Join us for another in a series of interviews with winners of awards from our 2024 Awards Ceremony. Our goal is to give you insight into how our fleet’s best simmers write, and imagine their characters as well as their out of character contributions and achievements.
This month we’re interviewing the writer behind Lieutenant JG Gnai playing a Galadoran Science Officer assigned to the USS Artemis-A. They won the Sarpeidon Award: “Awarded to a simmer who has made outstanding contributions to the 118Wiki. Sarpeidon was the planet in TOS’s “All Our Yesterdays” where the inhabitants built a library collecting their whole world’s history. This is essentially what our wiki aspires to be: a repository of our group’s history and a simming database.”
Marsh: Could you tell us a bit about the writer behind Gnai? Where are you from? What are some of your interests outside of 118?
Gnai: Of course! Hi, I go by Lich online, and I’m the person behind the jellyfish. I’m from Minnesota, but I’ve spent a good chunk of my life on the East Coast now too. Outside of 118, I’m a big fan of tabletop role playing as well as live-action role playing! I also dabble in just about anything I can get my hands on – writing, musical instruments, hiking, sailing, you name it!
What Star Trek television series or film do you consider your favorite? Why?
Gnai: My favorite series is Deep Space Nine – I love how it starts to dabble in serialization, while still staying decently episodic as the other 90s and earlier Treks do. It was right there at the sort of birth of proper serialized storylines on the silver screen, which is quite cool to think about in the wider context of television. Because of how it mixes serialization and episodic storytelling, it gets the best of both worlds in my opinion there – overarching plot lines and arcs that have stuck with me for a decade or more now, as well as compelling scifi “concepts of the week”. It was my first full Trek I saw, and I was just completely in love the moment I saw it.
And my favorite movie is the one with the whales, of course. Hopefully for obvious reasons. 😉
What do you consider to be your biggest strengths and weaknesses as a writer? Where do you draw your inspiration?
Gnai: I like to think that I am good at keeping dialogue flowing well. That’s one of the things that I pay the most attention to when I write a sim – what Gnai (or Vhysa’lia, my new PNPC) says needs to connect A to B, all while having a specific “voice” and being compelling to read. There’s a lot of things to juggle, but I really love the puzzle of trying to get it all to work. I’m also pretty proud of some of the times where I get to really delve into some narrative – Frontier Day (and my character being stuck unable to do much but yell at people telepathically) really let me try to explore novel ways of approaching that.
In terms of weaknesses – I know I’m not the fastest writer in the fleet! And besides that, I still have the same problem that plagues a lot of newer writers here: knowing how to push a scene properly. I’ve been working on it as much as I can, but it’s something that I know I need to put more effort into improving. There are some writers that just do the most incredible jobs at it, and I’m forever in awe of them!
And my inspirations are wide-reaching! First and foremost, I’d like to shout out the writers behind Gila Sadar, Jovenan, my captain Addison MacKenzie, and Robin Hopper over on Amity – they’re all very large inspirations for my own simming. I really like to delve into their sims, and see what makes their writing “tick”, and then try and implement that into my own writing! Outside of the fleet, I’m very inspired by the writing of Iain M. Banks’ Culture series, which is what got me back into creative writing. I do enjoy how he writes minds (and Minds) that are alien to our own, which is part of why I ended up choosing such an unknown species as the Galadorans!
You clearly do an amazing job working on the 118 wiki. What do you enjoy most about working on the wiki? What keeps you interested in it?
Gnai: Thank you! I really find organization incredibly satisfying, which is part of why I undertook the massive task earlier this year of trying to cut down the Uncategorized Images from ~5.5k to as close to 0 as I could get. With the help of a few others, and countless hours of Babylon 5, I did manage to get it down to (basically) 0! I’m inserting an incredibly unsubtle plug here to tell people to categorize their images when they upload them to the wiki, dangit.
Additionally, I absolutely love to play with formatting and templates. LCARS as a system is one of my favorite aesthetics, so I’ve been having an absolute blast playing with Gnai’s page and trying to get it to look properly “Star Trek”. Plus, having a record of everything that we write about is so incredibly cool – the wiki is what drew me here, and what draws a lot of new writers in general! I think it’s an incredible thing, and making sure it runs properly is one of my goals. One of the things that really brings me the most joy in regards to the wiki is getting to help other people with it. I love answering questions and trying to find solutions to problems that people have on the wiki.
One of the things that keeps me interested is the work of the other WikiGhosts. I don’t think working on the wiki would be half as fun if I didn’t have people like Gila and Niev to bounce my ideas for improving the wiki off of, or make competitions out of who could update all the pages the fastest. I really appreciate having other people who are as excited about the wiki as I am, and who are also religiously attached to the “Recent Changes” page.
Why did you choose to play the Galadoran race out of all of the permitted options available? What made the race stand out versus the others?
Gnai: Good question! I’ve told this many times to people over chat, but it was an incredibly selfish decision to play a Galadoran on my part. I wanted something totally and completely unique, that no one had done before – so that no one could tell me I was wrong! By playing something that was so totally a blank slate (albeit, with some development on the wiki that I could bounce off of), I had free reign to do whatever I wanted with the world-building of its species. And I’ve been totally in love with these jellyfish ever since I started writing for one, if it wasn’t obvious yet. One of my favorite pieces of writing is actually the submission I had for the Writing Challenge – I wanted to get to do a bit more work with the species’ past, and the prompt gave me the perfect outlet for exploring how the Galadorans lost their hive-mind and left their original world of Galador!
I think one of the things that makes Galadorans stand out is that they’re non-humanoid. There are few other non-humanoids in Starfleet, and even fewer that have such harsh limitations on their mobility as the Galadorans. I had a delightful time exploring how such limited mobility might come into play during Frontier Day, when Gnai lost control of its suit and then ended up outside of its suit entirely. Additionally, Galadorans have a deep desire that most of the other species might find odd – they strive to return to their original state of being a hive mind. That was just so deeply compelling to me when I first read it on the wiki. How would a society so focused on trying to become one entity function? And why would someone leave that society? There’s a lot of unanswered questions in terms of the Galadorans, and I’ve been thoroughly enjoying myself trying to come up with interesting answers to all of them as they pop up.
Finally, do you have any long term plans for Gnai drawn up yet? Do you want it to become a department head or an XO eventually?
Gnai: Not really! I’d love to see it grow more confident as a scientist and learn to take more risks, as well as develop deeper relationships with the rest of its crew, and with other crews in the fleet. I don’t think it’s destined for command, not as it is at the moment, but it might shoot for department head some day! But that’s a long way off.
Thanks for your time, Lieutenant Gnai!
You can read more about Lt.JG. Gnai on the Wiki, here.
