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I had a week off work, mostly under duress, and it turns out that holidays actually return you to your life rested and able to cope with things! Who even knew. Anyway, it was a lovely time in the north of Scotland - first to a family wedding, which was sweet and charming and full of small children, and I danced the Orcadian strip the willow to the dulcet tones of a calypso steel drum ceilidh band, I don't even know, it was awesome - and onwards and upwards into the Highlands. We drove along some incredibly beautiful and terrifying mountain roads (in my nightmares, I shall see the climb from the Well of the Lecht, and the speedometer dropping), including the highest classified road in the UK, which crosses the Cairngorms in a single track and is silent like flying, and spent several days staying in a teeny tiny cottage, super-cute, with lots of hot water, halfway up a mountain eight miles from the nearest village. You could step outside and hear birds calling and cattle lowing from across the glen, and when it got dark enough, there was the Milky Way. (I love that you can't - or at least, I can't, though my eyesight is pretty sharp - see the Milky Way straight on; it's there in your peripheral vision, like it's being gentle as it reminds you of your utter insignificance in the face of all things.)

So that was all very lovely. I finished the novel, finally. Well, I haven't finished it, but it's definitely into the editing stage. (Maybe four days with no internet or phone were what I needed all along.) And now I'm back, and September is coming, which I always think of as a time for change and promise even though I'm well out of academia - and that said, I will have to start job-hunting this month - and the weather is hanging pleasantly on the surface of autumn.

I wrote about 25k in August, not counting the novel, and I don't think I've posted any of it here, so rather than make a lot of story posts, here it all is.

For the Star Trek Friendshipfest:

Welcome, Wanderer (9201 words) by Raven
Fandom: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Data & Jean-Luc Picard, Data & Geordi LaForge
Characters: Data, Jean-Luc Picard, Geordi La Forge, Deanna Troi, Ro Laren, Sonya Gomez
Additional Tags: Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream - Freeform, Darmok, Mixed Media, Fairgrounds, Ferris Wheels, Languages and Linguistics, There really is a perfectly sensible explanation for all of this
Summary:

"You're the ranking officer here. Would you care to explain this?"

It's a really long story.

Oh, sinners, let's go down (4752 words) by RavenFandom: Star Trek: The Original Series
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Leonard McCoy & Spock
Characters: Leonard McCoy, Spock, James T. Kirk
Summary:

"What you gonna do, Mr. Spock? You gonna save my soul?"

[Content note is a spoiler, so it's at the bottom of the story post]

For trope_bingo:

Research Ethics (793 words) by RavenFandom: The Big Bang Theory (TV)
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Leonard Hofstadter/Penny
Characters: Penny (Big Bang Theory), Leonard Hofstadter, Sheldon Cooper, Bernadette Rostenkowski, Amy Farrah Fowler
Additional Tags: Community: trope_bingo
Summary:

Five things Penny doesn't understand about Leonard until she's met his mother.

[Please be aware of the content note on this one - it's at the top of the story post.]

where you gonna sleep tonight (3487 words) by Raven
Fandom: The Big Bang Theory (TV)
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Leonard Hofstadter/Penny, Sheldon Cooper/Leonard Hofstadter
Characters: Leonard Hofstadter, Penny (Big Bang Theory), Sheldon Cooper, Bernadette Rostenkowski, Rajesh Koothrappali, Amy Farrah Fowler, Howard Wolowitz
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Community: trope_bingo
Summary:

Sheldon doesn't snap at him for his lack of precision, which is how he knows the end of the world is coming.

Home (1065 words) by Raven
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Oversight - Charlie Fletcher
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Sara Falk, Lucy Harker, Hodge, Wayland, Jack Sharp, Charlie Pye, Cook
Additional Tags: Community: trope_bingo
Summary:

They found Mr Sharp on his knees with his eyes blank and unseeing, and drained of all colour.

That's all, and quite enough too.

I keep messing with this story trying to make it ~deep~ and ~profound~ - and, no. This is my id, you guys. Sorry.

Fic: A Clean, Well-Lighted Place
by Raven
6000w, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Data/Tasha, and Geordi, Deanna, Beverly, Keiko and ensemble. Twenty-one nights in the life of the Enterprise Insomniacs' Club.

( aromatic, interesting and blue )

I am at vidukon_cardiff, which seems like an excellent opportunity to post this vid! It is not a premiere; I finished it between panels!

Many thanks to cosmic_llin, thingswithwings, and the house at no. 46 for their help with this.

