Yer Opinion Needed

Bored now. The highlight of my day was eating a cheeto. I probably should get out more, but you try to eat a cheeto with a mouth that's mostly burned. Not so much fun now, is it? I also read back issues of Reader's Digests. Somewhere in there, I organized photo albums, did laundry, and cleaned up after yesterday's shindig. I also worked a little on a fic and started looking at a VOY episode in terms of novelizing it.

Novelization is hard work. I didn't realize it until I wrote A Case of Need last year, a novelization based on "Workforce." I must have watched the videotape of that episode a million times (mucho gracias to Bjorn for making that possible) in order to get it all down right. And of course, and in addition to the scenes I'd selected for my novelization (all B'Elanna's POV), I also had to add my own material and then have it all work together. When I started, I thought, "Oh this will be a cakewalk." Nope, it's darn hard. Almost harder than writing your own take on an episode simply now your framework is even tighter. First, you're constrained by the dialogue that already appeared on the screen - not much you can do there. You have to write around it and transitions can be the devil sometimes. I can't write a "different" Torres or Janeway than the ones who appeared in "Workforce" - what I project for them *has* to mesh with what the rest of the episode depicts. So I can't suddenly have Janeway musing about Mark or the Hirogen because it simply won't work in this particular context.

My current novelization project is a toss-up between "Drive" and "Flesh and Blood." I'm more inclined to do "Flesh and Blood" (video also courtesy of Bjorn ::grin::) and I might even be masochistic enough not to take a POV. I would write the EMH, if I thought I could do him justice, but B'Elanna herself makes a fine narrator for this particular episode. I may do a flip-flop. Half Janeway, half B'Elanna. But then there is the Tom scene where he says "With all due respect, Captain, I'd like to get my wife back in one piece." ::sigh:: The way I see it, I have to either pick one narrator to do the novelization or I have to novelize the whole darn episode and there is just so much here that I really think it's impossible to tell it from one POV. What do you guys think? Since I'm 90 percent sure I'm going to novelize this one, leave your thoughts and I'll go with majority rules.