Assorted Nonsense #1
Next Steps for Donovan Street Press Inc., Star Trek: The Original Series, and James Blish
This is the first edition of Assorted Nonsense on Substack, a newsletter from Donovan Street Press Inc.
Lo and behold, here we are on Substack.
Some context. For those of you who don’t know me, I’ve been a writer since the age of eleven. (I still have those stories. They lack finesse and technical polish (naturally) but they do have heart. That kid believed he was a writer.)
Fast forward forty-seven years. I’d had a few short stories published here and there, some work on CBC Radio, and finally published a novel called A Time and a Place in 2017 with a small Canadian Indie publisher called Five Rivers Press. I followed it up with a self-published short story collection called Other Times and Places. Shortly after that I edited and published a collection of my father’s short stories called The Deer Yard and Other Stories. Both collections were published under an imprint I created called Donovan Street Press.
May 1st, 2022 I launched a podcast called Re-Creative with friend and fellow author Mark A. Rayner. As of this newsletter we’ve posted thirty-eight episodes, have at least another four or five guests booked, with no plans to stop anytime soon (knock wood). It’s been heard in at least thirty-five countries that I’m aware of.
In January 2023, anticipating publishing a memoir about working in radio (mainly with CBC Radio) I incorporated Donovan Street Press Inc. I had reasons for doing this that I’ll save for another post.
I retired from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation last August (after thirty-five reasonably successful years, at least from my perspective), published the memoir Adventures in the Radio Trade the day after, and almost immediately declared myself an author on LinkedIn.
I’ve spent the last several months since retiring working on another novel (called Captain’s Away), producing the podcast, making music, practicing karate (I’m just a yellow belt, which is a whole other story), cooking and baking, puttering around the house, accompanied all the while by a Sheltie named Wendy, and trying to figure out what to do about this ridiculous desire to be creative and, more specifically, where to take Donovan Street Press Inc.
My karate sensei (teacher) keeps telling me to relax. I think this applies to every aspect of my life, actually. I’m a pretty chill guy but I’m not great at relaxing (or I’d be doing that now). Relaxing for me tends to happen late at night, when I’m too exhausted to do anything else.
This is where I’m at right now with all that. I want to go all in on the creative life. I want to keep writing books and stories, keep producing the podcast, making music, and grow Donovan Street Press Inc. incrementally to be bigger than just myself. Slowly, carefully. I’ve been thinking about replacing blogging (which I’ve done since about 2005) with a newsletter like this. Apparently newsletters are the best way to build an audience, a community.
But here’s the thing. I understand something now that I didn’t before. And it’s this: barring some miracle, there is no money in any of that. Worse, it’s likely going to cost money. Basically be an expensive hobby as opposed to a new career. I’m very fortunate in that I have a pension from the CBC, and a supportive wife. I may take contracts here and there to supplement my income. I will continue to sell my books and my father’s (and maybe others via Donovan Street Press Inc.) and yes, this will generate some income, but almost certainly it will take a long time to break even, if ever.
SF writer Robert J. Sawyer once told me a joke. “How do you make a million dollars in publishing? Start with ten million.”
It’s funny cuz it’s true.
It’s kind of freeing, though. It means that my decision making doesn’t have to be predicated on how to make money. I have to be responsible about that for sure. Watch the bottom line, don’t just throw money away, certainly TRY to make a go at it financially. But you see, it’s not ABOUT that. It allows me to focus on what I want to write. Podcast about what me and Mark (and perhaps others) want to podcast. Make the music that I want to make. Write whatever I want. I don’t have to spin my wheels second guessing what the market wants, or what people want, which I would invariably get wrong anyway.
Umberto Eco once said there’s a market for everything. (Don’t try to look it up, I heard it once when I was working in CBC Radio Master Control and somebody was interviewing him. Maybe Eleanor Wachtel.) The line resonated with me. Maybe, I like to think, there’s a market for me and my stuff. Maybe it’s a tiny little niche market, but that’s okay. That’s fine.
So that’s where I’m at. I’m not making any promises, any specific committments. I’ll try to put this newletter out with some regularity. I’ll just be myself, writing about writing, and publishing, and life, and whatever else interests me, and hopefully interests some of you. It may include snippets of audio, bits of video, etc. because I like that kind of thing. I won’t be too precious about any of it. You can read it free or you can contribute a bit. Entirely up to you.
Soon I hope to have another novel out for those interested. With Mark, I will have a weekly podcast, Re-Creative, putting those old radio skills to good use, featuring many interesting guests and subjects (it’s about creative people and the art that inspires them, e.g., films, music, paintings, maps, books, and so on), and available wherever you like to listen to your favourite podcasts.
Star Trek
I’m a nerd. Let’s just be clear about that right from the get-go.
