Producer and Writer Diana Dru Botsford sits down LIVE with Armin Shimerman (the Nox “Anteaus”) to explore the creation of character and story in his published fiction work!

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read:
Greetings everyone, and welcome to Episode 362 of Dial the Gate: The Stargate Oral History Project. I’m privileged with this show to do much more than provide an oral history of Stargate. During the five years that we’ve been doing this, we’ve gathered many friends and many stories along the way, and at this stage, I am very interested, and I know many of you are, in the projects that they are working on that have surrounded them since Stargate. Armin Shimerman, we have been privileged to have him on at least twice now, and one of the things that we haven’t given enough attention to, I think, is the process of writing through the stories that he has been telling through his Illyria series. And I wanted someone who could go toe to toe with him, who has been in the Hollywood sphere and can speak to that. So, for this episode, in the chat, there’s not gonna be any Q&A from the audience. It’s just gonna be between him and our guest host. For today it is Diana Botsford, whose storytelling career spans TV, film, and prose. She co-wrote the fan-favorite “Rascals” for Star Trek: The Next Generation, producing over a 1,000 half-hours of animation, including classics such as Inspector Gadget, Heathcliff, and Spiral Zone, and contributed visual effects for films including From Dusk Till Dawn and Terminator 2. As an author, Diana penned the Stargate SG-1 novels Four Dragons and The Drift, plus recent work for anthologies such as Double Trouble and Heritage. As a professional at Missouri State University, she created and led their award-winning screenwriting program for nearly two decades, and with her move to Michigan, she continues to teach and coach writers through online and conference workshops while developing new fiction and media projects. Diana, thank you so much for hosting today.

Diana Botsford:
David, thank you so much for coming up with this very cool idea. What a great way to explore what it means to be a storyteller. Storytelling has so many meanings to so many people, and usually it picks an image of someone with a book, reading to a group, or if you go back far enough in time, the idea of our first leaders and wise people sitting at the fire, regaling their community with tales of adventure and fables with meanings, and that would really help navigate people through lives with the morals of their stories and gives us reasons to imagine, to hope, to wonder. So, flashing forward a few thousand years, the definition of storyteller has most certainly changed. Authors and screenwriters, to be sure, but also actors are a critical component to telling a story. One of the things that they often tell you in television is that a character is born of two people: the writer and the actor. So, to have Armin here today to share his journey, which of course, for our Stargate fans here today, is Anteaus of The Nox, and then of course Quark in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and the mayor [sic] on Buffy, and I could go on and on. He’s done a lot of things since with video games, and appearances in The Rookie, and I think there’s even an upcoming film. But today, we get to talk writing and the journey, and I’m really excited to hear what Armin has to say, to discuss his work with the media tie-in novel, the DS9 novel The 34th Rule, and then from that, expanding on to short stories, and his fabulous alternate history trilogy, Illyria, with Betrayal of Angels, Sea of Troubles, and Imbalance of Power. Armin, it really is a treat and an honor to meet you and to have you here. Thank you for your time.

Armin Shimerman:
Thank you, Diana. Thank you very much, and that was a wonderful introduction. I just need to correct one thing. I didn’t play the mayor on Buffy, I played the principal. My good friend Harry Groener played the mayor.

Diana Botsford:
You’re right, that is my bad. I apologize. It’s been a couple of years. Just a couple.

Armin Shimerman:
Quite all right. Harry won’t mind.

Diana Botsford:
Did the principal get his head bit off? That was the mayor, I thought.

Armin Shimerman:
By the mayor.

Diana Botsford:
Right, by the mayor. Lucky you.

Armin Shimerman:
Yes, lucky me, because Harry Groener’s one of my dearest friends. So, it was very nice to be lunch for a friend.

Diana Botsford:
So, you’ve been very fortunate from the birthplace of writing for your journey as a storyteller, beyond acting into writing. You’ve worked with Joss Whedon. You worked with Ira Steven Behr, Robert Hewitt Wolfe, and Ron D. Moore.

Armin Shimerman:
Wonderful, incredible writers. Jane Espenson on Buffy as well. I’ve worked with some incredible writers. And good writers, by the way, in digital games as well have written me some incredible scripts and characters.

Diana Botsford:
There’s some amazing storytelling that’s going on in video games this day. And we’re starting to see, and hopefully we’ll have more time later to talk about it, universities are starting to embrace teaching this as a form of storytelling as well. So, it certainly runs the gamut. But let’s talk about your journey. You started as an actor, you spent years embodying characters written by all these fabulous writers, but now you’re the voice behind the words. How did you discover your authorial voice, and was there a moment when you realized you weren’t performing on the page anymore, but you were creating?

