RT2204- CINCSF Report

CINCSF's Report

At this point, we have two stable and functional units: SB Serenity and USS Ranger. Thank you, Sean, for getting Serenity back on its feet. This has been a very quiet year. Non of my efforts, which were primarily focused on Facebook, in the first 6 months of this year did much for attracting attention. I believe that we had one new recruit who worked with me, got a bio ready and then stopped answering e-mail (including mine) when I sent her to the CO's to pick between the units. At this point, the club is mostly people who have been here for many years with just a couple of newcomers. I'm not sure how we bring back growth. Forums like Instagram attract more attention than Facebook, but the written word of our hobby doesn't translate particularly well to that visual format. It isn't like we have new artwork every week. We could be more active on Twitter (and do have a rather inactive account), but that, too, isn't conducive to long-format stories.

I honestly think that we need someone in this job who can shake things up a bit and I don't believe that is me.

Real life is likely to encroach on more people's time and we'll have the slow attrition from the club continue until there is no longer a club.

There is, perhaps fertile ground given the more recent surge in SciFi programming. Within the Star Trek universe, we have Prodigy, Lower Decks, Strange New Worlds, Picard, and Discovery. Some are better suited for long-form storytelling than others. Picard is so driven by the one character that it would be hard to make into a reality as a writing club. Prodigy is fresh, though very different from traditional Trek and is, again, focused on a small group of characters. We could so something inspired by it, but it really couldn't quire be the same. Strange New Worlds would be a take on our own Origins Timeline from several years back. I'm not sure what Discovery is. But anyone following that path unless it was a whole 

Beyond Timeline thing would be completely isolated. I personally enjoy the irreverence of Lower Decks. For that matter, we could take some inspiration from The Orville (although the basic direction of such a unit would have a similar tone to Lower Decks...just focusing more on the senior officers). Right now, though, we don't have the manpower to start exploring these paths without deciding to shift from what we have been doing. Where is Jack Danger when we need him? This does not mention what has been going on in other SciFi and Fantasy with Star Wars, Wheel of Time, Halo, The Witcher, and many other worlds. ASR has opted, in the past, to remain purely Star Trek. Other online writing groups do have multiple separate universes without any relation to one another and cross into different universes. Again, though, I believe that we are too few to do this without compromising what we do now. Two units is about what our writers can sustain at present.

In short, we face the same problem that we have for years: find a way to grow or slowly fade away.

Jeff Jenkins
CINCSF
The Chair