As such, I just started watching all the original Star Trek series in order. I’ve always wanted to do that. I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen every episode. This is the series with Captain Kirk, Spock, Dr. McCoy, Uhura, Sulu, Scotty, and the gang. It’s always been my favourite out of all the various Star Trek offerings. Just for fun, I’m going to share my impressions in this newsletter as I go along.
To make it even more interesting (well, to me, at least) I’m also going to read the James Blish adaptations as I go along. Blish was a science fiction writer contracted by Bantam Books to adapt every script of the original Star Trek series into short stories, ultimately packaged up into twelve books. I collected all these as a kid and still have them. I became a big James Blish fan as well as a Star Trek fan as a result. Sadly, Blish may not have been as big a fan of Star Trek as he appeared to be in his author’s introductions; it’s reported that his wife and her mother helped write later editions of the books. (This to me would be like finding out Clint Eastwood doesn’t like horses.) Even more sadly, Blish himself died young, at the age of 54, before he could finish the series. His wife J. A. Lawrence is credited with authoring the final issue #12.
I get a kick out of the adaptations because Blish wrote each short story based on the final shooting script without ever seeing a finished episode. Some details would change during production, so the short stories differ in some aspects. For example, picking up issue #1 to read The Man Trap, which I just watched, I could not find it. I looked in every book for that adaptation only to realize that Blish had published it in issue #1 under the name The Unreal McCoy, the original name of that episode.
Along with all the usual episodes, Netflix has made the Star Trek original pilot available. It’s called The Cage. It never aired back in the sixties (except for bits of it cut into a later episode called The Menagerie). Executive Producer Gene Roddenberry made it with Desilu Productions (co-owned by Lucille Ball) for NBC hoping that NBC would pick it up as a series. In 1965 NBC rejected it, but apparently Lucille Ball convinced NBC to try again, so they did, ordering a second pilot called Where No Man Has Gone Before. They finally greenlit the series and the rest is history.
I’m not going to go into excruciating detail on all the behind the scenes details e.g., how the uniforms, bridge etc differed from what came later and so on. (I’m not THAT much of a nerd; plus all those details are available elsewhere.) I just want to note my own personal reaction to these episodes and the Blish adaptations.
Starting with the pilot The Cage, written by the man himself, Gene Roddenberry.
I really enjoyed watching this one, never having seen it before. I’d seen parts of it; those parts incorporated into the later two-part episode The Menagerie. The cast is almost entirely different from the actual series. There’s no Kirk, no McCoy, and Spock is almost a different character. He looks similar but smiles and yells a lot. It’s a great story: the Enterprise gets a distress call, attempts to retrieve a bunch of survivors of a ship that crashed on a remote planet, there’s a young woman stranded there with all these old men, Captain Pike (played by Jeffrey Hunter) is instantly attracted to her. Turns out the stranded men are all illusions created by a race of telepathic aliens called the Talosians. They want to resettle the surface of the planet (currently barren) with a new race to serve as servants, artisans etc. working for the Talosians, ideally descended from a mating pair of Captain Pike and the young woman, whose name is Vina. But Pike has other ideas, and the story unfolds from there.
It’s not exactly a slick production. I found dialogue in the episode stilted, especially early on, and Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Pike has little of the charm that Shatner would bring to his role as Captain Kirk. Extras stand around awkwardly. None of the other characters are particularly compelling, except for Vina, played by Susan Oliver, who’s charming. It’s a wonder NBC kept Nimoy as Spock after his loopy performance here (not Nimoy’s fault apparently; he’d been instructed to bring a little levity to the proceedings to counter the rest of the episode’s seriousness).
But the special effects were probably pretty cool for the mid-sixties and the (mostly) smart story would have blown the minds of any science fiction fan of the time. Still, it’s easy to see how the pilot didn’t win over NBC. Pretty serious, not expertly directed, not much action other than a fight with a badly made-up and kind of goofy bad guy, and the over arching question: can you guys really pull a show like this off week after week after week?
Final thoughts (spoiler alert!): for a race looking to essentially enslave the descendants of Captain Pike and Vina, and willing to imprison and punish Captain Pike, they sure are nice to Vina in the end. It’s also interesting that the pilot and first three episodes aired (The Man Trap, Charlie X, and Where No Man Has Gone Before) all involve telepathic powers, perhaps a preoccupation of Gene Roddenberry at the time.
Blish never wrote an adaptation of The Cage that I’m aware of (not counting those elements included in The Menagerie.)
Next up: The Man Trap.
That’s it for this time around. All the best, and have a terrific 2024.
Stay well.
Great comments! Live long and prosper!
I enjoy your writing and musings, Joe, and that MC photo sure takes me back. First step in making sure I get the newsletter was to take it out of my junk mail where it went automatically. I wonder if there's something you can do about that? No reflection on the work. :)