Content Notes: racial identiy, racism, sex, sexuality, sex work. I also have minor spoilers for a few books, movies and TV shows.

It’s hard to believe I’ve been writing as a hobby for over twenty years, especially because I hated writing assignments in high school. I’ve come to learn over the years that I’m one of those stubborn people who will hate something when someone else forces me to do it, but love it when I decide to do it myselt. (Makes me wonder why the hell I’m in the military…so glad I’m senior enough to do fitness training on my own now!) Of course my output has dropped considerably over the last decade, but I’m starting to get back into things. I finially finished off Howlers, I created new Blender models of Waystation and Silverado, and did a round of edits before releasing all my stuff in updated ebooks. (I’ve also been working on a model of another Traks hero ship, but I’m not going to reveal which one until I’m ready to release images.)

I’ve also, spoiler alert, started working on the second season of Halfway to Haven. Yes, twelve years after posting the Season 1 finale, I finally felt the motivation to return to Starbase 341, Captain Elizabeth Simplot, the USS Roadrunner and Matrian Space. OK, well, I hope to avoid stories about the Matrians too much, because after Silverado Season 6 I’m still sick of them. But still, as I was reviewing those stories for the ebook, I started feeling the stirring desire to go back to writing.

I also realized I made some pretty big mistakes.

I know in the first few seasons of Silverado I struggled to give each character their own voice. One family member who read my stuff commented “All these guys just sound like you!”. Which…well, as a hobby writer using Star Trek stories as an outlet, didn’t really bother me too much. But it was something I tried to improve as the series went on. And with Crash Course, Halfway to Haven, and Howlers. But when I look at these differents casts, H2H has some glaring issues.

First, there are too many characters. This was fine with Season 1, when half of them were lost near the galactic core aboard the USS Roadrunner. (I say ‘near the galactic core’ because I know ‘in the galactic core’ would probably mean they’d be cooked by radiation.) But as I resumed work on the first story of Season 2, which I had started back in 2012, I realized I had too many people running around. I’m not really sure how I’ll handle that…some may fade to the background for a while. Of course I have more Silverado characters, if you include the main characters, the Hazardous Team, Beta Shift, and the random recurring extras. But those guys were gradually introduced over multiple seasons, not all at once. Even in H2H I have characters like the Jungle Squad or the Federation Ambassador to the Matrian Republic who have been mentioned, but never actually developed because I’ve been too busy with everyone else.

Second, and maybe not really a problem, but almost none of these characters are based on people I know. Silverado was almost entirely based on people I knew, as was Crash Course. Howlers was an experiment in many ways, one being that relatively few characters were based on people I knew. H2H was the same. And I think this has made it harder for me to make these guys unique. So rather than being able to think “What would ‘Yanick’ do?” and letting that guide me, I have to be more…well…creative. I guess that’s part of the challenge.

Third, I have too many white humans or very human-like aliens running around. Sort of. Look, I know there are certain people who get offended by efforts to include a diverse cast. I’m not one of them. I believe Star Trek represents the best of humanity, which will include people from all over the globe. And if you don’t…dude. How are you a Star Trek fan? Gene Roddenberry put a black woman, an Asian man and a Russian in key leadership positions in a TV show in the 1960s, not to mention a female Number One in the first pilot, The Cage. Star Trek has always been progressive, it’s part of the franchise’s DNA (aside from Rick Berman’s homophobia, sexism, and harrassment of actresses). If you don’t believe in diversity, you need to take a good look at why you’re watching Star Trek.

Anyway, the reason why I say ‘sort of’ is because I don’t really think I established racial identity for most of the human characters. I may have referred to them as ‘pale’, but you know people of colour also respond to sunlight, or lack thereof. So what? Well, so I’ll be looking for opporunities to do something interesting with this. For example the idea that as humanity spread to the stars, race just lost its importance. Even today we see that cultural background and country of origin can be more important to people than racial origins from centuries in the past. Another idea that’s crossed my mind is that in the 24th Century, many humans would likely be of blended background. That is, with humans intermingling across countries and continents, many of us became mutts, for lack of a better term. I believe it was Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War that (spoiler alert) had a plot point where humanity decided racism was too much of a problem, so they engineered everyone into a single blended race. They also (more spoilers) made everyone gay as a population control mechanism. And as much fun as that sounds, I don’t think I need to go to those extremes.