[vid] we came to learn the sea [Star Trek: TOS, TNG, Voyager, DS9, and Enterprise]
by Raven
"You are my compass."
-Kathryn Janeway to Tuvok, "Prime Factors"

music: "We Learned The Sea", Dar Williams, from The Green World
content notes: none standard; one bright flash of red light near the start
password to stream: compass / download from mediafire, 65MB

( notes, stream, lyrics )

If you follow me elsewhere, you may know I am writing a story about Janeway and Seven, and, ah, trying to avoid it. To that effect, yesterday I asked if anyone wanted a Star Trek ficlet, and ah, people did. I ended up writing many stories. My favourite is the one with Kirk, Spock, and McCoy meeting baby Tuvok, but, really, I had fun writing all of these:

Dress (1159 words) by Raven
Fandom: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Julian Bashir/Elim Garak
Characters: Julian Bashir, Elim Garak, Keiko O'Brien, Benjamin Sisko, Miles O'Brien

"How do you know I'm not married?" Julian asks, playfully, then realises he's answered his own question.

Velocity (528 words) by Raven
Fandom: Star Trek: Voyager
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Kathryn Janeway/Seven of Nine
Characters: Kathryn Janeway, Seven of Nine

Preparation for command.

War Songs (1257 words) by Raven
Fandom: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Benjamin Sisko, Miles O'Brien, Kira Nerys, Shakaar Edon, Keiko O'Brien, Odo (Star Trek), Jadzia Dax, Jake Sisko, Julian Bashir
Additional Tags: Families of Choice

The first requirement, when one is celebrating the Bajoran Festival of Alignment, is good food.

Learn The Sea (935 words) by Raven
Fandom: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Star Trek: Voyager
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: James T. Kirk, Spock, Leonard McCoy, T'Meni, Tuvok

“Well, now, little one,” McCoy says. “What’s your name?”

Scientific Interest (608 words) by Raven
Fandom: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Kira Nerys, Jadzia Dax

Mandatory Starfleet continuing professional development.

Orbiting (927 words) by Raven
Fandom: Star Trek: Voyager
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: B'Elanna Torres, Seven of Nine
Additional Tags: Post-Canon

Standing there with her eyes steady and clear, Seven looks as impeccable as B’Elanna remembers.

Numbers (691 words) by Raven
Fandom: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: The Next Generation
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Julian Bashir/Elim Garak
Characters: Elim Garak, Julian Bashir, Jadzia Dax, Benjamin Sisko, Data
Additional Tags: Deep Dish Nine

Garak comes to visit before lunch, and as a consequence Julian burns a tray of garlic bread and about two thirds of a ham and pineapple deep pan pizza. (This one is in the collective shared AU where Deep Space Nine is a pizzeria and the gang are all human. It's, ah, a long story.)

Evidence of Things Not Seen (1542 words) by Raven
Fandom: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: The Next Generation
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Geordi La Forge, Data, Julian Bashir, Odo (Star Trek), Miles O'Brien
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe, Kinda

"We're really looking at Data as he would be if he were human," Geordi says, wonderingly.

...and that's it, and quite enough too. I am going to Inverness tomorrow for the weekend. Also, a long story.

So if you have the misfortune of following me on Twitter you may know I am having a Star Trek renaissance. This happens every couple of years and mostly goes like this: show! Feelings! Oh my show! Oh my feelings! This time around I am having love for TNG, which is odd - I've never liked it as much as DS9 - but interesting, and having thoroughly abused the 140-character format I think I would like to be verbose as to why.

So I am for the most part not really interested in generalised discussions of race on Star Trek? I mean, spoilers, Trek isn’t very good on race! Most of the time - but what it is great at is ideas. And nothing mainstream, for me, has ever done anything like it on cultural assimilation. There’s this one episode of Voyager that gets this really well and I’ve always thought is underrated. In "Lineage", pretty late on in the run, B’Elanna finds out she’s pregnant and it’s basically adorable. Gossip travels at warp ten, everyone on the crew wants to be the baby’s godparent and/or namesake, and Tom realizes the only person on the entire ship he knows who’s a father is Tuvok (!!) and they have this sweet and genuinely poignant awkward conversation in a Jefferies tube. (Every time Star Trek does this conversation it’s amazing. Dax advising Sisko on fatherhood! O’Brien advising Worf on marriage! ….anyway.) So B’Elanna finds out that her baby, who will be one quarter Klingon to three quarters human, will nevertheless look Klingon (“Klingon traits are dominant!"). And through a series of fights with Tom, fights with Janeway, and, eventually, an incredibly unethical application of her engineering ability to the Doctor’s programming, B'Elanna persuades him to alter the baby’s genetic make-up in utero so she’ll look human. Roxann Dawson, who plays B’Elanna, is Latina; Robert Duncan McNeill is white. A baby who looks more like him will look… oh, you get it. And I just cry and cry and cry at it, because whether or not you agree with her choice, she’s making what she thinks is the best choice for her baby. Tom tries telling her that there are Vulcans on board, Talaxians, Bajorans - and B'Elanna turns around and snaps, "And one hundred and forty humans!"

And of course he tries to argue and she tells him he doesn't understand: "When the people around you are all one way and you're not, you can't help feeling like there's something wrong with you" - and I cry.

