The Connor Wars Writer’s Room 39 – Flotsam and Jetsam

Here are some housekeeping bits and a few comments.

Seeing the Sites

A couple of my websites run the blogging/CMS software, WordPress. A new version is coming out soon with several enhancements that will make my life easier in many ways. As a result, I’ve been experimenting (offline) with different options for my sites once the official release emerges in the coming weeks.

I giving serious thought to moving The Connor Wars to its own site. The plan is to make the site more of a repository for discussion, links, new fics, and whatnot connected with TCW. I’d also migrate over these Writer’s Rooms, the forum, as well as either move or link to other material currently housed on TIB. I’d also try to create the necessary redirects so your links to the old addresses won’t break — after all, I don’t want the search engines to lose track of them.

I’m still mulling this over. It might be more hassle than I want to deal with. I’d appreciate any thoughts and comments you have about it. If you’d like it to stay as it is, I’d seriously consider doing that, too (after all, that makes less work for me).

Continued Thanks

Thanks to everyone still spreading the word about these scripts. New users are still coming by and reading the story. If you read it as I was writing it, it might seem like old news, but the links that get dropped do lead a new group of fans to my take on the story. Every now and then I stumble on a link I hadn’t noticed before, and I see y’all saying really nice things…often from handles I don’t recognize.

So, to all of you fans who are still spreading the word: thank you so much. It means a lot to me that you enjoyed my little effort and that you think others will too. A major goal was to give TSCC fans a feeling that they hadn’t been abandoned. If TCW is able to fill that chasm, even a little, that just gladdens my heart like you wouldn’t believe.

Keep spreading the word. I still see TLDs from all over the world dropping by. Whodathunk?

Some Story Bits

Here are a few more items about TCW that I don’t think I’ve mentioned:

The Cult of Sarah

The Cult of Sarah was actually planned to be a bigger deal. Stuff about the cult of personality and things like that. With Savannah becoming a more influential character than I’d expected, the Cult of Sarah sort of got absorbed by that.

I still sort of wish that we’d seen a little more of the populist side of this. Which brings to mind:

The Tunnel Trolls

As you doubtless thought with their introduction in F0302, “Tempest Tossed”, I expected to have a greater interaction between the civilians and the military. Thing is, once the battlefield grew and the war became more about trying to win instead of simply trying to survive, the Tunnel Trolls got pushed to the side a bit.

I know that they never disappeared. They were Savannah’s, after all. But I’d thought I was going to have a wider range of recurring characters than I ended up having. That’s sort of due to shifting the focus a bit more on the T0Ks than I’d thought I’d when I first did up the outlines. Oh well.

The Sarah Photograph

You know the one: the photo the little kid took at the end of T1 that Kyle eventually fell in love with. Where did it end up? I always expected that with Friar Radu being all Cult of Sarah that maybe he had it. Or maybe Kyle had it. Or it got lost, or maybe destroyed in JD.

Truth is, I didn’t want it dirtying up my timeline by making it a big deal. It had been used so much as a connector that I found it more of a distraction than a help.

Tears of a Clown

I’m a sap when it comes to TV and movies. I’ll cry at the crying parts (unless I’m out in public, then not so much). What scenes of TCW got to me?

The single biggest tear-jerker for me was F0304 – “Without a Scorecard”. Sarah dying had my face drenched in tears. It was so heroic and so tragic. And I’m getting verklempt now just thinking about it.

John and Cameron reuniting in F0313 – “Sharper Than a Terminator’s Truth” got to me as well. I very much wanted them back together.

Without a doubt, the longest weep-inducing scene was the final scene of TCW, with John and Cameron saying good-bye to Catherine. That lasted for many months. I’d written the essence of the scene long before season 3 was completed. EVERY time I returned to it, or even thought about it, the tears started flowing. I’m not quite sure why. I guess I just don’t take good-byes well, even if they are “happy” ones.

Tangentially–I laughed at that scene at the beginning of Romancing the Stone when Joan is at her typewriter crying over the scene she’d just written. But that’s how it is for a writer. If you don’t feel it, then you have no right expecting your audience to feel it.

The Glau

And yeah, she’s still stuck in my head. Shirley Manson is, too, a little; but since Allison and Cameron were such major characters in TCW, I was forced to think of Summer Glau on a daily basis. (Yeah, tough work.) You don’t just turn off that switch, but it’s lessening.

I can really appreciate how Josh must have felt when he had to pack up and leave the studio lot. When a fictional world becomes your life, it takes a while to reassimilate into the normal world. It sort of sucks. And in that vein…

More…?

I’ve mentioned before that I have no plans of writing another season of TCW. By now you all know the reasons why. Even so, I do love my TCW-verse. There are still some things I want to do with it–some canonical, some just fanfic, some situated in a place in-between. I wouldn’t put it past me to even dish up something in a narrative prose instead of in script form (egads!).

Who knows? I have nothing explicitly planned out or a schedule in mind. Just something that I’m toying with because I still have robot battles going on in my head. And political intrigue. And tech. (You can’t see me right now, but I’m grinning wide. Gawd, I love this ‘verse.)