Armin Shimerman:
Before I was an actor, as a very young man, I wanted to be a writer and wrote a number of short stories and poetry. Some verse. I was lucky enough at 13, so it doesn’t really count, to be awarded for my verse writing. I’ve always been interested in writing. Acting was not my first vocation. And what happened was I found out that while you’re doing a series, you have a lot of time on your hands. And so, I would go back to the trailer, turn on the TV, was nothing to watch, and I began to sit down and write. And found that to be enormously creative, and I used my time wisely. My first book, which is a series of books called The Merchant Prince, took me about, I would say, two or three years to complete. And that’s a science fiction series. It basically is Quark in the future, but based on a historical character, a man that has been my leading character for all of my books. This is an incredible human being called Dr. John Dee, who lived in Shakespeare’s time. For those of you who aren’t aware of my background, besides being an actor and a writer, I’m also a Shakespearean scholar and teacher, and I’ve taught at the university level and other levels as well. So, this man, John Dee, was an inspiration, and I began to write about him via science fiction, which is The Merchant Prince series. And then while I was writing that, I thought I should be true to my character and put him in his real time, which is the 1580s, and write some novels about that. And that’s where Illyria came from.

Diana Botsford:
So, how do you think your work in the visual medium as an actor helped or hindered your writing style as an author? I was reading your reviews and there was one that really showed that you bring all of it to bear when you write your books. You had a review that says, “I am reading Betrayal of Angels and I’m on chapter 11. I like where the story is going. Armin tells a story in a way that puts you in the scene, and you can almost hear the sounds that are being described.”

Armin Shimerman:
Thank you and thank the person who wrote that. Because I am a Shakespeare scholar, I am enormously familiar with the times, the period, the world of that time. And so, part of my agenda was to write books using the information that I had gleaned over a lifetime. And if this person feels that way, then I succeeded in what I was doing. But I use all my experience as a scholar to put into the books, and I imagine I use some of my experience as an actor. As an actor, one does the same thing. One takes the experiences one’s had in life and draw upon them to round out your characters.

Diana Botsford:
There is something very visceral about the way you write. It’s very immersive. And I thought this was a terrific little review quote ’cause it really fit what you’re doing. So, as an actor, acting is fundamentally about listening and reacting, having scene partners to bounce off of, to surprise you, to keep you in the moment. But now as an author, you have to be all the characters in that dynamic. How did you adapt from reacting to other actors to creating every voice in the conversation?

Armin Shimerman:
It’s enormously difficult for someone who’s used to bouncing off of other actors, as you just said. It’s a very lonely, isolated experience, in my case, facing a computer screen and trying to figure out how people are going to react. In some sense, it’s like addressing a play or a script right before you do it, in the case of the theater before you start rehearsals, and you sort of think, “Well, maybe this character will react this way, which would force me to do something else.” Because the litany, the creed, of the type of acting that I do is that all life comes from the other actor. So, whatever the other actor provides, I am responding to that. The other actor inspires me to speak, to move, to react in whatever way I’m going to do. But when you’re writing, you have no other person there. You have the image of what you’re creating in your head, and you’re trying to visualize what is that character doing and how is he affecting the other people around him. It’s very lonely, very isolated, and when you’re done, enormously thrilling.

Diana Botsford:
So, what kind of scene do you find to be the most fun to write versus the most challenging? For instance, for me, a stunt scene, I literally have to use Barbie dolls, or little stick figures, or I have to draw maps to really lay it all out. Where a talking scene or an intimate scene that uses props of some sort tends to be the most comfortable for me, but every writer is different. What scenes have you found to be the most challenging versus what scenes come with the most ease for you?

Armin Shimerman:
The heightened scenes where important things are happening are the most challenging, ’cause you wanna get them right. The easiest scenes for me are the comic scenes, because I’m very familiar with that and comfortable with that. But when you’re dealing with dramatic scenes that are going to change the arc of the novel or of the characters, those are the hardest, and I want to get them exactly right. And someone said this to me years ago, and it’s absolutely true: writing is rewriting. So, you go back, you look at it and, “No, that doesn’t work.” And you go at it again, and again, and again, and again, until finally you think, “I think I’ve written something of worth now. Now, I think I can move on and leave that alone.” But indeed, I may think that, and then three weeks later, go back and read it again, and go, “No, no. That’s not right yet.”

