If you spend any time on groups like alt.startrek.creative whatsoever, you probably already know who my favorite Star Trek character is, hands down. :-) This page contains links to all of my Q fan fiction and reviews.
I've decided to add an update section because there are several individual subsites, now.
May 4, 2009: Added a whole lot of stuff. I've been writing like crazy since November.
Many of my Q stories were written or started before the Voyager series came out, and thus do not necessarily take place in a timeline where any of the Voyager Q episodes are canon. For example, "Only Human" and its various spinoffs do not consider "The Q and the Grey" canon. However, most of what I've begun after 2003 or so does incorporate "The Q and the Grey" and "Q2" as canon.
The Deja Q Spinoff Tree: Contains links to Only Human and all Only Human-related works (PropinQuity by Mercutio, InseQurity by Mercutio and me, The Night They Drove The Borg Down by me) and to other Deja Q spinoffs (Familiar Strangers by me, The Q Who Fell To Earth by Jeanita Danzik, Lowest Common Denominator by Queriana, etc.). Updated May 2009 with more Only Human, more Working In Groups, and fixed links for Queriana's works. Also, I stopped making people go through the adult disclaimers to get to the page, because come on.
"Seventeen Things That Might Have Happened To Q" is based on the popular "Five Things That Never Happened To X" meme, where X is any character in any fandom. To do it for Q, I couldn't limit it to just five, so I chose seventeen because that's the numerical position for Q in the alphabet, and I couldn't make it "never happened" because the whole theme is that the character represents endless possibilities. This story was heavily inspired by my friend Atara Stein and her work in the novel "QStruck"; sadly, Atara passed away in March 2008.
Seventeen Things That Might Have Happened To Q: Seventeen separate AUs from Q's point of view. Includes Picard/Q, Janeway/Q, Guinan/Q, Kirk/Q, Amanda Rogers, Will Riker, Trelane's other dad and several variants of character death. No explicit sex, no violence more explicit than someone getting thrown out an airlock or talking about being mentally violated. Link goes to fanfiction.net because linking seventeen stories to each other is a pain in the butt.
This story can be interpreted as a "prequel" to either the Only Human universe, or a part of the regular Trek universe (which the stories below all belong to).
The Dance Of Chameleon and Mirror: In "Q Who", when Picard asks Guinan if she's met Q before, she responds "We have had dealings." What were those dealings? This story answers a few questions, and raises others.
When I originally became a fan of Q, I basically thought he was an irresponsible, childish asshole. I liked him anyway, but I thought he was a jerk. I read a fanzine dedicated to Q, "Quisine 4" (see The New Q Reviews for ordering info), and that started to change my outlook. I began to see that Q could be interpreted as a rebel against a stifling order rather than a juvenile delinquent, and this reading increased my appreciation of the character. The Q vignettes were all written to bring out this aspect of Q's personality-- all of them center around his conflicts with Continuum society, and I hope all of them provoke thought.
Civil Disobedience: My second ever published story! Yay! This is not available on the Internet any longer (I posted an earlier draft to alt.startrek.creative, but have removed all copies off archives after it was accepted for professional publication.) This story appeared in "Strange New Worlds", an anthology of fan-written fiction released by Pocket Books in June 1998.
His Brother's Keeper: This is the last Q vignette I've actually written, though chronologically it occurs before all of them. Takes place right before "Deja Q", and is best understood if you've watched "Hide and Q", "Q Who?" and "Deja Q." It also makes a good prequel to "Only Human", and in fact might be more powerful that way.
Dilemma: I wrote this vignette first-- my first completed Q story, in fact, though I began Only Human long before writing this. This story takes place right before "True Q," and is best understood if you have watched "Deja Q" and "True Q."
Testament: So far, this is the last of my Q vignettes, chronologically. This story takes place during the Voyager episode "Deathwish", and is best understood if you have watched that episode. Sorry, Voyager fans, but no Voyager characters actually appear in this story.
