Author's Notes: Baptism By Fire

I wrote this when I was on a big H.P. Lovecraft kick. I am also a somewhat-sort-of fan of Star Trek. Thus, this was posted in four parts on alt.startrek.creative in late 1993-early 1994. It was fairly well received, despite a few glaring plot holes.

There was a sequel. I don't remember the name of it, and it doesn't matter, because it sucked. Nyarlathotep started dismantling the Federation, Guinan was one of the Elder Gods... bleach. I can't beleive I wrote it. Don't look for it, if you know what's good for you.

In early 1995 I asked a friend with similar interests if she'd like to take a look at it -- I don't remember how the subject came up, exactly -- and she said sure. Now, I knew she was a fiction developer for a fairly new publishing company. What I didn't know was that she decided to look at this as a writing sample, rather than just a friend saying "Look, I dumped a bunch of ink on paper, wanna see?" Not that I minded, though, and it was a briefly intriguing possibility.

It was noted that there was very little character development in this story; this is true, as I figured that in order to keep in as in-line with the canon as possible, it wasn't my job to deal with that. This did lead to a request for an original work, though.

I found out in the last year or so that not only in the first year of awards on the rec.arts.tv.mst3k newsgroup was this story nominated for "Worst Fanfic" (which honestly, looking back, it probably deserves, though it didn't win) but someone did a wicked MiSTing of it. As soon as I track down another link, I'll probably add it here somewhere. A lot of the problems in it, though, spring from a creative writing class I was taking in school. Needless to say, these aren't all they're cracked up to be.

Read the story.

Go to the Fiction Page.

Mark Kinney / alberich@iglou.com