Diana Botsford:
Part of the whole process with screenwriting or game writing, anything for the visual medium, versus writing a novel is that collaborative versus solitude challenge, as you say. For the people that are joining us today to listen and to watch, there are some processes in place for the solitary author, like a critique group, which has both its advantages and its disadvantages. In the sense that if you piecemeal it out, you can get set off in the wrong direction with the wrong feedback, versus keeping the door closed for the first draft, like Stephen King would advise. Do you utilize any writing groups? Do you have fellow critiquers that you work with at all, or are you door closed totally 100%?

Armin Shimerman:
I’ve experienced both. When I was writing Merchant Prince, my publisher teamed me up with a wonderful writer named Michael Scott, an Irish writer who’s created probably more than a hundred novels. And so, Michael and I would go back and forth, talking about what we were going to write. And the process that we used was we had formed an outline of what that story was about. And he — if I may tell this story — I think originally, the publisher and Michael Scott assumed that having created the outline, I would sit back and let him do most of the writing. He wrote the first chapter and was kind enough to send it to me for me to look at. And I didn’t like it, and I rewrote it. Michael, as I said, is a much more prolific author than I am. He got back to me and was very pleased with what I had written. And so, the process that we used after that was, he would sketch out a chapter, maybe a page or two, and then I would flesh it out. If we’re just talking about numbers, I would flesh it out from two pages to twelve pages. And that’s the way we worked, and that was a very collaborative process. In the next book of the Merchant Prince series, Michael had to go somewhere else, and Chelsea Yarbro became my co-writer. She, assuming that I was not going to be very helpful to her in her writing, just began to write this novel that had my name on it. And she would, like Michael, send me her chapters, and I would, like Michael, send my edits, which she never incorporated into her story. And it became two divergent different stories, the novel she was writing and the novel I was writing. And eventually, I had to go to the publisher and say, “You’ve gotta choose. Whose novel are you going to publish, hers or mine?” And he was kind enough to say, “No, we’re gonna go with yours, Armin.” And so that was a process that wasn’t as collaborative as my one with Michael Scott. And that too is a trilogy, The Merchant Prince. And so, the third novel, I just decided, “I’m just gonna write this myself,” which I did, and that was a very creative and happy experience for me. So, as you said about Stephen King, I closed the door on everybody else and just took over the reins of writing. When I started the trilogy Illyria, I was already comfortable and confident that I could write by myself and did.

Diana Botsford:
After you were done with your first draft, did you have beta readers? Did you utilize any —

Armin Shimerman:
I had my wife. My wife is very smart and a prolific reader. And so, she would read it and say, “Here’s this.” I did have a lady who did look over my work. She was hired by the publisher to do that. And she was very helpful. I didn’t always agree with her, but she was helpful. So, between those two, I had some feedback. But unlike the Merchant Prince experience, I was confident enough and egoistic enough to think I can do this by myself. But they were helpful. The two ladies were helpful.

Diana Botsford:
Now, going back a little bit in time, with the media tie-in novel for DS9 that you were involved in, The 34th Rule. So, having written media tie-in novels myself, I understand there are just 10 more layers to the process, to the point where you’re literally having to tell the studio, “Look at this episode, at this time code, because he said this, and she said that, and that’s why I’m saying what I’m saying now.” Having gone through that, talk to us a little bit about your experience writing The 34th Rule. It was a fun book.

Armin Shimerman:
All right. Thank you for that. It is a fun book. But I didn’t write it. David wrote it. So, let me tell you the background on this. David George, and I, and Eric Sitwell wanted to write an episode for Deep Space Nine. We went in and spoke to Ira about pitching this idea, and for whatever reason, Ira decided not to go with it. As we left the building, we were all very disappointed. David, who had written another Star Trek novel, suggested we turn it into a novel. Eric wasn’t interested in writing a novel. David and I sat down and worked out the outline for the novel, and that was it for me. I had assumed the experiences I’ve just described to you would happen again, that he would write a chapter and I would overlook it and make changes. But David took it upon himself, and I’m happy that he did. He took it upon himself to write the whole novel, never really once letting me in on the process. And [inaudible] good or bad, and I think it’s good, except to work on the outline, and to give my character’s background to David, and this we did in the outline sessions of figuring out how Quark, and Rom, and Nog would react in this situation. It was a topic that I was very much interested in. That’s why we wanted to sell it to Deep Space Nine. Sorry to deflate this question, but I really didn’t write that novel.

Diana Botsford:
It’s interesting to hear there are so many roads that lead to Rome, as it were, so to hear.