And it's not just about race, of course, but culture; not just how you look, though of course that matters, but what you are. (B'Elanna's Klingon fighting instincts! How hard her human father found her to live with!) Oh, I cry so much, because how can you articulate that? That feeling of being four or sixteen or twenty-seven, and you're in someone's house or at a party or at your desk surrounded by your colleagues, and someone says something and you're just - at the precipice of your lack of understanding. When the people around you are all one way, and you're not.

And it's kind of odd and counter-intuitive, but this time around I’ve realised the application of this same narrative to, of all people, Data. Not all the time: I think the show sometimes misfires on this, and sometimes does it really well – it seems to depend on the particular episode and set of writers? But, okay, Data. (He's an android and, because this is Star Trek, operations officer on the Enterprise.) I adore Data and always have – I was saying to someone recently that my Star Trek feelings are getting on for twenty years’ standing, owwww – and I’ve always mostly thought that I love Data and Spock for the same reasons. In different ways, they both serve as a moral compass for their respective captains. I mean, with Spock it’s usually an outright, Jim, don't do this, this is a terrible no-good idea, and with Data it’s more often from the mouths of babes, truth - but I love that. (And, the other side of the trope which I also love: the few occasions when it’s reversed. When it’s Kirk reining in Spock from murdering Stonn, or from complicity in horrors in “Mirror, Mirror”; when Picard tries to pull Data back from the brink with Lore - I love that narrative arc.)

But… okay, with Data. In “The Measure of a Man”, which by the way is my favourite courtroom drama ever and probably one of my favourite episodes of anything, some dude shows up and gives Data transfer orders: he’s being sent to the lab to be dismantled so they can figure out how to make more of him. Data’s answer is, huh, what if you can’t put me back together again? Rather than do this, I will resign – and then they tell him, you can’t resign, you’re property of Starfleet. And Picard is forced to argue in court for the position that Data has rights over his own body. It's a story about humanity, and sentience, and life. It's a story about transformation. And it's a story that allows Guinan to say this to Picard, when no one else will (for those playing along at home: Guinan is the Enterprise’s venerable bartender, played by Whoopi Goldberg): "Consider that in the history of many worlds there have always been disposable creatures."

That gives me chills. That if Data is property, then property obscures sin. In the history of many worlds, there have been those whose bodies were marked. I'm sorry, Riker whispers into Data's ear, and reaches in to remove his hand.

And then, the ruling, when it comes, is very narrow. ( spoilers for a 25-year-old TV show )

But then, they do lots of episodes where Data wants to be human? Which I've been thinking, misses the point that that episode makes so succinctly. Sometimes it’s understandable – at one point Data tells Geordi that he’s afraid of outliving everyone he’s ever known – and sometimes less so. Spock, of all people, tells him: “There are Vulcans who aspire all their lives to achieve what you've been given by design." And Data can't defend why he would rather be human, though he does point out that it's a choice - like Spock's choice to be Vulcan through and through, despite his human mother.

So I've found myself thinking, isn't that kind of... colonialist, if that's even the word? Data wanting to be a person is a very different thing from his wanting to be human, especially if the narrative embraces the latter as though it were unproblematic. And the show gestures at this distinction quite a lot without ever quite making it: Picard comments at one stage that Data might be a culture of one, but it's no less valid than a culture of billions; when he's dying, Noonien Soong tells Data that he will grieve, "in your own way"; and there's also the spot-on sweetness of the way the show never questions Data's right to refer to his two human creators as his parents. His mother describes him as "the child of two people who loved him and each other" - which is lovely, but they never take the additional leap and say, Data's is a form of human life. If that has value, then why should he aspire to a different kind?

But then - here it is. Data, who is different from everyone else around him, even more so than half-human half-Klingon B'Elanna and half-human half-Vulcan Spock – and there's nothing wrong with him, but, well. Well, darling, wouldn't you wish to be white? You would lose what you were, but without your soul in doubt. What it is, is this: Data doesn't want to be human, he wants to be normal, unmarked. Like B'Elanna wants for her daughter; like Sarek wanted for Spock. What gives me the feelings is that the show for all its failings, engages with that desire so closely and gives it to these characters who are gifted and loved and flawed, and gives them the consequences of that desire, Data's loss and B'Elanna's desperation and Sarek and Spock not talking to each other for thirty years, because, by god, it sucks to be different. It's okay to want to assimilate into the majority culture; to not just be yourself. It's okay to wish for whiteness; it's saying, sometimes, not all the time, we all do.

Two things Shim keeps telling me this week:

-I'm on holiday, I'm allowed to not do things;

-All writing is writing. Silly Star Trek ficlets are as much writing as the Great American Novel.

In that spirit, I wrote this.

fic:: can't you see, this is mercy
by Raven
2500w, Star Trek: The Next Generation, gen. Data and Geordi, also Picard and a host of reluctant Vulcans.

It takes Geordi a while to realise Data is evading his questions.

( the trouble began with the team of Vulcan scientists )