing it. He already did CYOAs for Hamlet and Romeo & Juliet.