A couple of months ago, I started writing a short fanfiction story in the Star Trek universe. It was my very first attempt at writing both fanfiction and science fiction, so it was an interesting little exercise. USS Montgomery was short, only some five and a half thousand words, but it told a nice little story reminiscent of old school Star Trek.
As it turned out, it was very well received. I had several positive comments and it was accepted for publication on a Star Trek fanfiction site. I even had a lovely comment on this site, where someone who had read it on the Star Trek site had taken the effort to track me down so they could let me know they really enjoyed it.
One thing I did receive from the editor of the fanfiction site was some constructive criticism; firstly that there wasn’t as much character development as there could have been, and the protagonist, Arienne Landy, seemed to be too young and inexperienced to have been given command of a ship like the USS Montgomery.
I’m never one to shy away from being told when I could do something better, so as I was busy working on the last few bits of “The Body in the Building,” I started to write a new story – the origin story for USS Montgomery, which hopefully covered off both the points that were raised by the editor. Thus “USS Montgomery: First Command” was created.
Originally, I had planned for “First Command” to be full novel length. But as any author knows, that is a hell of a lot of work, and with it being Star Trek and a universe that is very aggressively protected, there was no way that I could actually receive any reward for my efforts.
I decided that the longer, darker story that I originally had in mind would be better served in its own book in my own universe. That will be the next novel I will be writing once I get “Body” off the table. But I still wanted to write the origin story for “Montgomery,” and I had some ideas that I thought would work really well in the Star Trek universe (but perhaps not so well elsewhere).
In the end, “USS Montgomery: First Command” wound up being novella length, some 13,000 words (and about 1,500 words longer than “The Map in the Fortune Cookie”), and I am very proud of it. There is a story around the really fantastic cover that we came up with for it, but I will write that as its own post, as it deserves the attention of one.
So please feel free to read “USS Montgomery: First Command!” If you like it, please share the link with your friends, and maybe even check out my other books over on Amazon.