Where was I? Right. Racial identity. So one of the problems with a blended human race in Star Trek is that on television, in video games, books or other storytelling media, we look for characters who resemble ourselves, and this can help us engage with the story. We’ve probably all heard the famous story of Whoopi Goldberg seeing Nichelle Nichols in Star Trek and running to her mother shouting “Mommy, mommy, there’s a black lady on TV, and she ain’t no maid!”. There are important reasons for Star Trek to show diversity, like the story of Benjamin Sisko as a black widower raising his teenage son. God, I was so clueless when DS9 first aired as to how significant that was! Finally having a gay couple shown in Discovery was a big deal for me, and I’m still dissappointed we didn’t get that in the 90s Trek. And I don’t know if the intention was there for Jadzia Dax to become a trans-gender icon, but wow…in hindsight, it makes so much sense. Still, I like to think that humanity will grow to a point where racism won’t be an issue anymore, and where we can enjoy each others culture. It won’t be easy…as a gay man I certainly know that many cultures say I shouldn’t exist. So…we have work to do.

All of this to say, I have some thinking to do when it comes to diversity in my characters. And I know I haven’t always done a good job of this in the past. Lt Cmdr Johnson at the end of Silverado Season 3 was a not-very-successful attempt to bring race into comedy. It’s certainly easier with aliens…less risk of upsetting someone. And cultural diversity doesn’t have to mean race or skin colour…one idea I’m toying with, given recent events, is giving a character a strong-ish Ukrainian background. But we’ll see.

But the final issue with the H2H cast is that I really fucked up with Stoneryder. Like, guys? I really fucked up. His character was inspired by two different sources: The gym-bros I had started seeing in military gyms during my military college and basic training days, and “Ha-ha, male porn star funny.” And to be fair to myself, I actually think I did a decent job on the gym-bro piece. I remember being especially frustrated by people who made bulking up their entire identity, and a big part of Stoneryder’s personality was based on two guys I knew who spent every spare hour in the gym, downing protein suppliments and creatine like candy, and treating any sort of actual training like a boring annoyance. Well, OK, lots of the training was a boring annoyance, but they in particular were annoyed that it affected their workouts. And I swear, a week in the field without their suppliments and they just deflated. And ever since, if I find myself in a gym at a combat arms base, I find myself rolling my eyes at the ‘fitness enthusiasts’, usually in their early twenties, who don’t seem to have any life or interests outside the gym and ‘getting swole’. OK, yes, I realize by saying that that I’m revealing I’m in the gym a fair bit myself. But I’m not there to get big. And if you stand me next to these guys…well, you’ll know who’s made the gym their life, and it sure ain’t me. I’m a nerd, and I work with nerds. The gyms I’m usually in are still busy, but it’s people doing what they need to do to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

OK. Right. So the gym-bro side of Stoneryder makes sense. Where I really fucked up was the porn star part, and the elements of his personality I could have drawn from that. Look, a lot has happened in twelve years. We’ve seen the rise of Only Fans and PornHub. Dating and hook-up apps have gone from the fringes of society to mainstream. There are multiple movies or TV series about men doing sex work: Magic Mike, Toy Boys, Escort Boys, and The Full Monty all come to mind. And let me be clear: when I say ‘sex work’ I don’t just mean prostitution. Performing in porn, live-streaming cam shows, no-sex escorting, stripping and even using your sultry voice as a phone-sex operator are also all forms of sex work. And most of them are legal in countries around the world. In most of North America you can’t pay someone to have sex with you, but you can pay to watch a recording of people who have been paid to have sex with each other. And it turns out there actually might be reasons for people to hire a sex worker that most of us wouldn’t consider: There was a really interesting series on Netflix called Special which told the story of a gay man with cerebral palsey and his struggles with dating and sex due to his disability. Spoiler alert, in the first or second episode he hires a sex worker to help him lose his virginity, and it turns out the sex worker in question has had multiple clients who had turned to him because of shame and embarrassment over a physical disability.

Holy shit. That’s really interesting. It’s sad, it’s scary, it’s frustrating, it invokes a lot of empathy and emotion. It really made me reconsider some of my preconceptions about sex work, though of course I’m not the first sci-fi writer to do so. The Companions Guild in Firefly certainly beat me to it, or The Consort in the Mass Effect trilogy. William Shatner’s Tek War had fairly liberal use of sex robots or VR-driven sex fantasies, in some ways similar to Westworld. Another Joe Haldeman book, Forever Peace, dealt with the complete tech-assisted merger of consciousness during sex, as well as mentioning complete gender-affirming transitions as being simple and routine. Altered Carbon by Richard K Morgan gave a world where humans could swap their entire bodies with relative ease, including changing sex. Even Huxley’s Brave New World took a novel (for the time) approach to sex with its mantra of “Everyone belongs to everyone else”, and its use of drug-fueled orgies as a quasi-religious experience. Out of the sci-fi realm, author Christopher Rice (son of Anne Rice, writing as C Travis Rice) recently wrote a series of steamy gay romance novels, which included a major character who operates a gay porn studio. And his research into and depiction of the industry really gave me things to think about.

