The Crème of the Masking Tape Brigade.

"Tape is amazing..."

Back in 1993 Star Trek: The Next Generation was still new and airing on television and I remember spending countless hours on the family room floor in our home in South Bend, Indiana. Even at seven years old I knew when I would have a bout of creativity so I went downstairs toting my crate of Lego. As a side-note, Lego was a major part of my developmental process. And while the bulk of what Lego means to me should be kept for another story, it’s safe to say if my Dad had some cool new technology, I usually built myself one out of Lego by the end of the week.

Plopped in front of the television and definitely in the way on the floor, I would watch Star Trek in its various incarnations. At some point, most likely days earlier, I had decided that the TNG Tricorder toy I had was not accurate enough compared the ones used on the series.  I carefully laid plans to put it right and set about finding the best scenes in the episodes from which I could glean the best examples. At seven years old it seemed reasonable to find the widest masking tape I could and purloin my brother’s box of magic markers. I didn’t seem to care that the masking tape didn’t match the battleship gray, albeit inaccurate coloring of the toy. I piled the stuff right onto the “sensor head” and proceeded to add the blue, green red and yellow ink.  I knew that within two away missions under the piano or into the back of the basement or the copious holstering it would undergo my loving modifications would be turned into a colorful smudge. To combat this obvious eventuality, I covered the masking tape masterpiece with clear parcel tape. The tape would serve to fend off just about any invading liquid from a spilled glass of water in those Tom and Jerry “jam jars” my mom kept for drinking glasses to my sweaty seven year old hands. When I look back, I don’t know how long that Tricorder lasted, only that there were several “versions” of the masking tape top and that the clear tape might have been a revision and not something I thought of right away.

Mr. Data Underwater with his Tricorder...

This wasn’t the last adventure with masking tape though….

In late December 1998, Star Trek: Insurrection had just premiered in theaters. My family were living in Scottsdale, Arizona at the time which is always hot even in December. As I explained earlier, I was always creating stuff out of Lego. With the new Star Trek film were of course, new props and naturally I was plotting ways to make my versions from Lego in the car ride home from the theater. All the adventures awaiting me in my back yard, not to mention my best friend Kiel’s yard was just begging to be discovered. With this Tricorder we would be able to explore strange new worlds behind the waterfall pump and seek out new civilizations on the swimming pool floor. Sometime in January, Kiel and I beamed down to Baku just to the right of his swimming pool and in front of a large pile of rocks. Those of you who have seen the mess that was Star Trek Insurrection knew what happened during the away mission, Data walks straight into a lake with his Tricorder. After some dialogue, “Captain” Kiel and I decided that the answers we sought were waiting on the bottom of the swimming pool which at that moment was doubling for an alien lake. I walked with earnest, Lego Tricorder with handwritten, masking tape decals outstretched. Following my direct orders, I walked into the pool. Once in, I got lower, and lower until my head was underwater, just like Data in the film. It wasn’t until years later that I read the one used in the movie had been water sealed so that Data’s underwater adventure didn’t destroy the film prop. My adventure however,  was far less planned. As my Tricorder submerged the ink I had so carefully and painstakingly applied to the masking tape buttons lifted off in a nebula of black, red and green.

Instantly, I ran to the edge of the pool, desperate to salvage whatever I could from the situation. Kiel and I looked on with amazement as the buttons disappeared and were replaced by the familiar cream of masking tape. It was no longer that wonderful, new Mark X Tricorder we had just seen in the film. It was a piece of plastic…leaking plastic with no value of any kind. I was crushed. I was humiliated. I was angry.

As I look back on it now, I remember sitting at Kiel’s kitchen table with some markers and a ballpoint pen reapplying those graphics with such dedication. I probably asked or more like ordered him to find the best screen-caps he could of it and demanded that he wait and do absolutely nothing while I repaired my crown jewel. It was his fault anyway! He ordered me into the pool and he probably knew damned well that the Tricorder wouldn’t survive the trip. As our fiasco played over and over in my mind I seem to remember just wanting to go home.

Well…

My parents didn’t call me the “tape king” while growing up for nothing. Tape is amazing. Duct tape can paint a Tricorder or Phaser-Rifle silver when you’re not allowed to buy spray paint yet or the spray paint that you do have never seems to dry in twenty minutes. I can’t see a roll of masking tape without being transported back to my living room floor in 1993 or to the bottom of Kiel’s swimming pool with a cloud of ink above my head.

