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Old January 1st, 2005, 10:41 PM   #12
Kester Pelagius
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Join Date: Dec 2003
Location: Earth, Mutter's Spiral
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Eric Paddon
"One criticism, if i may... You may have taken two throw away characters and overblown their importance. One or two scenes to set-up who they are should be enough, why integrate them at all into the narrative as anything other than background characters?"

I'm not sure I know who you mean there. If you mean the Charybdis-Ortega scene I open with, that's deliberately done to provide accurate foreshadowing for "Murder On The Rising Star" later on in the series. My approach is that there shouldn't be any sudden revelation about a past event from out of the blue in a later episode.
What I meant was you've created a scene just for the sake of putting these character into it. As such, IMO, it feels somewhat forced. Instead how about integrating them organically into some existing story arc, but keeping them in the background. (Of course I have no suggestions as to HOW to go about doing this, that's what's great about advice. You can dole it out by the shovelful!)



The way you have it now it's dreadfully obvious that the reader SUPPOSED to take notice of these characters. Not very subtle.

At least that was my inititial impression. It's really hard to objectively critique something when you know it's a set-up meant to foreshadow events, so I could be be wrong.

Anyone else have any opinions on this section of the story?


Quote:
Originally Posted by Eric Paddon
"Nice to see you trying to expand on other characters, like Adama's wife, but why turn her into a boring homewife?"

Well, I described her as being retired from a professional career of her own, looking forward to when her husband would soon retire as well. The particular career I chose for her was one I've used in other fanfic stories in the past. I felt it highlights Adama's own sense of loss ultimately if in fact he was on the verge of retirement and having a chance to make-up for lost yahrens with Ila, who had already done her share of what she wanted to accomplish in life in terms of a professional career.
Sounds reasonable, now that I know you were basing this on existing fanfics.

Still Ila's portrayal is a wee bit too cliched, don't you think?


Quote:
Originally Posted by Eric Paddon
"If you have access to the comics check out... well... I think it was between issues 3 and 8 (?) ... Best as I recollect she appears therein in command of a ship. (Mean looking military vessel too!) Apollo stumbles on her vessel, which was trailing the Galactica, sadly they'd all taken a dose of the Thorian (?) radiation and died. But not before she extracted a promise from Apollo that he'd never reveal to his father that he'd found her."

That's issue #15 of the Marvel Comics series, and it was Boomer who found her. There was never anything there to indicate she had anything to do with the military in her life before.
It was Boomer?

Well that sticks a pin into a balloon of (apparently false) childhood memory.

*shakes head*


Quote:
Originally Posted by Eric Paddon
For the most part, that was a case of my looking at what someone else did and deciding not to utilize it. THe one thing I did do was not write a scene of Ila dying, since at the time I wrote this I was trying to keep the door open to harmonize things with another fanfic author's story where she does turn up alive and well yahrens later with ships found by the Pegasus.
Perfectly reasonable, but what I was thinking was the idea of, rather than killing her off, maybe going with the idea that she was able to gather a group of survivors together, patch up some old cruiser or something, and. . . ??

For some reason I've always imagined Adama's wife, much as you have as a former teacher, only being from a military caste/class family as a Academy Commandant type.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Eric Paddon
Actually, the planet mentioned in the broadcast is "Sagitara." I kept that scene but changed the planet's name to Piscera, because I decided earlier that (1) Baltar would be from Piscera, a point that a number of fanfic authors had come to a kind of general consensus on for no particular reasons and (2) I wanted Adama's question about a particular colony to be tied to his suspicions about Baltar's invovlement in the ambush, that if the colony he knows Baltar from is untouched that would tell him everything right then and there.
*pop*

There goes another memory.

One more and I will have to break down and reread all my BG novels and comics. Assuming of course I can find them.

On Baltar... are you sure his colonial origins were never explained? It's odd, now that I think about it, but aside from the episode where he appeared with a medallion like Adama wore and revealed himself to have been a member of the Quorum of Twelve there really wasn't a lot of info on Baltar was there?

Sorry I have no more memories for you to deflate.

Keep up the good work!
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