Armin Shimerman:
And I’m sure that David had to go through all those hoops, not only with Paramount, but with Pocket Books, as he was creating the novel, and he went on to write many more novels for Pocket Books.

Diana Botsford:
The Star Trek novels have done incredibly well, unequivocally. It’s the media tie-in… Have you considered writing any more media tie-ins for DS9 or for Star Trek, Stargate, or for anything else?

Armin Shimerman:
No.

Diana Botsford:
Buffy also?

Armin Shimerman:
No. That’s not where my desires are. My desires are to write really about what I know. Isn’t that what they say about writers, you should write what you know? Yes, I’m familiar with the very start of the science fiction programs that I’ve appeared on. But for me, I live in Elizabethan times. So, that’s what’s most familiar to me.

Diana Botsford:
Have you written any short stories that take place in that world?

Armin Shimerman:
No. I haven’t. I wrote short stories as a young man, as a teenager, but no, I haven’t done that since. I like the long form better. However, it’s not writing, but it’s comparable. I have directed a lot of Shakespearean plays. And in a sense, you are writing there too. You’re writing performance. You’re not writing lines. Shakespeare wrote the lines. Although occasionally you can change a word.

Diana Botsford:
Yeah, you can ask Kenneth Branagh about that.

Armin Shimerman:
I don’t mind doing that. And I think sometimes you have to do that, and I could go into a lecture about that, which I won’t do now. And so, you’re writing what the actor is going to do as far as choices and performance in a Shakespearean play. And you yourself as the director have a vision of what the world should be. Because after all, you can put Shakespeare in any time and in any place, and if it works, it’s glorious. If it doesn’t work, it’s a complete fiasco. But that’s what you do. You write a scenario that is performance rather than language.

Diana Botsford:
So, it’s a different kind of media tie-in novel in a way, right?

Armin Shimerman:
That’s right.

Diana Botsford:
‘Cause it’s somebody else’s sandbox, and you’re playing in their sandbox.

Armin Shimerman:
You’re playing within the parameters that they’ve given you. But you… in Shakespeare’s case, and I’m sure with a lot of other writers as well, you can have a lot of leeway as long as you don’t defile the sandbox.

Diana Botsford:
That’s a good way to put it. Absolutely. Can we talk a little bit about the industry in general right now? And not just the television and film industry, or gaming. All the venues, all the roads that lead to Rome as far as storytelling are concerned. There’s a lot of turmoil, there’s a lot of upside down going on. Where do you see yourself as a storyteller? What roads do you see yourself going on next to tell your next tale?

Armin Shimerman:
As an actor, I’m dependent upon someone providing me a script and asking me to join their cast. And in that case, I get the script, and the writers are the primary creators in TV or film. But the actors are the interpretive artists. We take the language and the situation, and we add our own experiences to that, and our own choices to that, and we do our best to fulfill the writer’s vision, adding little spices, nuances of what our own life experience has taught us. Now, the business is indeed in turmoil. Writers have, not recently, but in the near past, went on strike to make sure that they were protected, so that AI didn’t take over their work. As it is, producers, studios have curtailed their time at work, causing the writer’s room to be smaller, or keeping them on for a certain amount of time and then firing them because they don’t need them anymore. This is a horrible situation, and I… One of the hats I’ve worn in my life is a union activist. I was on the union board for seven years while I was writing, and I’m very happy the writers got what they needed in the strike. And one thing I’ve learnt as a union activist is that strikes and negotiations are just one step in the pathway forward. It’s never a be end-all. It’s just a temporary fix until we get to the next negotiation, but what they did in the last negotiation was a great stride forward. AI is a threat to writers.

Diana Botsford:
Governor Newsom just signed a bill about not replacing an actor with AI, and hopefully that’s a step forward as well, too. On the author side, I don’t know. I would suspect you were part of the Anthropic settlement, because I noticed that you have a very nice, clear copyright on your books, the Illyria series. And Anthropic, thanks to the Authors Guild and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, and a few other associations, Anthropic now has to do this huge payout. Anthropic is Claude, the AI Claude, which is… It’s actually a decent AI for fact-finding stuff, although it does hallucinate. But they scanned in hundreds and hundreds and thousands of books. Your books, my books. My books were on that list, unequivocally. And now they’re having to do a payout to anyone who had a proper copyright on their books. I don’t know.

Armin Shimerman:
Thank you for that.

Diana Botsford:
I hope you know …

Armin Shimerman:
I didn’t know that. I know that AI has scanned our books.

Diana Botsford:
… there is a search engine to confirm if you’re on that list or not. I will email that to you after we finish talking.