Back to Basics

As I sit here, home sick from the day job, feeling worse than I have in a very long time I have found myself compelled to write. Through the “Pig Pen” like cloud this cold is generating around me I can see the blinking cursor is taunting me to say something so I have decided that I have no choice but to accept its challenge and start typing.

The story I decided to tell was how I became a “writer” way back in the dark ages of 2005 and now almost four years later I am taking steps to recover my blogging mojo.

              It was a winter afternoon in 2005 when I started my first blog. I started it over on the now Google owned service Blogger.com. My online career thus far was minimal. I had released my first podcast earlier that month so I used my new found blogging skills to tell the world which consisted of all twenty two listeners, what was coming up on the next show.  I also used the blog to talk about personal happenings and other minutiae.

The reason behind my interest in extolling my views to the world didn’t just come to me, however. It sprang from a book. Around the same time I was discovering podcasting I found myself listening to an episode of IT Conversations. The show covered Gnomedex 2004 and blogging pioneer and former Star Trek actor Wil Wheaton was reading from his then new book, Just a Geek.

At that point, I had no idea that Wheaton was a writer or blogger. Wil read from “The Hooters Incident” and a selection from “SpongeBob Vegas Pants” and I was hooked. Not only did he communicate to me as Star Trek alumni, he touched my baser feelings as a misunderstood outcast geek who no one could relate to. I thought, he writes about things that are going on in his life. Why shouldn’t I?

To this day, I attribute the fact that I picked up the quill to Wil Wheaton and “Just a Geek.” Blogging became a way of life for me and “Seb’s Random Thoughts” which later morphed into “Seb’s Raw Takes” started to gain readership and most of all quality. I wrote about technology, podcasting and politics. I published interviews with members of the Star Trek production team from Dan Curry to Michael Westmore to the holographic doctor himself, Robert Picardo. When I blogged that telemarketers were using Skype, the entire blogosphere talked about it.  I was now “a writer” and I took my craft to print and worked on two true crime reportage books and earned my first official by lines. My blogging got validation from award sites and I was asked to write about blogging for the UK Magazine, PC Plus in late 2006.

After I started agreed to co-develop and produce Star Trek: The Continuing Mission in mid-2007 my free time went to that endeavor and my blogging was choked and finally to died around November ‘07. That was the time that I moved back to California from Northern England and my writing was focused on the first few episodes of the new series. While my blog slipped into obscurity the actual composition of blogosphere as well as podcasting / video casting changed as well.

While I wouldn’t go as far as to say I feel like Rip Van Winkle, I feel related. Twitter and other “mood message” services have taken over as the dominant way to express yourself online and the good “old fashioned” blogging systems that were the stalwart of “my time” have become lumbering dinosaurs.  I am disheartened with this as I feel that there is a good side to extended commentary. Not everything can be said in a 140 character limit or your update on Facebook. Granted I have a presence on Twitter and Facebook but I know my own expression needs more real estate.

So while Bloggers still blog, just not as much or often and Twitter Tweets are at an all time high, just last week I signed up for a new WordPress account.  It was interesting that I did this shortly after I started listening to my audio version of Just a Geek and it brought home with a precision that only Wil Wheaton does why I started doing any of this in the first place.

I was over on Wil’s blog a few days ago and discovered that he has written another book, The Best Days of Our Lives, which is also available in audio format.  I plan to purchase and listen to it. Who knows the inspiring things this next book will help me do.

Star Trek: The Continuing Mission

November 2007 – February 2009 with Star Trek: The Continuing Mission

After agreeing to co-create a new Star Trek audio series with my friend and writing partner, Andy Tyrer I found that I seemed to have no time to write. This is funny, because part of my job on the series is to supervise and or write scripts. Andy and I were able to churn out “Ghost Ship” in just a couple of days of bouncing documents back and forth through email. I then wrote what has become “the lost episode” or the first version of “Integration.” After the show premiered in December and we were sitting down talking about the second, we decided to take it in another direction. In retrospect, this was one of the best decisions we ever made on the program. The new episode that was written was completely different. There were a few very late nights where Patrick McCray and I wrote until it was light again. We added some humor and had a nasty Klingon come for revenge. I was never happy with the way the story ended and it wasn’t what I had originally intended. Something you accept when you work with other writers and producers is that what you write doesn’t always make it to the “screen” and sometimes none of it does. I am thankful that the story that Patrick and I spent so much time on made it to the internet.