I finally have enough of these to give them their own heading. Because I like genderswaps and I don't see Q as particularly bound to his usual male form, some of these are het, with Q as a female. I've also included stories under this heading that are gen but primarily deal with interaction between Picard and Q, as friends, antagonists, or their more usual ambiguous relationship of, uh, friendly antagonism? Antagonistic friendship? Whatever you call it.
Lovers and Angels: A P/Q slash vignette with no sex. There are about half a million "Picard and Q get involved" slash stories out there, and I wasn't interested in retelling that concept, so I just assumed they had a relationship and wrote a brief tale of loving that which is alien.
April Q: My friend Andraste was running a cross-fandom Holiday Fanfiction Project in 2002 and since she put up a last-minute beg for stories that were not about Christmas or the X-Men, I decided to quickly write one. Sadly this story shows how fast it was written; it really does beg for some expansion. But I may or may not get to that, so I've decided to put it up here anyway.
Hypothetically Speaking: Another P/Q story with no sex (what is it with those?) Post-Nemesis, Jean-Luc's been comparing notes with Kathy, and won't Q be surprised at his hypotheses? I think this may actually be that strangest of beasts, an original concept for getting Picard and Q together. Stories in which Picard initiates things are damn rare to begin with.
Prometheus In Chains (incomplete): This is just checking to see if anyone is actually reading this site. This story, which is also incomplete, has only been posted to the PiQuante list so far. It's a "Q loses his powers" that doesn't depend on either "Deja Q" or Q doing something stupid, and in fact it can be interpreted best as a spinoff of "Civil Disobedience". It's also going to be quite NC-17 with m/m and f/f, eventually, but it's not there yet. It also has X-Men characters pretending to belong to the Star Trek universe, filling out the cast of characters on a colony world.
A Doctor, A Q and a Baby: This is P/C and P/Q, genderswap, takes place in a total crackfic AU that also appears in "Seventeen Things", above, and does not actually have Picard and Q interact at all. When Janeway turned Q down, Q took female form and got Picard to be the father of her child. But a human baby needs a human mother. Beverly Crusher and Q fight over Picard and the proper care of Q babies. P/C, P/Q, Q in female form.
Asking Jesus for Shoes: Written for Realm of the Muse, a prompt fic. Not slash, but features Picard and Q interacting. Q takes Picard back to the 20th century, Picard decides to take shelter from the possibility of changing the timeline in a church, and hilarity ensues. Mocks hypocrisy more than religion, but the deeply religiously sensitive may want to avoid it anyway.
The Bad Guy: Rated R, an unofficial sequel to Infatuation by Sasha-Anu. Last week, Picard snapped and humiliated Q in front of his bridge crew. Now Q's back, and looking for payback. Dark, elements of non-con. This is not my usual Picard or my usual Q.
Based partially on the episode "Q2" and the obvious changes Q had undergone in it, and partially on my personal experience, the premise is that Q has spent a long time (3,000 years, but all in the Continuum timeline, so no time has actually passed in the universe's timeflow) dedicated to raising a kid and working to change the Continuum from within. And he's sick of it. And he needs a vacation. But he can't see how to step into his old life and have Picard understand where he's coming from, after he's changed so much. So he decides to create an entirely new timeline, from the ground up, parallel to the original timeline, and in this new timeline Q manifests as a woman, as well as doing some other things differently. This is intended to be a P/Q series, but since it's more or less rebuilding the TNG Picard-Q relationship first, it's going to be quite a while before any sex occurs.
Do It Again, Prologue: In which Q has a midlife crisis, dumps the kid on the mate, and takes a vacation by creating an alternate timeline.
Do It Again 2: Farpoint, Revisited: In which Q redoes the Farpoint encounter, appearing as a woman, antagonizing Worf deliberately instead of accidentally, and making other minor changes.
Do It Again 3: Quality of Growth: Post-"Lonely Among Us." Q shows up in Picard's bedroom to harangue him in lieu of giving Riker the powers later on.
