Rising Through the Ranks – Lieutenant T’Ama – USS Chin’toka

[StarBase 118 Staff]

Somewhere in between lower decks and high ranks lies a mysterious land, full of Lieutenants and Lieutenant Commanders. They make up the backbone of the Fleet, leading departments, joining task forces, and giving Lower Deckers a hard time. However, they have been overlooked by interviews recently and don’t often get the credit they deserve. This new series Rising Through the Ranks aims to change that! 

These interviews will focus on the journey, growth and character development that happens as Lower Decks is left behind but Command is not quite in sight yet. We will also be taking this opportunity to find out what it’s like to write for particular duty posts, lead a department, write without the training wheels of mentorship, and make plans for career advancement.

Today we’ve asked Lieutenant T’Ama, a female Vulcan/El-Aurian hybrid and the Chief of Operations on the USS Chin’toka to share their experience.

Harford: You spent a considerable ten months as an Ensign. Is there anything you miss about your time in the Lower Deck? Do you think there were any advantages to spending that length of time, and the subsequent eight months as a JG, in the Lower Decks?

T’Ama: Well, to be fair I spent the first three months struggling to make full time. I didn’t exactly hit the ground running like some people do. Spending longer in the Lower Decks does give you more time to get into trouble, which I regret not doing more of. I kind of miss it! But I think, particularly in my case, it’s allowed me to empathize with how rough it can be as a brand new baby ensign. What point you join in a ship’s mission-shore leave cycle can make it easier or harder to get into it. I joined at the very tail end of a mission and then had an entire shore leave to wander my way through a bit aimlessly, and if you aren’t a person who is very comfortable bugging other people it can be tough arranging scenes.

You were promoted to Lieutenant pretty recently, how has that transition been? What’s been the most noticeable difference for you IC and OOC?

I also recently became a ship staff observer OOC and IC she also became the Chief of Operations, and so in both regards there’s this big shift to learning how to lead a team and lead a scene. T’Ama is very snarky IC and it’s the kind of humor that punches up and doesn’t really work punching down because then it’s just mean. Now she has way fewer people she can punch up at and I’m trying to figure out how to preserve this aspect of her character without punching down. There is a gulf I’m starting to feel where I’m slowly realizing I’m not Lower Decks anymore and oh I’m literally one promotion away from being the same rank as all these actual senior officers. It’s a little weird.

Are there elements of real life that you especially enjoy incorporating into T’Ama’s story, or do you try to keep her as far apart from you as possible? What other sources do you draw inspiration from and how does that impact your creative process?

Well I’ve made the mistake of writing a character that was too close to myself in a different game before and that was a horrendous experience, so I try to keep her away from a lot of the ways I react to things. That’s why she tends to be fearless because one of my big rules is to not put any of my own anxiety into her. I tend to embody her when I write so writing my own anxieties makes it worse. Conversely, deliberately choosing to not do that is a little bit therapeutic.

I created T’Ama before I learned that first lesson of not putting too much of yourself into a character and before I even figured out what my own damage was, and as I’ve written her over the course of nearly two years I’ve had the horrible realization that she is actually like way, way more like me than I originally thought. Like I accidentally gave her all my own problems, but she’s a version of me that has made different choices.

I think it’s impossible to keep everything of yourself out of a character. Every character has some little facet of you inside it because you created them and you’re drawn to certain stories because of who you are, and it’s easier to write what you know. You just don’t want to make a character that has every facet of yourself in them. T’Ama certainly has more facets of me than I intended, but as long as she’s being therapeutic rather than detrimental I’ll keep writing her.

Other sources of inspiration usually get put into NPCs, though I find I struggle to write the ones that are solely based on another person. Every once in a while I can actually use something that happened to me intact, like T’Ama’s terrible shepherd’s pie that tastes like a tree because it has too much rosemary in it.

Tell us about writing an Operations Officer. What sort of situations do you find yourself writing and how is that different now that you’re in the Chief role? What advice do you have for players who may be considering an Operations office or want to expand what they are writing in the Operations role?

I’m finding writing the Chief role easier somehow, and I don’t know if that’s because I’m finally getting the hang of it or I can always fall back on delegating stuff to the NPC crew or what. Operations lets you stick your fingers into every pie on the ship and allows you to know just random things, like what temperature they keep the pools at on the ship.

Operations is kind of the support class – a lot of things fall under their domain, but there’s also a lot of overlap with other duty posts. They are good at organizing things. We were doing search and rescue recently and I had T’Ama step in and organize a large group of survivors for extraction. It can take some creativity, but it’s often best to try to balance the team.

Finally, tell us about your writing process. What helps you the most when you sit down to write a sim and what do you find most challenging? How do you maintain focus on the collaboration part of writing in the fleet?

The most challenging thing is the continuous everyday fight against ADHD. Most of the things I do are to mitigate anything that would be an obstacle. So finding the sims I need to respond to again can be annoying, so there’s a label I give them in addition to the email filters. I’m time blind so staying aware of how long it’s been since I simmed is a problem, so I have an app widget on the first screen of my phone that counts how many hours it’s been since I last reset it. Taking all day to read like 8 sims is currently a huge problem, so I’m experimenting with pomodoro 15 minute timers so it’s a bit of a race. I take what I feel like is a really long time to write so 10pm is the latest I can start writing without ruining my bedtime. Keeping on top of things makes it easier to stay on top of them. If I leave something for too long then there’s all this guilt in the way of doing it which makes it even harder to do.

My background is in roleplaying, not in writing, so it’s pretty natural to collaborate. I almost need another person to bounce ideas off of. It’s overall more fun that way, and I’m very good at taking a seed idea and developing it, but I feel like I’m very bad at generating ideas out of nothing.

As for what makes a good push, you want to write enough that the other person knows what you’re talking about and you’re not leaving them to do all the heavy lifting, but you don’t want to box them in too tightly to what the response needs to be to make it make sense. Even if it isn’t power simming, people will often not say what you want them to say and then you’re left looking stupid. So striking that balance is a bit of an art.

Thanks for your time, Lieutenant T’Ama!

You can read more about Lieutenant T’Ama on the wiki.

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