The Short Stories: Introduction

(You can skip this bit if you like.)

This all started with the semi-official "Literary Challenge" threads in the Ten Forward section of the STO forums. I think they started out under the redoubtable Branflakes, then carried on for a while under the aegis of CaptainSmirk, and later became an unofficial thing in the new ARC version of the forums.

Every so often, Branflakes threw out a prompt, and people wrote stories inspired by it. Simple as that, really. I joined in some time after I'd started playing the game, and the number of Challenges was already well into the twenties. So there's a lot fewer of my stories than there are Literary Challenge threads, which might come as a relief to some.

I decided, for the purposes of these exercises, to model my character(s) in the stories as closely as possible on the ones I have in-game - this provided a sort of ready-made consistency with the game's background, and it stops me from too much power-tripping (my characters in-game don't have game-breaking superpowers, so they can't have them in the stories either.) Initially, this meant I was telling stories about Tylha Shohl, my only character at the time - who got portrayed as a slightly moody, introspective workaholic and something of an Andorian racist on the quiet. As the game developed - you can probably spot where season releases happened, as the stories go on (the actual start point is sometime towards the end of Season 5) - and I got myself more characters, things started to diversify a bit.

I'm starting off with the bulk of the one-off Literary Challenge stories, here. After I'd gone on for a while, I progressed into writing longer, multi-part stories, and - because these things develop a sort of internal continuity after a while - some of the one-offs fit in, chronologically, inside or in between the longer pieces. (This sort of internal consistency serves two purposes. It makes the storyline as a whole seem more solid, realistic and believable. And it means I can refer back to an earlier story inside a current one, pick up on some detail that didn't look important at the time, and pretend I planned it all way in advance, so I look dead clever.)

So here we go. At the start of all this, Tylha was my only character, and she was flying a Mirror Assault Cruiser called the USS Sita. (I'd already decided I needed some sort of naming scheme for my characters' starships, and - being me - I decided to name Tylha's after obscure musical works by the composer Gustav Holst. And then I made Tylha herself a Holst fan, and much later it wound up being a significant plot point, believe it or not.)

Some of these Literary Challenge things wound up being, well, squibs - mood or character pieces with no significant plot to them. On the other hand, some of them turned into pieces of writing I'm actually quite pleased with. For all the Literary Challenge stories, I'm including, at the start, the prompt for that particular challenge. You can decide for yourselves how close I've stuck to it.