Armin Shimerman:
Thank you. I appreciate that. That’ll be great.

Diana Botsford:
No, absolutely. It’s gonna take awareness. I think, though, the other half of the equation is how do we as storytellers rise to the circumstances of the situation and ensure that we’re still given avenues to tell fresh stories? One of the things we’re seeing, for instance, and SAG, Screen Actors Guild, has been getting into this, is the vertical storytelling format, which is the short little iPhone videos. They’re starting to get into that. I’m wondering, as authors, how do we compete now with the millions of fan fiction short stories and everything else going on to entice people to wanna read at a time that we used to have 80% of this country used to read, and now only 20% reads? How do we get them to the table reading another book?

Armin Shimerman:
I don’t know. It’s something I’ve thought about for a great long time. It saddens me that people do less reading than they used to. When I teach, I sometimes make literary references, and I’m agog at the fact that my students have no awareness of what that is. It saddens me a great deal. I don’t know how you get people to read. I think there are too many attractions, whether on iPhones or streaming services or whatever, and people just want something immediate. They don’t want to take the time to dive into an author’s world and experience that glory that a talented writer can give a reader. It is a phenomenal experience, and the only way to get people to read is for you and I and others to talk about it and tell them how good it is. We have to be the good reviewers that tell people, “Go to this book. Go to this poem. Go to this literary work in order to enjoy it.” As a Shakespearean scholar and director, I see the falloff of audiences who are no longer interested in language. All they really want are visual things, and that’s one of the things that have happened in our culture. You started this program by saying about storytellers around fires, and people fascinated about the worlds that the bards told in front of the fires. And it was a linguistic thing. Shakespeare himself talks about listening to a play rather than seeing a play. And our culture is visually oriented, not orally oriented. So, we want to see things. That’s what grabs people, is its visual impact. And books don’t necessarily do that. They’re just ink spots on the page. So, the only way you’re going to enjoy a novel is by reading it and experiencing it and allowing yourself to fall into that world.

Diana Botsford:
So, there’s a sociological term called the cool fire, that refers to television. The idea being that thousands of years ago, we sat around the fire at the end of the day and these stories were told, and now we sit around the TV set and these stories are told. And they’re still, as I said, there’s morals and fables, and it hits us on an emotional level. I have found there tends to be more interest in reading a book if it’s known that it’s going to be adapted or it has already been adapted. Because it’s kind of a sure thing, in a way, because of what you said, this interest is more in the visual medium. So, there’s certainly some truth to that.

Armin Shimerman:
It is a disappointment, and maybe it’s just a generational thing. Maybe that’s what’s going to happen. I don’t know. But it’s sad. During the course of centuries, things have been lost. And I hope reading isn’t one of them, but it’s a possibility.

Diana Botsford:
I think part of that is this country versus other countries, though. If you look at Finland, for instance. They have a phenomenal literacy rate.

Armin Shimerman:
When you visit Ireland, for instance, there are no pictures really of sports figures. It’s all pictures of the writers, the Irish writers that come out of Ireland. They are the heroes in Ireland, and it’s probably true in Finland and in other countries, where they have a great respect and interest and fascination with writers and their writing.

Diana Botsford:
Now, there’s a lot of truth there. The funny thing though is, there’s been a lot of studies done that have shown how the brain benefits from reading versus too much screen time. I’ve been ill for a few weeks, so I’ve just been watching TV. But last night, I dove into a new book, and I slept better last night than I have slept in a long time. And I know it’s because of the quietness of reading.

Armin Shimerman:
To add to that, my wife, for instance, and there are many people like my wife, who have a problem reading on Kindle. They just don’t… they want to feel the page. They want to be able– to turn the page. They wanna be able to go back to the page. And not the screen, but the page. There’s a tactile delight in turning the pages. I don’t have a problem with Kindle. I don’t care how you read a book as long as you read the book. But there are many people who say, “I can’t read a book on a screen.”

Diana Botsford:
There’s another issue behind that, too. I have dyslexia, as did Octavia Butler, the great science fiction author. The invention of the Kindle was the greatest gift for me. Because I can literally sit there and read so fast now, and it’s remarkable. And I collect science fiction books. My dad had a big collection, and I inherited some of it, and I keep adding to it all the time, of autographed books. And I love the feel of a book, as you say. But if I try to read one, my eye will just start going over here. It’ll take me three hours to read a page. A nice, big Kindle, I’m still reading it, I’m enjoying it, but one paragraph at a time. So, it’s again, the more roads that lead to Rome, the better. But there is something in the neuroscience of reading versus screen watching that’s significant. And I think as authors, I think it’s up to us to try to figure out how to get everybody back to the table. I do not have the answers, but it is certainly a challenge that we need to pick up and do something with. I’m not sure what that is, though.

