Subversion Theory: Chapter Two Posted

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?

Star Trek Voyager 5x11 - Latent Image

Seven: It is unsettling. You say that I am a human being and yet I am also Borg. Part of me not unlike your replicator. Not unlike the Doctor. Will you one day choose to abandon me as well?

Latent Image Gifset series Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Snippet from my newbie that will start hitting AO3 in the next month or so

“I had to scuttle Hood today.” Michael exhaled, the heel of her palm digging into her forehead. She remembered the way Tilly had sounded in her call earlier that day. Broken. Hollow. That intractable optimism she’d tried so hard to hold onto when serving on Discovery was distant now, worn thin and feeble over time, every transmission more defeated than the last. Michael hadn’t wanted to give her up, hadn’t wanted to send her away. She worried for her, for the things that could happen now, the things beyond her control. But Starfleet was desperate for another captain–for someone brilliant and stubborn like Tilly, who wouldn’t mind the oldest, shittiest end of the Starfleet stick. The only vessel to survive the attack on the museum. The only one not connected to the core at the time. The only one Control hadn’t even tried to take, to corrupt or destroy, because she was just too goddamned old. But Franklin could fly, and that was all that mattered. If anyone could keep her alive in this kind of fight, it was Tilly.

Fandom: Star Trek: Discovery

Rating: Mature

Relationships: Michael Burnham / Airiam, Michael Burnham / Control, Michael Burnham / Nhan

Synopsis:

Three years after the attack on Section 31 Headquarters, Starfleet and the Federation are on the brink. Planet after planet is falling to Control, every attack more devastating than the last. There are no patterns, no viable solutions to stop the carnage, and with their resources dwindling, the last Federation starships are at risk of being corrupted themselves.

But when the USS Discovery begins receiving encrypted transmissions from someone claiming to be Starfleet who seems to know everything about their enemy, Captain Michael Burnham is forced to decide whether their new source is truly an ally–or if Control is luring the Federation’s last bastion of hope into a trap.

Blargh. I love them.

I know you.

My beta reader is being nosy.

"I'm just gonna take a peek at what you've got in this here mug while I wait, kthx."

A list of some of the things I use every day for writing and worldbuilding tasks!

I've been thinking about a post with this info for a few weeks now, so here it is! A note that I am not affiliated with any of these sites or services--I just use them :)

WordHippo

Until late last year, I had been using thesaurus.com to handle my never-ending hunt for the perfect word. I switched to WordHippo because it is much more friendly to searching phrases in addition to just words. It also includes rhymes, translations, word forms, and pronunciations. For non-English speakers, the word forms section could be particularly helpful.

Fantasy Name Generators

This site has just about anything you could need in relation to generators, including ones specific to pop culture and fandoms like Stargate, Star Trek, Harry Potter, and more. There are sections to create simple mockups of character armor, solar systems, languages, and even find some royalty-free music.

PhotoPea

As a graphic designer, I often find myself needing to visualize my characters, environments, and book covers to really immerse myself when I'm trying to write a scene. PhotoPea is a free alternative to Photoshop that even uses many of the same keyboard shortcuts (meaning you can often follow Photoshop tutorials while using PhotoPea). If the Adobe Creative Suite is out of your budget, PhotoPea is, in my opinion, the best free alternative.

Seventh Sanctum

This was the first generator site I used back in my days on FanFiction and FictionPress, and I still like to use it for its slightly less daunting interface when compared to Fantasy Name Generators. I also find it loads faster.

Descriptionary

I stumbled across this site not long ago, and I've become a bit obsessed with it. It's a bit clunky to navigate, but there's a lot of information and helpful tidbits to be found including color symbolism, body language, and words to use/not use and why.

No Man's Sky Photo Galleries

While this isn't a specific site, and the one I've linked here is just one example of many that are out there, I've found No Man's Sky to be one of my biggest inspirations when writing sci-fi and environmentally focused scenes. The sheer scale of No Man's Sky and its procedurally generated worlds make it easy to find inspiration for everything from planets, to fauna, wildlife, ships, and structures.

Inkarnate

This site stands alone if you need something that allows you to build beautiful maps for your stories. It has a free and a paid version, and the free version is fairly robust. If you're someone who writes anything that involves large-scale worlds or anything involving military strategies, it can be really helpful to have the lay of the land right in front of you as you write.

Autocrit

While the free version of this is pretty limited, I've really enjoyed having it accessible for identifying adverbs, story beats, and to compare my original pieces to genres and authors.

Cap That

If you need high resolution screen captures from your favorite shows, this is the place to find them!

Regina, what are you doing? ONCE UPON A TIME, 'Devil's Due'

Sometimes there are good days, and sometimes there are the "I just discovered this train car includes toilets in the private rooms" kind of good days.

There is nothing better than walking the dog and managing to come up with a breakthrough for your original fic plot.

Good thing the Godolphin Arabian has a murky origin story...

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