The Short Stories: Introducing Ronnie Grau

(More of me waffling about the background. Ignore it.)

By this point, I'd been through the new version of the Klingon character creation system (creating Shalo, who turns up a little later as a character), and was spending enough time and effort on STO that buying a lifetime subscription seemed - briefly - like a good idea. Unfortunately, the "good idea" thing lasted long enough for me to spend the money.... Tylha's next ship was named after Holst's opera and ballet "The Perfect Fool", this being the sort of person who'd buy a lifetime sub. Never mind.

This gave me access to the Liberated Borg character race, so I rolled myself a Liberated Borg. I also started one of my idle background projects (long-time fleet members may remember my attempts to have a full roster of colonists, all called Charlie Luhrs; this sort of thing amuses me and worries my friends and family), trying to get every possible version of the USS Enterprise on one character. It occurred to me to wonder how any one person might have come to command so many different ships from so many historical periods, and the answer I came up with was "eh, it's Star Trek, there are time warps and things all over the place".

And so Veronika "Ronnie" Grau came to be, a displaced person from the 22nd century who'd been through the clutches of the Borg on her way to the 25th. It seemed to me that anyone who'd actually gone through all that would be, not to put too fine a point on it, a psychological basket case... and that there were two ways of dealing with that, in my writing. I could have her confront and deal with her problems, with a maximum of fine prose and brooding angst - or I could have her deal with things by ignoring her problems as hard as she could, seeking out adventure and excitement and really wild things to distract her from the fundamental awfulness of her life.

You can guess which one I chose. I don't really do fine prose, anyway. You've noticed this by now.

The idea, too, of there being something of a mystery about Ronnie also sprang to my mind... eventually, this idea worked itself out, over the course of four long, long stories. I think it all made sense in the end.

However. The next entry is the very first appearance of Ronnie Grau on the forums. She's been enormous amounts of fun to write, and I hope she's just as much fun to read.