This page includes stories in which Q interacts with other members of the Q Continuum.
"The Q Vignettes"
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 original "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.
"The Q Vignettes"
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 wrote, 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: 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.
Later, I became fascinated with Q's life within the Continuum, with other Q and with inter-Q relationships.
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 produced. For years, the only thing most people seemed 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.
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 was used as a plot device in every fanfic I'd read with her up through 2001. 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 can be interesting.
Around 2009 or so, I became heavily interested in writing female characters -- I'd always been interested in writing female characters, but the livejournal community Where No Woman, dedicated to the women of Star Trek, inspired me. I actually fell in love with my version of Suzy-Q. Unfortunately, even after other people started writing decent fanfics with her, my headcanon for the character is mine, and no one else shares it, so to get my fix of the character I had to write her myself.
Q and Suzy-Q: Though the current convention, popularized by Peter David, is to refer to the female Q played by Suzy Plakson as "Lady Q", I don't like it because a, she's not really a lady, and b, it suggests that her identity as Q comes from her relationship with Q. In fact she is just as much Q as he is. So I generally refer to her as "Suzy Q" except in the fiction itself, where she gets whatever name the characters are likely to call her. These stories focus on Q's relationship with Suzy-Q.
The Civil War: Stories that take place during the Q Civil War.