Dayton Ward Interview With StarTrekBookClub.com
Dayton Ward is no stranger to Star Trek, getting his start in the Strange New Worlds contest and going on to write dozens of books in the franchise, including entries in SCE, Vanguard, Seekers, a couple Trek Travel Guides, and the wonderful Kirk-Fu Manual. We open our conversation by being grumpy about AI writing, but quickly move on to talking about Shore Leave, a show he’s been going to since 2003.
He talks about his sweet personal library and predicts that he’s going to die happy down there, an enviable goal if there ever was one, and we both agree that unread books are still a valid part of a personal library. Anyone disagreeing with that can go build their own library of books and leave us to our unread ones.
I ask him a line of questions about the Incredibuilds kits, I have them on STBC because there’s a book that comes with them and I’ve never managed to get my hands on it, at least not yet, and he lets me know what’s in those books. Spoilers: it’s all Star Trek content to give background on the build that you’re incredibuilding.
He and his writing partner Kevin Dilmore recently had a comic book adjacent project released, “Captain America: Declassified“, which is a riff on “The Last Interview” series of books, featuring interviews with comic books characters to gain insight on how they viewed the big events that happened in the Marvel Comic Universe. This might sound familiar because I recently spoke with Kelli Fitzpatrick and she has a book in the same series coming out next year, hers will be Captain Marvel themed.
He gives some good advice to first time convention going folks like me at the end of the talk, I’m grateful for it and I’m already taking him up on some of it!
Dayton Ward can be found on his website, Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, and Twitter
Derek Tyler Attico Interview With StarTrekBookClub.com
Derek Tyler Attico is the final interview for my series before I head off to Shore Leave, this one was recorded about a week before the show. We start with a discussion about his recent nomination for a Scribe award by the IAMTW for the recently released Autobiography of Benjamin Sisko in the in universe series of autobiographies. The other four books where from two authors who each wrote two books, so we talk about who he would write about if he were able to do another book in the series. He’s done a good bit of work with Modiphius on their Star Trek line of RPG books.
We then discuss Shore Leave and his history with the show, they recently released their program, and holy moly I was not prepared for how much they’re going to be doing in just three days. Derek talked me through his schedule and I’m hoping to catch at least one of his panels.
Our discussion about Galloping Around the Cosmos led to a fun conversation about what brought him to the franchise, specifically the episode “The Devil in the Dark”, a story of fear, hope, and trying to communicate.
He’s currently doing a master class series for Tallaght Academy of Sequential Art on story telling, which brought us to a conversation about his time in a class that was taught by comic industry legend Dennis O’Neil and how their relationship lead to Attico learning about the comic industry in general and how to deal with hitting writers blocks.
He currently has an exhibit at the American Writers Museum on Role Playing, a very cool accomplishment!
Also, I didn’t figure out his shirt until about half way through the video. It’s clever and now I want one.
Derek Tyler Attico can be found on his website, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Jim Johnson Interview With StarTrekBookClub.com
Jim Johnson has been working on Star Trek properties since at least 2004 with three stories in three different Strange New Worlds collections and more recently as a project manager for Mõdiphiüs, pronounced Moe-diphius, not Mod-iphius as I said for the first half of the video until I was correctly corrected. I was able to speak to him due to some introductions by Derek Tyler Attico, and I think is going to open up another group of writers to talk to about their involvement in Trek and has even given me a few ideas for future content on Twitch.
We open the talk with me drooling over his Blue Bricks Defiant he has on a shelf behind him, then swap a couple “million dollar ideas” that are sure to have us in the two comma club soon enough. We move on to have a great discussion on how exceptionally friendly everyone is on the creative side of Trek books and how willing they are to help people out with interviews and games and how lucky we are to be involved in the fandom.
What prompted me to post this interview before Shore Leave is Kelli Fitzpatrick is bringing the new second edition core books with her to the show. Up to this point, I’ve been blissfully unfamiliar with IRL RPG games, as most of my RPG experiences are PC based with minimal human interactions. The second edition is officially launching at GenCon, but those of us at Shore Leave are going to get to see it a week early.
As a newcomer to the RPG space, I had to ask, what exactly is a second edition and how does it effect the content that’s been previously released? Jim gives a great breakdown of the hows and whys, and essentially the original game was good but they had a ton of content come out since the original core book came out, so some tinkering was in order to make it all align better.
There’s a conversation on how different reviews for literary books are from RPG books, the project management methodologies of Mõdiphiüs, the process of choosing authors for the books, and how content is approved by Paramount.
We wrap things up by mentioning that Mõdiphiüs is currently running a 50% off sale on both the US and UK sites, the second edition is up for preorder, and there’s going to be a starter kit that’s going to be a great entry point to the game system for people like me that are intimidated by those big gorgeous books.
Mõdiphiüs can be found on Facebook and Discord.
Jim Johnson can found on his personal website, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube.
