Chapter 5 Is Up ❤️

Snippet from The Ithaca Mandate

Ardent, 2765

“She was so excited to see that god-awful ship,” Judith whispered, and Kalor bit her lip as she nodded. “Meanwhile, I can’t get away from it fast enough.”

Kalor set her hand on her arm and squeezed.

“It’s just a ship, Quinn,” she said. “Just as fragile and vulnerable as the rest of us.”

The simplicity of the statement refused to settle. Ithaca wasn’t fragile. She’d never faltered. She was an entity all her own, an impenetrable metal veil that wedged herself between two realities Judith could no longer reconcile. For years she had known Ithaca would take Lyris, and Rilka–that she might even one day have taken Zoey.

She wasn’t just a ship. Not anymore.

She was a threshold, a snare–a patient, immutable gravity that Judith knew was now finally seizing her, too.

Ithaca was always going to take her.

But her pull would drown them both.

Snippet of a new WIP I didn't need to start...

“What happened to your truck?”

The woman leaned a bit, like she’d just noticed the damage.

“Dunno,” she answered, leaning back with a frown. “Found it that way.”

Taryn dropped the bag in the bed, then clapped the dust from her palms.

“Looks like an animal got it.”

The woman shrugged.

“S’pose it does,” she said.

“Some kinda grizzly?” Taryn asked, crossing her arms over her chest and cocking one hip out to the side.

“Could be.”

“You don’t seem real concerned,” Taryn remarked with a lopsided smirk.

The woman shrugged again.

“Not my truck.”

Taryn didn’t say anything more for a moment, the pair of them studying the scrapes. She glanced over just once to get a glimpse of the woman, of the way she tilted her head like in thought. She should leave it alone. But she pushed anyway.

“You got cameras at your place?”

The change in the woman was immediate. Her head snapped around. Her face became edgy and hard.

“Why?” she demanded.

Taryn wasn’t ready for the sharp note of suspicion.

“You got a grizzly you prob’ly should know,” she explained. “What if it comes after you?”

The woman seemed to relax. She pulled the keys out of her pocket and spun the ring once around a finger. It landed in her palm and she closed it.

“Ain’t got grizzlies up there,” she said, and this time, she seemed almost to chuckle.

“This whole area’s got grizzlies,” Taryn countered. She waved toward the store. “My boss hit one just last week.”

Another shrug.

“Won’t hit any grizzlies drivin’ up there.”

Taryn raised her brows and gave up.

“Thanks for loadin’ me up,” said the woman, and she tossed out a light smirk and pulled on the door handle. Taryn watched as she climbed into the seat, flinching a bit when the door clattered shut. The woman looked small as she leaned out the window and glanced back at her. “See you next week.”

The truck choked for a second and then roared back to life. Black smoke spat out of the tailpipe. Taryn backed up a step, waving the cloud out of her face.

“Yeah,” she called out over the ruckus. “I’ll be here like always.”

The woman nodded, then rolled up the window. The truck clunked into gear and lurched forward. It grumbled when she reached the hill at the end of the driveway, then splashed through the pothole on the shoulder. Taryn’s eyes followed it until it disappeared behind the bend in the road, and only when the sound of its engine faded back into silence did she turn back to the mill to close up.

Benefits of forming healthy relationships in a small town: Mechanic gives you a ride home so you don't have to wait 4 hours for your wheel bearings the next morning 🥹❤️

Look, she's not even crying!

STAR TREK: DISCOVERY - S2E2 New Eden

Every time I make popcorn, the animals in this house make me feel like Snow White.

Thank God the turkeys live outside or I'd be making a whole extra bowl.

Things they don't prepare you for as an adult: "Your father left some potatoes in the basement and I kept asking him to get rid of them but he didn't--can you move them while you're here?"

Mother, those are not potatoes. Those are alien lifeforms and I'm pretty sure this is how the zombie apocalypse starts.

Nevertheless--they are no longer in the basement.

This is SO PRETTY ❤️

But they did not do these two justice in the show 💔 😩

^ Closeup of their cutey faces

It doesn't matter what I'm writing, there is a 99% chance my birds are acting as my beta readers from one or both shoulders.

The other 1% of the time they're interrupting my workflow by shitting on the laptop screen, which leads to me going to the kitchen for a wipe and subsequently reminds me I haven't eaten or drank any water in 10 hours and should probably do that. So...helping?

On Writing & Rarepairs

One of my favorite aspects of writing characters is really trying to get into how their minds might work--and when it comes to pairings, I greatly enjoy making something out of nothing.

Prior to 2023, I wasn't a Star Trek fan. I had seen the newer movies, and as a lifelong sci-fi nerd, they were fun to watch, but I always preferred Stargate and Farscape. I've historically been one to connect with characters who are "different"--Seven, Scorpius, Airiam, Saru--and I was in the midst of a particularly bad mental health spiral when I happened to turn on Star Trek: Picard. Seven of Nine was immediately someone that piqued my interest, not only because she was canonically LGBTQ, but because she was clearly someone that had a backstory. This led me to Voyager, because I wanted to see that backstory.

Shipping Janeway and Seven dragged me out of a 6 year writing hiatus, and I started working on a fanfic, though I never intended to post it, and I never finished it.

In 2024, I started Discovery, and was completely unprepared for how much S2E09 would mess me up. I'm a sucker for a tragic character on a good day. Make it a character we didn't know much about, then add an emotional scene between her and the female lead who barely ever interacted and apparently this is all it takes--that and being a bit grouchy about rare pair voids. For the first time since 2017 I was able to not only write something, but FINISH writing it. And then write and finish five more. More than that, I was actually happy with how they turned out, and how my writing evolved as they went from a one-shot to the longest thing I'd ever written.

Sometimes it seemed strange to Burnham, feeling that Airiam was beautiful. She suspected not everyone did, that they might see Michael as defective or faulty for feeling that way about someone–some thing–like that. She knew from the outside it was easy to forget Airiam had once been human, had once looked just like every other human aboard Discovery, but they only ever saw the augmentations the Commander couldn't hide beneath the trim navy and silver Starfleet uniform. They couldn't see the rest, the places where metal and machine fused into the organic remnants of a woman who had lost far more than just her life.

Brains are weird, and they latch onto weird things. As terrible as I consider Discovery overall, I can't complain about the fact that it was able to bring something back to me I hadn't been able to do in many years. The fact that it has now also translated into letting me write my own original fiction again, and allowed me to get back into the HABIT of writing again, is something I will be forever weirdly grateful for. The last time I finished an original piece was 2007. I'm looking forward to changing that next month <3

YouTube

USS Discovery Bridge | Star Trek Ambience

USS Discovery without the terrible writing and cornball acting.

When I really need to get into the space-writing zone, this is where I go 🙃