The topic this week is “writing in other media” and my only real experience with that is writing two Stargate: Atlantis media tie-in novels. They were really a labor of love, because I am a huge dorky fan of SF/F TV. I am practically Queen Dorkania of Dorkopolis.

When I was growing up, I was a huge SF/F fan and read everything I could get my hands on, but I didn’t get a chance to see many movies. (For TV, all I had were badly edited reruns of Star Trek on the one channel that came in mostly as static, and Land of the Giants. I adored Land of the Giants.) I made up for that by reading the movie novelizations, and then later got into reading the Star Trek novels. One of my favorite books from that time is still Diane Duane’s My Enemy, My Ally, and after I read it I went out and bought all her fantasy novels. I got into Star Wars fanfiction when I stumbled on an ad for a Harrison Ford fanzine in the early 80s, was a fanfic reader (and writer) for twenty years. I was also a big fan of shows like Buffy, Angel, Hercules: the Legendary Journeys, Farscape, Firefly, and many others.

When Stargate: SG-1 first started running, my husband and I paid for Showtime just so we could watch it, then followed it when it moved to the SciFi channel. I had watched and loved Stargate: Atlantis through its first season. Then one of my favorite people, Rachel Caine, wrote an SG-1 tie in under the name Julie Fortune, and I’d read and really enjoyed it. When I talked to her about her experience with it, particularly the fact that she had been able to write exactly the book she wanted, I decided it might be worth a shot. Rachel encouraged me to contact the publisher, I did, and ended up writing Stargate Atlantis: Reliquary. I didn’t make tons of money, and the book didn’t have great distribution, but I enjoyed the experience enormously. I love writing, and I love being able to get paid for something I love doing, but this was combining my love for action-adventure SF/F TV also. I wrote a second tie-in the next year, Stargate Atlantis: Entanglement.

That said, I don’t think I’d ever be tempted to write a tie-in for a show or movie I wasn’t already in love with. For a tie-in that may be read by people who are casual viewers as well as big fans of the show, it’s important to get not only the characterizations and voices right, it’s important to get the details of the world and technology right. To do that, you have to watch the shows in a different way, with attention not just to the story and the characters but the way they do things, the way things work, and so on. The Stargate novel writers received zero extra information from MGM or the production company, so all you had to go on was the show itself, as it was airing. It would have been a lot of hard work for something I didn’t enjoy.