The following words scrolled across my tv screen and changed my life forever.


Unhappy with a new treaty, Federation Colonists along the Cardassian border have bonded together.

Calling themselves "The Maquis," they continue to fight the Cardassians.

Some consider them heroes, but to the governments of the Federation and Cardassia, they are outlaws.



Star Trek: Voyager premiered 10 years ago tonight. I'd been online for 4 months at AOL, devouring everything Trek on the forums there with my 2400 bps modem that I bought for $20 at CompUSA and installed myself in my Packard Bell PC. It was wonderful. It had a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive AND one of those new little bitty ones. SO cool. *sigh* There was no WWW, at least not available to new users like me. Prodigy finally got the Web, and it was another new door opening.

One week later, I discovered alt.sex.fetish.startrek and the first Voyager story written by cruisedirector. I wrote to her, a fan letter that probably contained a ton of 'omg' and 'squee'-ish language. We began to correspond and somewhere along the line I decided to tackle my first story. Oh.dear.god. Yes, she still has it. Ten years later she's holding it over my head. It was horrible. But intead of telling me that I sucked, and to please get out of her universe, she proposed that we write something together. We did, and then we did it again, and she had to continually reign in my penchant for schmoop. And even when I hated her, I would ultimately re-write the passage she'd send back to me and it would be a night and day improvement over the original.

She taught me POV (to the point that when I see inconsistencies in other fic I cringe.) She tried to teach me 'show, don't tell' and I'm not sure I have ever totally mastered that one, but it wasn't for lack of trying on her part. LOL

You see, at the age of 40, I was a rank newbie. A music teacher by profession, and a romantic at heart, I saw things that the producers never saw. We wrote episode extensions when we were disgusted with what TPTB (the powers that be) had done to our characters. OUR characters. She formed a fan club when no one else would, and for a while I wrote episode reviews for that publication. I interviewed Robert Beltran twice, once at his very first con appearance, and the second time in a hotel room along with maquismom. ::laughs:: I housed jenwrites for that first con, along with maquismom and at least one other fan whom I'd care to not remember at all. ::shudder::

She sent me a cassette tape of sappy music to write by, and I sent her Linda Ronstadt's "Feels Like Home". I heard it on the radio on the way to church choir one night and I wept. I also wept frequently when reading her stories.

cruisedirector gave me my first LJ code 2 years ago, and it has been wonderful getting to know her again. We were even pregnant together once. her youngest is two weeks older than my youngest. And we've only met face to face once, at a Trek con in Baltimore. There are so many others, and she has named most of them in her entry here. I can remember a panicked email concerning friede, with whom we corresponded regularly at AOL. "Don't send her any more smut! She's ONLY 14!!!" ::laughs:: Who knew that the talented writer we'd been nurturing was a minor?

It was wonderful, it was exhilarating, it was fun, and all my RL friends thought I'd lost my mind. And I had. And I will always be grateful for the fun, the tears, the memories and my start to writing.


Happy anniversary, YCD. TFW. My current music is just for you. :)