So when I say I fucked up with Stoneryder I don’t mean I made a mistake by making him a former (or maybe practicing?) sex worker. What I mean is that I really missed several huge opportunities to make the character interesting, and funny.

Let me get a couple of things out of the way: Human trafficking and sexual slavery are evil and must be opposed and eliminated. I do not support any sort of coersion or force used to push people into sex or sex work. But as I said above, I do consider consentually creating porn, stripping and similar activities to be sex work. I also don’t have any moral objections to a person willingly choosing to engage in any of these forms of sex work, though engaging a prostitute is currently illegal in my home country. To me, the biggest requirement for sexual activity of any kind is informed consent. Consent cannot be forced, it cannot be bought or imposed by an authority figure, it requires a sound mind and the person must be above the legal age of consent for consent to be given. Full stop. And that’s not something I see Star Trek ever changing. (Though Captain Kirk might want to take some notes here.)

So with that out of the way…what sort of sex work did Stoneryder do? Why did he stop? Did he completely stop? Why is he even in Starfleet? Lt Cmdr Wyer, my Yynsian character, confronted him over his lack of interest in his role as Security Chief in H2H 1.7, and we didn’t really get an answer. We know he performed in porn, takes great pride in his sexual prowess and skills, and it was implied that he did more than just perform on…screen? Hologram? But this raises some very interesting questions about what sex work in a post-scarcity society like the Federation looks like, especialy a society with holodecks and holo-suites. Why do it? Not to survive, not when your basic needs are met. Not because you have to. Food and shelter are plentiful. For extra credits? For fame and prestige? People in the Star Trek universe take on jobs they enjoy and find fulfilling, whether that’s serving in Starfleet, running for Federation council, building a new colony, bringing useful products to market, or running a Creole restaurant in New Orleans. I mean, Joseph Sisko wasn’t spending his golden years running that place to keep a roof over his head, he was doing it because he loved it.

So can I believe that people would do sex work because they enjoy it? Twenty years ago I would have said “Hell no.” But today, especially with the rise of Only Fans, online ‘influencers’, podcasts and inveriews with sex workers with frank discussion of their work, and people who thrive on the attention they can get? Yeah. When you put it that way, I can easily see people competing to produce popular holodeck programs, including sexual ones. Hell, it was heavily implied in DS9 (if not said outright) that there was an active industry producing holographic pornography. I can imagine people finding fullfillment in helping others experience companionship, or physical pleasure. We basically see that with the entire planet of Risa in TNG and DS9. And when the person can choose their clients, when the sex they give is internally motivated and not forced on them by someone trying to exploit them…yeah. It’s easier to imagine. I’ll also give a shout out to Masculine Jason’s Porn Star Confessions podcast, where among other things he asks sex workers how they got into the industry, and discusses their experience. I don’t always agree with him, but he’s given me much to think about.

So that was one set of opportunities missed with Stoneryder. The other set of opportunities has to do with males and their sexual and emotional maturity…or lack thereof. Look, when I wrote most of my stuff, I was still a 20-something guy myself. And after I joined the military, I was surrounded by horny, young, straight (mostly) men who didn’t have the slightest clue about sexuality, and whose idea of sexual diversity meant doing it doggy instead of missionary once in a while. And I think, if you’ve read my stuff, you’ll find that I have a lot of male characters who really aren’t very comfortable with sex, other than a few stand-outs like Jall and Stern who just…go nuts. Almost like I was using specific characterse as a way to vent frustration or something. I’ve tried to break out of that mold with newer stories, such as introducing polyamourous characters in Howlers. I’ve also tried not to have too many bisexual characters, because it just didn’t seem realistic to me. But as I’ve gotten older and been propositioned by more bisexual or even straight men, I’ve come to realize that I really could have included more bisexuality and still been realistic…though it may have made my readers uncomfortable. All two or three of them.

