JEAN (cont.)  “Now, that particular universe came out of a tragic period in my life.  I was very far from family for the first time, on my own.  I left home when I was seventeen to go to college, and never went back home to live.  But there is a difference between being sixty miles from home and having the capability to run home for the weekend when you want to, and being eight hundred miles away from the family.  And as I was growing up there were six people very, very close to me.  My grandparents, my parents, and an aunt and uncle who happened to be my father’s brother married to my mother’s sister, and they had no children, so I was like a daughter to them, too.  So I was a chick with six hens when I grew up.  These people were very close to me.  And over a period of two years my aunt died slowly and horribly, my grandfather died slowly and horribly, and my grandmother was sinking into death.  She died after I had completed the first part of EPILOGUE, but it was obvious that she was dying, and my father had a stroke in the middle of all of this.  And I was, for the first time in my life, facing up to losing people, to major change that one cannot control.

“And that is what EPILOGUE is all about.  If you’ve read it, then you know it’s about a war, in that case.  You see, when you write fiction you translate your experience into something else.  There was no war involved in my experience.  But, you remember, EPILOGUE begins with Kirk as a very, very old man . . . facing senility . . . losing his memory . . . having lost the people who were like family to him . . . having lost his position.  He’s been retired, not kicked out.  He’s just grown old and been retired.  It’s facing up to loss . . . and I was working off my own frustrations writing the first part of EPILOGUE.  And then I came back and wrote part two after I had lived through and come to terms with that period of my life, and I had a book to complete.  And then the artist goes on and finishes the story that was begun out of the emotion of a particular period.  But it’s probably because it is so close to my own life that I don’t want anybody else fiddling around with it.  It’s complete in itself.  Now, that’s one kind of universe, where you as sole author, or perhaps with a collaborator write a particular thing, you finish it and that’s it.  You don’t do any more.

“Then there’s the NTM universe, which is wide open.  That one is much more of a conventional TREK universe, in that it came purely out of questions that I had about the series . . . questions I had had about ‘Journey to Babel’ in particular . . . explanations of the way Sarek treated Amanda, which bugged me for years before I came up with my solutions . . .”