Do It Again 4: That Only A Mother (Part 1): Q appears at the moment of Tasha Yar's death to offer her a deal. Not yet complete.
Anything I happen to write about Q that isn't all about Continuum politics, spinoffs of Deja Q, or part of another arc, goes here.
Similar Features v. 1.0: I am absolutely sure I will expand this at some point, and when I do it will most likely be a slash fic, though this initial take on the idea is relentlessly gen. This is an X-Men Movieverse/Star Trek crossover, taking place after X2 but no real spoilers. Charles Xavier has in his basement an entity who knows Abbott and Costello, thinks he's a 24th-century Frenchman, and is afraid he might accidentally eat the sun. Life is never boring chez Xavier's.
Where No Mutant Has Gone Before: Another X-Men Movieverse/TNG crossover (I swear they're just too damn easy). This is a remix of Andraste's "To Boldly Go", a drabble that features Charles Xavier having switched places with Captain Picard. In this remix I expand the concept to explain how this happened. Three guesses as to what deus ex machina I use. The first two don't count. :-) Sooner or later I might write Picard's POV of these events. :-)
I don't think I've made any secret of how much I despised the episode "The Q and the Grey". I found the notion of a war in the Continuum implausible, the notion that humanity could somehow be instrumental in that war flat-out unbelievable, the fact that the writers completely forgot about Amanda Rogers (after mentioning her in the previous episode) unforgivable (so I have a soft spot for her. How could I not like a Q named A. Rogers? :-)), the notion that Q might seriously believe a war could be won by having a baby with a human downright stupid, the notion that a child would bring peace in the first place dorky... I could go on. I also don't like that the episode used the presence of Q's mate to slap a big "I AM A 100% HETEROSEXUAL MALE" sticker on Q's face (it's not that he has a mate, or that she takes female form, that bothers me; it's Q's and his mate's incessant parodying of heterosexual marriage cliches, with Q calling his mate a ball and chain, Q's mate demonstrating jealousy for a mortal, etc.) or that Q having a child completely denatured the inherent menace in the character. I could go on.
And in fact I will-- one of the other things I despise about the episode is how much bad fanfic it has produced. The only thing most people seem to do with the events in "Q and Grey" is either ignore them (the strategy I adopted until about 2001), or use them to produce pretty repulsive fanfic about Q's jealous mate making a hard time for Janeway, or Picard, or whoever. (Well, there is at least one good P/Q where Q's mate shows up and is jealous, but honestly, it's good because the writer is good enough to take such a cliched idea and make it entertaining, not because the idea's that great.)
What to do about bad fanfic? Write your own and try to give people a different idea about how things could be handled. I didn't like Suzy-Q primarily because she is used as a plot device in every fanfic I've read with her. So I decided to do some work exploring her and making her a person. And I gotta admit that Keegan de Lancie managed to win me over with his portrayal of Q's son-- I hated the whole idea, until I saw the episode. The transformation of Q into respectable Continuum citizen is actually something I can get some play out of in fanfic-- yes, the character has radically transformed, but that in itself may be interesting. So some of that will be here. I can't fix Q and the Grey, but maybe I can make it a little less painful to remember.
Amanda Goes To War: Written for SNW VII, but it didn't make it in. Amanda Rogers and the start of the war in the Continuum.
Butterfly Dreaming: Decidedly NC-17. Yet another rewrite of "The Q and the Grey." Kes doesn't think Q is going to convince Janeway to mate with him; she offers an alternative. Although I wouldn't call this a PWP -- it was devised around a plot point, after all -- it does have explicit heterosexual alien sex. Yeah, baby, alien porno! And no, I can't remember what the title has to do with it either.
Mistress of War: Who is Q's mate? What does she do when she's not with Q (which, one guesses, is much of the time?) And what was her role in the war?