But moving away from sex, as I got older and my straight friends got married, I also started talking more with their wives and girlfriends. And this was around the same time the Internet was starting to talk about the epidemic of male loneliness. And these women were telling me the same thing: Their husbands/boyfriends didn’t have many close male friends, or at least not the sort of relationships that these women had with other women. I started noticing how my straight friends were reluctant to show affection. My gay friends and I would hug each other hello and goodbye, talk about anything, tell each other we looked good. My straight friends…God, I made a joke once about a buddy’s butt not appealling to me, and I found out later just how badly it had hurt him to hear that from a gay man. I really had to re-think my approach with straight friends after that, as one of my defense mechanisms as a gay man in the military was to go out of my way to demonstrate that I was not attracted to the guys I knew. Who knows who else I unknowingly hurt with that approach? (If any of you guys are reading this, I am sorry.)

I’ve been happy to see things shift as my friends get older and more mature. My straight friends hug now. They seem to be in better places. I would imagine that by the 24th Century most of this will be worked out. Hopefully well before that. But I do think that a key factor behind the challenges straight men face in Western culture with showing affection and building strong emotional support networks with each other can be traced right back to homophobia. They distance themselves from each other because they don’t want anyone to think there’s any sort of sexual whatever happening, whether they’re concious of it or not. My gay friends and I are already openly banging other dudes, we’re not going to be ashamed to hug our friends hello, tell them they look great in that sweater, or tell them we care about them. Or even love them, platonically. But straight men of my generation, and probablly those a decade behind us, really seem to struggle with that. I’m seeing signs that the guys in their twenties now might be different, but I guess that remains to be seen.

What does this have to do with Stoneryder, you ask? Well, now that I’ve given it more thought, I’ve come to realize that he would be without a doubt the most sexually and probably emotionally mature man on Starbase 341. I hinted in Season 1 that he had done porn scenes with other men, I plan to make it clear in Season 2 that he’s pan-sexual. Not bisexual, pan-sexual. Meaning that while he likely has his preferences, gender is pretty far down the list when it comes to what he finds attractive or not. Shrugroe, Wyer, Virgii and Boxer showed the emotional maturity of a pile of dead trout in Season 1. And frankly, Stroneryder was even worse. He was basically ignoring his job and womanizing in the background for most of the season. And to be fair, I think I pulled that from the gym-bro part of his character. But I refer you back to my previous statement, RE: “I fucked up”. The gym-bro piece is a big part of his personality, and I don’t see that changing. But I really need to properly think about the parts of his personality that relate to his time doing sex work, what that would have taught him, and how that would have impacted his ability to form relationships. If he was escorting successfully, for example, he was probably very good at putting people at ease, making them comfortable, and making them feel like they were special. If he was performing in porn with women and men, human and alien, cis and trans, then he probably doesn’t give the slightest of fucks about what people think about who he cares about, or how he demonstrates that affection.

I will have to be careful not to turn him into some sort of sexual and emotional Gary Stu, but I think the gym-bro elements will balance that out. Looking at his behaviour in Season 1, I think it’s reasonable to say that while Stoneryder might have a lot of experience building carefully managed, one-on-one relationships with clients, he’s absolute shit at teamwork. Especially the non-transactional Starfleet sort of teamwork where everyone is supposed to work to a common goal. His attempts to befriend Wyer in Season 1 were also extremely awkward, which was mostly just me playing for comedy. But I wonder if maybe, despite being very comfortable with affection and emotional honesty, he’s so used to responding to what other people want from him that he just doesn’t know how to start a friendship based on his own needs? I wrote a scene between him and Dr Annerson in the first story of Season 2, and I started seeing potential there for the two to bond, and for her to give him some much needed mentoring. I also thing at some level he’s very lonely, and that could be what drove him to Starfleet in the first place. Seeking the family of peers that was heavily emphasized in Picard Season 3. Maybe he was so frustrated with people falling in love with the porn persona he cultivated, he needed to escape and wants to feel valued for him. Hmm.

All of this to say, I’ve thought a lot about my H2H characters over the past few months. I put a lot of effort into re-introducing them in the first story, and a big challenge for Season 2 will be trying to figure out who to keep and develop further, and who I should let fade into the background until I have better ideas for them. There will be personality changes from Season 1, mostly because it’s been twelve years since I wrote those stories. But of all the characters, Stoneryder will have the biggest and probably most noticeable changes.

I also really need to fix some glaring holes, like the Federation Ambassador. And maybe put some better explanation in to why the Federation is willing to expend so many resources on this relatively unremarkable civilization. I have some ideas on that, and the hint I’ll give is that it involves Waystations 2 and up.

Have a good one!