world-building for my Star Trek OC fic; annoying people on ff.net

I have been feeling kind of blue and tired for the past few days. I don't know why. *sigh* It will pass -- it always passes -- but I feel generally enervated and blah and while I want to write, I can't seem to persuade myself to put words in a row.

So I've been doing world-building and structural outlining for valles_uf's still-untitled Star Trek OC-fic instead. The story is currently structured with one scene per day, counting down until the pirates appear. It starts 'eight days before,' when Jayavanti (the POV character) hears the faint, oddly-phrased distress call from the border colony of Simplicity. The scene I am currently yanking apart for structural reasons is 'five days before,' which deals with the second day down on the planet, trying to do palliative care on the plague victims while Nico and Kath do a lot of lab work to figure out what is causing this disease and how to cure it. I had initially used the scene just to introduce Adam, the most relevant colonial character, but I realized that I really needed to expand the scene to explain stuff that becomes important later on, like a notable period of Simplicity's history from about twenty years back, and exactly how the governing council is reacting to the Red Cross mission and so on. (I want to see if I can work in an explanation of Simplicity's name rules and social shaming practices as well, because they are relevant to Adam's semi-outcast status and his later actions, but that's not strictly necessary.)

I have also been trying to work out a rational starship design for the Amber Lotus, which is my Red Cross wide patrol and emergency first response ship. At the moment, I have a sort of cylindrical central module with two decks. The upper deck has the bridge at the front end (it's a small bridge, basically a command station at the center, navigation to the front, communications to the right, and engineering to the left), crew quarters along the single corridor, and a common room/cafeteria at the back. The lower deck has a sickbay/field hospital at the front, an extensive laboratory complex in the middle, and engineering and life support at the back.

Then there are auxiliary sections arranged around the central module, each of which can be detached and used as an oversized shuttlecraft. I have not decided yet how many there are, but I think four, five, or six, depending on their relative size. The ship never lands in full configuration, but each section can land when detached, as can the central module. This makes it easier to spread supplies out over a greater physical area when dealing with huge natural disasters like earthquakes, floods, or fires. One (or maybe two) of the auxiliary sections also has a sickbay and a lab, so auxiliary section A is the part of the ship that lands on Simplicity. Kath, Jahiem and Hegev remain in orbit with the rest of the ship, in case the landing team gets infected despite their decontam protocols. Also, this lets Kath and Nico run tests in more than one lab simultaneously.

My current crew complement is eight: Captain Dr. Inez Castaño y Mendez (human female), Dr. Katherine Rush (human female), Dr. Jahiem Rush (human male), Mind-Healer Elakwa Baerdi (Betazoid female), Dr. Nicholas Siddig (human male), Dr. Lu Zhi-ren (human male), Jayavanti Chatterjee (human female), and Hegev nich Tal (Tellarite female). The latter two are a nurse/lab tech and the ship's engineer, respectively. The Amber Lotus can be run by two people in a pinch (actually, even by one, since it has a lot of automation, but two are better so somebody is always awake to deal with emergencies), but the Interstellar Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies does not like to send ships out without at least six people on board, and they prefer a crew complement of ten or twelve. The Amber Lotus is running a bit understaffed at the moment, since this story takes place about a year after the end of the new movie, and a lot of volunteer efforts are currently devoted to, well, the aftermath of Vulcan and to dealing with some nasty Klingon incursions.

(It is my firm belief that the Klingons are pissed off about the loss of their ships around Rura Penthe when the Narada busted Nero out of jail, leading to the transmissions Uhura overheard early in the film. They do not necessarily blame the Federation or the Romulan Empire, but they are lashing out to prove their strength and channel their outrage, and since the Federation was also weakened, well... Convenient target is convenient!)

As you can see, I am doing ridiculous amounts of world-building for this story. I would slap myself upside the head, but I enjoy the process way too much to stop. *grin*

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In other news, I got a private message at ff.net from someone who reviewed one of my HP oneshots. It reads as follows:

Hey, I really enjoyed the story "A Certain Point Of View." It was very well written. What are you going to work on next? Where in the U.S. are you from? Write me soon.

I find this annoyingly presumptuous. Firstly, the information ze asked for is already posted on my ff.net profile page. In fact, I put the 'what I'm writing now' section up specifically to ward off questions like this.

Secondly, I resent the assumption that I need to respond to these questions and write to this person. I already respond to all reviews, which I do out of general courtesy though I have no obligation to. I see no reason to create any further relationship with most people, and I resent the tone of this message, which seems to assume that of course I will enter into a... I dunno... a Facebook-style online pseudo-friendship with the reviewer.

So I left the message unanswered and simply responded to the associated review by thanking the person for said review and advising hir to read my profile page if ze genuinely wanted to know more about me. I think that is more than polite on my part.