“Inspiring Songs” #5: “Star Trek: The Next Generation” theme…
The original Star Trek series had better episodes than any others in the Star Trek franchise. They’re dated now, especially if you’re looking for razzle-dazzle special effects. (They had to make do with what they had back then—literally!) Yet many of those original episodes were written by real sci-fi writers, not some young screenwriting novices. (The same can be said about the earlier Twilight Zone, even more so.) But The Next Generation‘s theme song was much more inspiring than the one from the original series’, hands down!
Written by the famous Jerry Goldsmith (the version I liked best was on a Boston Pops CD—”Pops in Space” I think it was called), it gave me goose bumps the first time I heard it. My ten-year-old son (he’s now forty-five) was even more impressed. It just held so much promise. The show delivered, with Jean Luc Picard matching my image of what a starship captain should be. (I had a hard time getting by Counselor Troi and Ensign Crusher, though.) Picard and Worf were my favorite characters.
But hearing that theme motivated me to watch every show. The stories were often disappointing, though, especially when compared to that magnificent theme song. The experience led me to conclude that it takes a whole team to make a successful series or movie. Good writers are needed as well as good music and good actors, writers who can spin good yarns week after week, a more difficult task than writing a movie’s screenplay…or just one novel.
The comparable challenge a fiction writer faces is a series of novels, not one. Like The Next Generation, an author’s series generally reuses many of the same characters over and over again. What changes are the plots and maybe the settings, and maybe the “guest” characters. The challenge arises because the ho-hums can set in. Like readers who read the books in a series, an author can become bored with writing about them.
This is one huge advantage self-publishing has over traditional publishing. For the latter, a publisher can get tired of a series even before readers and writer do. The publisher can cancel the series as a consequence. (This happened to me with the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series when the publisher wanted to end it with a trilogy. I knew Esther and Bastiann wanted me to create more adventures for them. I don’t know about readers.) The flip side of the coin occurs when a publisher wants an author to continue a series, even if the author is bored with it and knows subsequent novels will seem boring and formulaic to readers as well. The author often ends up writing little else, as in Sue Grafton’s case.
Self-publishing offers an author a lot of freedom when writing a series. Although my “Esther Brookstone” series is forty percent traditionally published, I self-published the last three books in the series. Sure, I completed the trilogy, even ensuring the third novel had a paper version, but I went beyond that for Esther and Bastiann. They deserved it, and I wasn’t bored with writing about their new adventures together as a married couple. I hope you aren’t either.
I’ll let someone else worry about theme music for the series when and if it becomes a TV series. I can suggest a few possibilities from classical music, but I’ll have to confirm those with Esther! She has a mind of her own.
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Comments are always welcome.
Oktoberfests. I think my only mention of them is in Death on the Danube, and that only occurred as a reasonable facsimile at the beginning of Esther and Bastiann’s honeymoon river cruise (the beer gets to Bastiann, though!). We actually took the cruise that novel is based on in October through multiple European countries, so the reader can see most of what we saw by riding along with those two lovebirds. We didn’t have a murder on our cruise, of course, and there was no Interpol agent like Bastiann around to take over the investigation if we’d had one! This novel is in the middle of the five-novel “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, forming a bridge between the first two more international books and the last two, where the sleuths solve crimes on Esther’s home turf. Available in ebook and print format.
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
