Jane Seaton

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Name:	Jane Seaton
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URL:	some fiction is here, and here
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Jane Seaton is a fan writer who focused on the Star Trek: TOS character Pavel Chekov.

Some Fanworks

• Chekov: In Love and In Trouble (zine)
• Classic #1, #2 (zine)
• Side-Trekked #2 (zine)
• St. George and the Gecko (a Spock/Sulu/Chekov/Uhura humor fic, originally posted to alt.startrek.creative, was the winner of an ASC Award )
• Swap (zine) ("Now, enter Jane Seaton and Teegar Taylor with Swap. At least, a piece of Pavelobilla both engrossing to read and beautiful to behold! Bask in the glow of its magnificence and feel your loathing for the Big Three fans dissolve into gentle pity. Hold the 'zine in your hands with the knowledge that your exalted state can never be theirs. Saracen dogs they are, but despise them not, knowing this, the Ninth and Innermost Circle of Chekov-Fan Nirvana, is closed to them forever. ~ Berkeley Hunt, co-editor of 'Swap'")
• an article called "How do I not write a rough draft?," posted to Working Stiffs (X-Files website) (sadly offline)

Fan Comments

2019

Teegar Taylor:

It is my firm conviction that if she wrote for a more popular character, Jane Seaton would have inevitably been a more well-known fanfic writer. I am selfishly glad, however, that she ended up squandering her considerable talents on the meager handful of content-starved Chekov fans. We needed her more.

I could not have asked for a more perfect writing partner had I designed her myself. I always particularly admired her ability to create plots that were clever and engaging without becoming convoluted or resorting to mere gimmickry for a resolution. My plots tend to begin strong then collapse in on themselves in a byzantine heap. Jane had a knack for slicing through the worst of my Gordian plot-knots.

Her narrative style is clean and direct – which was also a good counter-balance to my tendency towards sesquipedalian excess. However, most importantly, I love her characters. I was going to say that she writes quiet, mysterious characters. “Mysterious” is misleading, though. That descriptor would indicate there is something suspicious that draws your attention to them. The opposite is true. It’s always far too late when you finally realize what they’ve been up to. For example, I’ve been re-reading “Friend in Need.” In it, our heroes are surrounded by a multitude of native servants, some of whom repeatedly warn them that they are not as stupid as everyone assumes they are. Despite this, you as reader are gradually lulled into ignoring them, much like the upper class character in the story, and end up being genuinely surprised when at the end of the novel it turns out that the servants are, indeed, not as stupid as you had been assuming. This is a classic Jane Seaton twist. Her characters are subtle. They hide their motivations in plain sight. It’s one of the factors that make her stories as much fun on the third or fourth read as it was the first time through.

Above all, I love her version of Chekov. The Enterprise’s Russian navigator is a quintessential example of the “eager young officer fresh out of the Academy on their first assignment” stock character that appears in every incarnation of Star Trek. Wesley Crusher, Harry Kim, and Sylvia Tilly are different re-writes of the same role. This character is a standard from military dramas dating back to the Ancient Greeks and Romans and any other culture that told stories about armies or navies. One tried and true, very standard, very traditional way to write this sort of character is to make them very socially awkward. Doing so makes it easy to create contrast to the more mature characters and to show growth as the story progresses (which is the whole point of including a character like this). I’m just not at all thrilled about reading or writing about extremely socially awkward Chekov, though, and was incredibly relieved to find a writing partner who felt the same way. In addition, Jane actually speaks Russian, unlike 99.9998% of all other writers of Chekov fiction (including myself) who are faking it (usually very badly.)

Her Chekov is a very intelligent, sensitive young man with a wry, Slavic sense of humor. He’s quietly intense, passionate, even a bit sullen at times. He is, as one of his ex-girlfriends described him rather like a hedgehog – big eyes and adorable until you get too close then he turns all prickles and spines. Jane sometimes worried that she had created a very specific flavor of Chekov that existed only in her writing. “Don’t worry about it if you have,” I’d assure her. “He’s sexy and I’m in love with him.”

Much the same can be said (metaphorically, of course) of Jane Seaton, herself, the best fanfic writer that nobody knows.