Armin Shimerman:
I’m not sure either, and it saddens me, and I’m sure it saddens you and it saddens a lot of people. But if that’s lost, my God. What will humanity be like?

Diana Botsford:
With all these emojis… It’s like looking at hieroglyphics.

Armin Shimerman:
One of the great things about writers is they often will refer back to pieces of wisdom that other writers have come up with. It will inspire them. They might include it in their works. I certainly do. And if that wisdom is lost, oh my God, civilization is at risk.

Diana Botsford:
So, who inspired you to set you on the course as a storyteller?

Armin Shimerman:
Certainly Shakespeare. That’s number one on my list. My wife says I only live in the 1600s, so all the writers that came out of that time. Marlowe, Greene, and other people. That is, for me, the most fascinating. There’s a lot of modern writers whose names I’ve just forgotten, but that I enjoy as well. For me, because I’m a theater actor, there’s a lot of playwrights that are just astounding. You read them and you don’t know how they came up with that.

Diana Botsford:
It’s funny. I just realized “Far Beyond the Stars,” the episode where you played a science fiction, you all play science fiction writers, my father was part of that circle. So, I knew all those people as a very little girl. So, that, for me, they were my… I love Shakespeare too, of course, and who doesn’t like — Henry V is my favorite — who doesn’t like to crack open a play and read a little bit? But those sci-fi writers of which you and your fellow actors emulated, that was quite a treat, because you got it. You understood their influence on modern literature and the literary scene.

Armin Shimerman:
I’d forgotten the very famous character my character was modeled off, very famous. He was a short, irascible science fiction writer. I’m sure you know who he is. I’ve just forgotten.

Diana Botsford:
Yeah, it wasn’t Isaac Asimov. That was played by Miles O’Brien.

Armin Shimerman:
No, it wasn’t Asimov. He had a reputation for not being comfortable to be around.

Diana Botsford:
Was that Ray Bradbury?

Armin Shimerman:
It wasn’t Ray… Who? Yes, Harlan Ellison.

Diana Botsford:
Oh, Harlan.

Armin Shimerman:
Yes. You see, that’s the reaction, exactly. But he wrote great stuff, and he had high ideals. And that episode of Deep Space Nine is the cast’s favorite. Oftentimes, our audience will say, “Well, it’s your favorite. You got out of makeup.” That’s not the reason. It’s that we pulled back the curtain and said, “Really, the heroes of our show, in addition to the actors, are the writers. It’s the writers who are the primary artists in this enterprise.” And we got to pull back the curtain and show you the writers. Not our writers, but other science fiction writers, and it is our favorite episode.

Diana Botsford:
It’s for many, many reasons. The layers just go on forever. We could spend two hours just talking about that episode and the work that all of you did in it. So, back on industry for a minute, from the business side, as far as being an author versus dealing with the guilds, what was the most surprising part for you business-wise as far as being an author is concerned?

Armin Shimerman:
For me, the hardest part, and it was just serendipity that it happened, the hardest part was selling the book. I had written it. I had edited it. I was happy with it. But I had no experience whatsoever in how do you sell a book. The Merchant Prince was an assignment. The publisher came to me and said, “I’m gonna team you up with Michael Scott, and you’re gonna write The Merchant Prince.” So, that was already sold. It was already taken care of. So, when I started Illyria, I just did it for my own creative reasons. And then when I finished it, I thought, “Now, how do I sell this? How do I get this out on the market?” That was a high hurdle to straddle, and eventually, and I’m a person who’s had… who must have an enormously enlarged luck gene, luck just happened, and Jumpmaster Press came my way and said, “You send us a copy of your book, and we’ll see if we’ll publish it or not.” And three weeks later, they said, “Yes, we’ll do that.”

Diana Botsford:
It’s not Field of Dreams, writing a book.

Armin Shimerman:
No, it’s not. If you write it, they will come. But if I may tell this, totally tangential– and I’m just bragging now. I apologize. The man who wrote the film, Field of Dreams, not the author of the book, but the man who wrote the film, is Phil Alden Robinson. And when he came back from Iowa, where he shot the film, he gave me my first computer, and that computer’s what he wrote Field of Dreams on. And there was a message on the computer when I opened it up that said, “Armin, I’m so glad to be out of Iowa.” But yes, it’s not Field of Dreams.