Unfortunately, a lengthy, unexpected “hiatus” was just around the corner and the world had months to wait for the first half of “Integration” to hit the Internet. Because TCM is a non-profit show, the actors and producers don’t make any money which means when something happens, often times, it can effect the show greatly where if it were a paying enterprise we would just pull in more talent to continue meeting deadlines.

Now into May 2008, almost 5 months after “Ghost Ship” had its time in the spotlight, “Integration” rolled out, its first half. While the show was met with mediocre reviews I couldn’t help but feel that the break between the episodes would cripple my show and our loss of listeners and visitors to the website would be irreparable. We took it in stride however, and released the second half in July now 8 months after the pilot.

We have ups and downs. We have days where I wish I had never started or I don’t want to be doing it tomorrow. But whenever I get close to writing that email or saying I quit, something always tells me to hold out just a little longer. It tells me that I am working on something special and that someone, somewhere, sometime will see what we do and say “I’d like them (him) to come and produce something for me” – So I stick with it and at the moment I am glad I’m still here.

The next episode hit the Internet on Halloween. Learning Curve, penned by Andy Tyrer it was a thriller of sorts. Star Trek met something much more dark and scary. The episode set up Doctor Wilson and his attitude issues and showed the audience that this guy might not be the nicest guy around. There are some really fun moments in there and we learned about how Plummer’s father died trying to find him in a message in a bottle from the past. Fun stuff.  Perosnally I didn’t do a great deal to the script except participate in the final polish of some of the lines and deal with some technical issues.

Now hitting more of a production stride, we are pumping out episodes a little faster. Not as fast as I would like, but it is much better than an 8 month break..that’s for sure! The next episode “The Darkest of Thoughts” which is written by a very talented playwright called David Raines, will be coming out in just a few days. It is safe to say I am more excited about this episode than I have been about any since the pilot. It is edgy. It’s character driven. Its daring. It has IT.

The original airdate for this episode was pushed back by two weeks to go in with a microscope and scissors and re-cut the entire musical score for the episode. We felt it needed to be darker and more in keeping with what we had established in previous episodes just increased a few notches. So that’s what we did.

I would say that I have learned more working on this show about working with writers, actors and just people in general that just about anything else I have done.  I think this next episode and the two that will follow it will really show that we know how to green light the right scripts and execute some good Star Trek. I am not here to make something you have seen or heard before, I don’t want to operate in the same vacuum as Star Trek did on television and I want to take everything else in SciFi into account while putting this stamp on the universe. Shows like Lost and Battlestar Galactica have set new presidents and standards for the way science fiction stories are told on the screen. The next Star Trek film coming out this may will do the same.  I consider it my mission as an Executive Producer of this series to see that those concerns are met with the stories that I support and commission.

The audience of the series is in for a real treat with “The Darkest of Thoughts” and the next two parts of what has become known as the “Sword of Romulus” trilogy all written by David Raines.  We are starting down a path of excellent story telling with an edge to it Star Trek has rarely seen.

This blog is not a tool for marketing. This is what is going on at Star Trek: The Continuing Mission, if anyone is interested. You are more than welcome to comment.

Gone But Hopefully Not Forgotten…

Thanks for stopping by my brand spanking new blog, After Thoughts. I know that blogging isn’t all that “in” anymore and that everyone is using services like Twitter and writing short entries but I wanted a new place where I could put my ideas out online.

My blog “Seb’s Raw Takes” is officially an archive now and will no longer be updated. I felt that, in order to feel in anyway right about blogging again I will need a new blog, with a new, fresh outlook on things.

As I write this at 1:34 in the morning, I am unsure of what I will be publishing on this new blog. I used to find things to write about at the drop of a hat, and the interviews on the old site were some of the best content I have ever created.

These days I am on a slightly different but more focused path. Star Trek: The Continuing Mission, a downloadable audio series will be releasing its forth episode this coming Saturday. I have never been as proud of the series as I am of this completed episode. It is sure to give fans of the show everywhere something to talk about around the water-cooler and on forums around the world.

Because I stopped posting entries to my blog back in November 2007, I thought I would make the first few entries here detailed accounts of the happenings since if for no other reason than a journal of events. Maybe someone, somewhere will get a kick out of it.

Thanks for stopping by. It’s good to be back.