Back in my day we had to walk 15 miles, in the snow, both ways… We’ve all heard stories like this at some point in our lives, and the Fleet at Starbase 118 is no exception. Spend a little time reading your Ship Chat, the Officer’s Club, or chatting in the Brew Continuum and you’re bound to hear tales from some of the veteran writers about the way back times of their Lower Deck Days.
Some of these stories sparked the idea of interviewing members who have been writing with the Fleet for long enough to see trends come and go and share with us their perspective on how the times have changed. Maybe we will even get some juicy stories along the way.
To kick off the new series lovingly called Back In My Day, we’ve tracked down LT JG Taelon who writes as a science officer on the USS Gorkon.
S. Richards: Looking back at the archives, I realized it’s been a while since you’ve been interviewed. For all our new writers, do you mind telling us a little about yourself? Where are you from and what have you been up to since the last time we heard from you?
Taelon: I’m from Oregon and that hasn’t changed! Still quite happy to be living out in the country, and the pandemic certainly made that a nice haven. Since I was last interviewed, unfortunately, I’ve had some ongoing challenges that made me struggle to keep up with the Starbase, but I’m finally back on my feet and happy to be here full time again.
I am a freelance (read: unemployed) artist and web developer, and have been lucky enough to keep a fairly laid back lifestyle for the last few years even if money’s (extremely) short. I’m usually gaming or working on art projects if I’m not writing.
These days you’ll probably find me yapping in the voice chat, so apologies to all the other participants….
How long have you been a member of Starbase 118 and during those years, what has been the biggest change you’ve seen? How has that change impacted the community?
I’ve been a member since 2016, though through 2019-2024 I had a lot of issues keeping up and was on and off. So with that in mind, I’d say the Discord has been the biggest (and best!) change. The Fleet used to just use a web-based chatbox and it was mostly a few of the Ops folks in there. The Discord has made it much easier to chat fleetwide and opened up a lot of inter-ship plotlines and friendships, and it’s been really fun to get involved there.
Now Taelon hasn’t been your only character in the time that you’ve been writing with the Fleet. How many different main characters have you had? Out of all of your previous characters, who would want to bring back, even if just for a day? What made you pick them?
I’ve had exactly one other ‘main’ character, a temporary XO I played while Taelon was in the past for a while (long story). She was fun, but I doubt I’ll bring her back. My two secondaries I’ve run are Ruwon, a Romulan counsellor (primarily on the USS Za, RIP) and Teryn (USS Constitution-B), a Cardassan out to make his mark. I’m playing Ruwon as a PNPC currently, and Teryn may eventually reappear.
Taelon is great fun to play, but I like writing several other archetypes, and Ruwon is much more socially confident and outgoing. Teryn is likewise more outgoing, but in a stiff and formal way; he tends to assume he’s in charge of wherever he is and will take the lead, while the other two are followers by nature.
I almost exclusively ‘main’ male characters, for whatever reason. Not really sure why that is.
How has your writing style changed through the years and what do you know now that you wish you had known back at the very beginning?
I’d say it’s not changed too much, aside from using more separate narration blocks rather than having extensive narration within the dialog tags.
If anything, I wish I’d known not to sweat things too much! I don’t worry about my sims as much as perhaps I should, but I used to worry about their content to the point of stress. The game’s at its best when you just go with the flow, and my writing tends to be better when I write freely rather than worrying about my quality.
Alright, now to get down to the reason we are all here. Tell us your favorite story from back in the day.
There’s a whole lot of them, but I’d say looking back one of my favorites was my third (second? I joined mid-mission so it’s hazy, honestly) where Orions tried to kidnap a pop superstar, Lady Shaddonna. Taelon was sent with the small team meant to escort her to the station for her upcoming concert, but their shuttle got jumped and attacked, resulting in their capture. Not only was it his first time in actual combat, he got to turn the shuttle’s warp core into a bomb via the principle of ‘every machine is a smoke machine if you run it wrong enough.’
The rest of the mission was chaos – they got caught, escaped, Theo got tortured, and Lady Shadonna’s pet targ Duchess bit EVERYONE at least once, friend or foe. Also, of all the repeating enemies Ops has had, that targ was the worst one.
Thank you so much for your time!
You can read more about Taelon on the wiki.
