View Single Post
Old January 1st, 2005, 02:00 PM   #11
Eric Paddon
Squadron Leader
 
Eric Paddon's Avatar
 
Join Date: Mar 2004
Location: Morristown, NJ
Posts: 1,795

Default

"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.

"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.

"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. 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.

"I scanned the document and found no reference to Centitilla. Go back and re-watch the pilot. Pay close attention to when the Galactica is re-entering the system. There should be a bit of dialogue to the effect (from memory):

Adama: "And Centitilla?"
Tigh: "The planet's in flames."


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.


"I think it is great that you've expanded on so many characters, but I'd also like to see a bit of expansion detailing the background setting!"

Fair point. One thing I generally prefer to do is write dialogue and character exposition, but background settings and physical descriptions is not the thing I focus too much on since I always have a sense that I'm stopping the flow of the story cold whenever I take too much time to do something like that.

Thanks for the comments!
Eric Paddon is offline   Reply With Quote