Diana Botsford:
No, it’s not. It’s, you can write the most magnificent thing… But I’ve seen this in the television and film industry too, where I have seen scripts just never get made that are genius. I’ve also seen scripts that were about two nuns in Idaho end up being about New York, two cops in New York City. This is all part of the process. But as far as publishing is concerned, it is a different animal. You do have more control of your vision. You are the property master. You are the production designer. You are the costume designer. You are those things. Maybe not 100%, but 99.9%.

Armin Shimerman:
That’s also true. You’re in total control, more than even directing a play. You are in total control. Everything comes out of your imagination, out of your vision, and yes, that .1% can come from the editor, but most of it…

Diana Botsford:
Or your wife.

Armin Shimerman:
Or your wife.

Armin Shimerman:
But most of it comes from you, and you have total control. And if it succeeds, “Thank you, you did it.” If it fails, it’s your fault.

Diana Botsford:
Yes. Definitely. So, the first time you got your first box of books… for a book that you yourself, you completely, the Illyria books, you wrote, what was that experience like for you?

Armin Shimerman:
Joyous. It’s like getting my first good review on Broadway. It’s joyous. In addition to that, getting my first box of books was to walk into a bookstore and see my book on sale on a shelf. That was equally as joyous. It’s a little bit egotistical, but it’s lovely. It sort of says, “Congratulations. Here’s a good review.” It’s not a review, but it’s something that says, “You succeeded. You succeeded.”

Diana Botsford:
It’s a landmark, definitely.

Armin Shimerman:
It is a landmark. And I recommend it to anyone who’s out there. But you have to write a book first to do it. But that moment, we see, again, I’m making a bad analogy, but we see the joy in actors when they receive awards for their performances and how excited they are. It’s exactly the same thing for a writer.

Diana Botsford:
It’s very special, and it really is like a lamppost in the legacy of you as a storyteller. And this kind of leads into my next question. Your Stargate character is gonna live on in reruns forever. Quark, the principal at Buffy’s high school, all of these characters, the work that you’ve done in video games. Right now, there are people in different homes all over the world playing games, hearing your voice. But now, having shifted from being part of someone else’s legacy to building your own legacy, your own world that is somewhere, somebody’s cracking open the book, taking a sip of their tea, moving the page. How does that feel for you, that shift?

Armin Shimerman:
It’s part of the reason I think I started to write, was to do that. As proud as I am with my on-camera performances, I didn’t wanna die with my tombstone saying Quark. I wanted to leave something to the world that I could be extra especially proud of. I’m proud of my work on TV, but I wanted to do something beyond that. And so writing was my way of, “OK, maybe if I write one good sentence that people will remember,” or if I write a book that intrigues people, entertains them, and in my case, again, influenced by an author in the 1600s who said that literature must both entertain and educate, and that’s what Illyria is about. It’s about entertaining and educating at the same time. So, if I can educate and entertain, and somebody learns from that experience, then I think my being on this planet for a short period of time might have been worthwhile.

Diana Botsford:
You’re here. So, what’s next for you, Armin? What are you working on next?

Armin Shimerman:
As an actor, I’m doing a play right now, Outside Mullingar. But as a writer, I’ve started, I’m not sure if it’s a play or a novel yet. But I have started writing, again, something about Shakespeare, and the theme is… Shakespeare didn’t know that he was going to be on everybody’s lips 400 years later. He didn’t know that. He was simply a playwright, and at that time, playwrights weren’t esteemed. Actors weren’t esteemed. Both dramatic playwrights and actors were not allowed to be buried in sacred ground because they were thought to be infidels, to be irreligious. So, he couldn’t possibly know what his writing would mean to future generations. So, I’m writing this story about Shakespeare at the end of his career, wondering whether any of it was meaningful, any of it worthwhile. Because, as a man, the little that we know about him as a man, he sacrificed a great deal of his social life in order to create these plays. ‘Cause he was not only the writer of these plays, he was the actor in these plays, he was the producer of these plays. Lots of other things connected to these plays and sonnets. And there’s no way for him to know whether or not it was important. And of course, the reader knows that it’s important because they know. But I want Shakespeare as a character to worry about his importance in the world. And I’m writing about this because I’m of a certain age now where I wonder if any of the things that I have done artistically are valuable. You were kind enough to mention about the books and about my performances on TV. Thank you. But I still have a little voice in the back of my head says, “You’re still an infidel. You’re still irreligious.”

Diana Botsford:
Imposter syndrome.

