Star Trek: Into the Abyss...

I had the television on early one day, as I was online. It’s not something that I usually do, but anyways… a Deep Space Nine episode came on. I found myself watching even though I knew what was going to happen. That was a great sci-fi show, with an amazing writing/ producing staff. Battlestar Galactica, The Dead Zone, The 4400, Medium, Roswell, Now and Then, Carnivale and Dark Angel all have mined the ST:DS9 talent pool.

Back in college, Larry (of RnD) and I wrote a script for one of the Star Trek shows. We actually wrote a two-parter for college credit as Independent Studies. I had written a couple scripts before and he had written numerous short stories and was a published poet. For both of us to get credit we had to write two separate scripts.

We ended up with two scripts that any fanboy would love. When combined, they told an epic story. ,At the time I did not quite get the concept of the bottle show. Unfortunately, our scripts were never read.

Flash forward a couple years and I was laid up due to having a dislocated knee and needing to recuperate after surgery. I had written a half dozen scripts or so since the last Star Trek attempt and I felt that I had grown as a writer. I started plotting out a new script. This one was a bottle show. It was a total stand alone story that gave all of my favorite characters a time to shine.

The problem that I had was... while I can pick apart movies and shows- what’s good, bad or indifferent and usually speak about them intellectually; my memory is not the best. I’m not someone that can just start quoting every episode of shows or knows every little fact regarding the character’s backstory.

Now, my friend Ted is the type of person that can give you an obscure quote and tell you from what episode. I enlisted Ted’s aid to help with continuity and editing. However, as the writing process went on, he began bringing more and more to the script and eventually we were co-writers.

Larry, of course, is the D of RnD. Ted is the creative consultant, the story editor - that helps us stay on track. He is one of the few people outside of the industry that has the knowledge and intelligence to understand what we are doing and offers us an honest opinion of what works and what doesn’t, from someone not intimately involved with the script.

What makes this a good story is that few years after the second script was submitted I moved to Florida. About 18-months after I lived in FL, I finally went back to New York to empty out my storage unit. The day before I got back to NY, my mother received ALL of the scripts that I/we had previously submitted, unopened. THE DAY BEFORE.

What makes this even funnier is that each one of the scripts had a letter with it that said that the script had not been read due to the fact that the shows were no longer in production. From the date that the last script was submitted to the day that they were returned, more than four years had passed and the show had gone off the air the year before.

Don.