Power Corrupts: Technically this is more about Kes than Q, but I've included it here as well. It's the trial of the aeon -- the Q Continuum vs. Kes, for Kes' destruction of the Borg. Written for the Remix Redux, a remix/sequel to Cait N's drabble Absolute Power.
Q, Interrupted: Written for Theatrical Muse, a prompt fic.Sexual situations, comedy, genderswapped Q going incognito, time-displaced Q Jr as Trelane, and Captain Kirk. Q2 (the Q who got Q thrown out of the Continuum) tells the story of the most humiliating thing that ever happened to Q.
I had been doing a lot of mental work with "The Q and the Grey" and the war. The thing that keeps hitting me, every time I think about it, is that if they'd just had the brains to split that out into two episodes, a goofy episode about Q hitting on Janeway and a serious and dark episode about war in the Continuum, it could have been so good... but what they actually did do was more or less completely schizophrenic. It didn't really succeed at being either funny (oh, immortal people are getting shot and killed, and suns are blowing up! hahahaha, stop, you're killin' me!) or profound.
While I'm fairly sure more war stories are sooner or later going to come out of this dark obsession with rewriting "The Q and the Grey" so it fails to suck, this particular arc is coming out... darker than most. For one thing, Q's dead in most of the stories in it. For another, I have royally screwed with every human and every part human and every sentient construct of humans in the plot. This is an AU where Q's side of the war... lost.
Covers TOS, TNG, DS9 and VOY. Maybe ENT will have a character or two if I can figure out why they'd be alive. I've put it on its own page because it's getting pretty big.
I wrote these for the Livejournal trek100 community. A drabble is exactly 100 words, and each is written for a specific challenge. Microsoft Word thinks these are 100 words each, at least. They're all different time periods and some aren't even the JdL Q.
"The Djinn and His Master": The challenge was "love slaves." Story has P/Q implications.
"Sons and Mothers": The challenge was "joy after betrayal." Features Q Jr and his mother.
Q Costume Drabbles: I wrote three for the "costume" challenge, since Q is Trek's resident costume slut.
"Facets": A conversation between Picard and Q.
"Not My Colors": A missing scene from Deja Q.
"Femme Fatale": It was originally Peter David who suggested Q might pull a stunt like this, but it was Atara Stein who suggested that Picard wouldn't be as stupid as Q thinks.
Every so often I've gotta write a story about a Q that really doesn't relate all that strongly to the JDL-Q. They go here.
listen:there's a hell of a good universe next door;let's go: Written for the ASC CrossTrek challenge, in which characters from different Trek series should meet up in brief vignettes. I'm the first one to do characters as relentlessly minor as Amanda Rogers and Charlie Evans, though.
Boys' Night Out: Thus far, incomplete, though I expect to finish it one of these days. Q's son invites his friend Icheb out to explore the universe. Minor spoilers for the pro Voyager novel "Homecoming", though I didn't read the sequel so I'm just guessing how that will turn out. This is going to be slash, though so far all it involves is witty banter.
First Born Son: Written for the LGBTFest on Livejournal for the prompt: Star Trek (any era), Q, Identifying as male makes Q transgender in the Q Continuum, since most Q don't identify with a gender at all. I am kind of cheating in that the story is about Q's son, since I don't see the JdL Q as tied to his male appearance at all, but for some reason I've long thought Q Jr was essentially male. But hey, the prompt says Q, and the kid's name is Q also. Besides, it was kind of hard to find a story if it had been the adult Q, given that if you've known someone for five billion years it's really not going to come up anymore that they're unusual in some way that doesn't personally impact you much.
Essays I've written having to do with Q.
Through and Through Q: Written for Idol Reflection, a livejournal community dedicated to essays on one's favorite characters. Q's canonical history, and how I feel it all ties together despite the writers' best efforts.
Captain Control and the God of Ritalin: Written for Ship Manifesto, a livejournal community dedicated to essays on one's favorite "'ships", or fanfic pairings. In this case, I discuss Picard/Q and the reasons why I think it's a viable way to perceive the series.
That Would Be Gods: The History and Nature of the Q Continuum: My personal theory, designed to include the latest Star Trek canon (which means it contradicts everything in the "Only Human" tree), on the origin of the Q.
I play Q on Livejournal, writing him in numerous prompt communities and a few role-playing games/communities.
Trek roleplaying
In 2003-2004, there were two ongoing Star Trek sockpuppet communities on Livejournal, where a bunch of us had LJ's that purport to belong to Trek characters. The first community was Trekjournals. I had Q and Amanda Rogers. The time period was DS9 Relaunch, Season 5 Voyager. The second community was Treksoap (described by its founder as "a bitchy soap opera"). Q and Amanda were both spending more of their time in Treksoap (being dimension-spanning entities, they can cross between two incompatible universes). Then the games both kind of died, but they were fun while they lasted.
Q Jr's LiveJournal (from Treksoap)
Q meets Jonathan Archer and Malcolm Reed, faciliated by Picard and Vash (Treksoap)
The story of Melusine (Treksoap) (now fully entered)
Prompt Communities
Theatrical Muse: I am writing Q in the Theatrical Muse community, where there's a weekly question posed to all the fanfic socks present. Q's entries are here.
Realm of the Muse: I'm also writing Q in the Realm of the Muse community, where each week there are multiple prompts posed to all the fanfic socks present. Q's entries are here.
Muse Academy: I am also writing Q in the Muse Academy community, which uses a small number of prompts per week, and also "muse inquiries" where the writers write about their characters. Q's entries are here.
Pan-Fandom Roleplaying
Sages of Chaos: Q frequents the Sages of Chaos community, for asking questions and getting answers. Q's questions are here, and his replies to other people's questions are here.
Hearts and Minds: As of Apr. 2009, I just joined the game Hearts and Minds with Q, who has been shot by someone in the Continuum and has been sent to the village to recuperate, unable to use his powers. This link includes the posts from the previous player of Q as well; mine are the ones from Apr 2009 and later.
I don't write funny very often-- it takes a funny character like Q to inspire me. "Super Wesley" was written in response to a thread about who would win in a fight between Wesley, the Traveller, and/or Q. "A Q In The Hand" is a parody of flyers for slash zines, and the excerpts they include to illustrate their stories. "10 Q Ideas" was the result of brainstorming with a young man who would rather remain anomymous. It's all his fault, I swear. :-) "The Q Who Fell..." came about because Mercutio, Jeanita and I were all kind of borrowing ideas from each other in a sort of incestuous way, and we all had the premise of Q losing his powers and getting rescued by some female original character, and we'd all been exposed to the Mary Sue accusations, so we decided to parody ourselves.
10 Q Ideas We Passed Up: We decided not to write these gems of story ideas, for which the world should thank us. :-)
Super Wesley Dates Amanda The Q: Come on, you thought they'd make a great couple, too. :-)
A Q In The Hand: Parody of an ad for a slash story.
The Q Who Fell To A Nearby Location And Became Just A Human Being: Parody of "Only Human", "PropinQuity" and "The Q Who Fell To Earth", written by me, Mercutio, and Jeanita Danzik.
How To Write Moi Without Looking Like More of an Idiot than Your Feeble Species Dooms You To, by Q: Posted to fanfiction.net and tailored specifically for that site, this is a rant about bad Q fanfic on ff.net disguised as a story. Q chews out bad fanfic writers in usual style.
The Asshole Song, by Q: Parody of "The Asshole Song" by Denis Leary.
It's been a while since any of these reviews were updated. I would like to get back to them one of these days, though.
The New Q Reviews: Written by Queria. Reviews of Q's appearances in the comics. To the best of my knowledge, this covers all of Q's appearances but one, and that one is essentially a repeat of the Klingon story except with androids like Data instead of Klingons.
The Biblio-Q: A fairly comprehensive reference to Q fanfic written as of 1997, complete with reviews by Alara and Mercutio. Hasn't been updated in a while.