Armin Shimerman:
It is. It is, “id you make a difference?” And so, I wanna take those voices and put them into Shakespeare’s head and have him deal with it, and I’m not sure if he ever realizes that his work will be important. I only know that he has questions. That’s all.

Diana Botsford:
So, that is something I would love to read, having enjoyed reading Shakespeare since I was a child. But also, as part of your legacy is your academic work, just sharing perspective and giving to generations of people to help their perspectives as they’re learning about one of the greatest storytellers that ever lived. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Armin Shimerman:
And thank you. I’m very proud of that because I do see making a difference. Because that’s immediate. I can see that. I can see that people– Primarily what I teach is… Excuse me, I teach Shakespearian acting to Shakespearian actors, and I can see their understanding. I can see the light bulbs going off in their heads as they get it, and I know, because they’ve told me and I’ve seen it. They use those light bulbs in their own performances, and I know as an actor that the mentors that I had influenced me to perform a certain way because of what I learnt from them. And so, in a sense, those mentors are being transmitted to my students, and they in turn will transmit that further on to the next generation. And so, to that extent, I see that I have an influence that is beneficial for future generations. There’s nothing that makes me happier than having a good class and watching a student or a group of students improve and get what I’m talking about because I’m very proud of what I teach. My students are very complimentary about saying, “Why didn’t I ever know this before?” Because most people will — Now I’m gonna teach a little — most people will say, “I don’t understand Shakespeare,” or they’ll call it Old English, which they’re totally wrong about that. And it’s because the actors don’t know how to communicate the language in the way that Shakespeare thought of the language, and the trick is to teach actors to think that way. And when they think that way, and approach the language that way, their performances are exponentially clearer, more understandable than ever before. And when I see that, when I’m sitting back in the class and watching that, my heart jumps for joy.

Diana Botsford:
As a professor myself, I absolutely understand the… It’s almost an addiction to the light bulb going off in your student. It’s an extraordinary experience. It’s a gift to give, and I’m sure as a professor, you’ve also received back. You’re never too — What’s the saying? – “You’re never too old to learn or too young to teach.”

Armin Shimerman:
It’s absolutely true, and I have gotten back, I’m sure you have as well, when a student comes up to me and says, “Your class was the best class I had at college.” Or when I see a performance of one of my students and I see them using the techniques that I instilled in them. As you said, it’s just thrilling. It’s thrilling.

Diana Botsford:
That’s a hell of a legacy onto itself, Armin. Really. Thank you for, I know you need to go. You said you had to head to boot, but this has been an extraordinary experience.

Armin Shimerman:
Thank you for the lovely questions and, and your complete understanding.

Diana Botsford:
Yes. It has been great. And I will send you that link, I promise.

Armin Shimerman:
Thank you, I appreciate that.

Diana Botsford:
I will email you about that. So, thank you. Break a leg with your new play. When is it going to–

Armin Shimerman:
We are performing right now. So, I don’t know when our segment airs, but our play is playing until November the 9th at a theater in Los Angeles called The Skylight. The play is called Outside Mullingar by John Patrick Shanley. It’s a four-character show. It’s an incredibly good play to be doing in this time because it offers joy and hope and I think the theme of the play is that when one door closes, another one opens, and it’s both funny and touching, and people cry, and the cherry on top is I get to work with my wife. She and I are two of the four actors. So, it’s just glorious, and we have a matinee today.

Diana Botsford:
Break a leg. And thank you so much for being with us today. This has been an absolute treat.

Armin Shimerman:
Thank you, Diana.

Diana Botsford:
Thank you.

David Read:
And thank you both. I really appreciate you, Armin, for coming back to speak with us further, and it means a lot to have you, and my ears just open wide when you have something new to say about that time period. There’s so much of our history so rooted in that era, so thank you for always being willing to share.

Armin Shimerman:
One of the things, if I may, just for a moment, one of the things that came out of that era is the St. James Bible. And God knows how much our world is affected by that. There’s even the thought that Shakespeare may have written one of the Psalms in the King James Bible. No proof of that, but that’s a rumor.

David Read:
Would you really be surprised though? I wouldn’t.

Armin Shimerman:
It’s possible. It’s not likely. I’ll tell you why, just because of the timeline. Shakespeare died in 1616. The Bible came out in 1623. It’s possible, and they took years and years to write the King James Bible, so it’s possible. And again, because he was an actor, a playwright– He wouldn’t call himself a playwright. He would call himself a poet. These were all aristocratic members of the church. I don’t think they would ask an actor to write a psalm, but who knows?

Diana Botsford:
Especially if they had the perspective that you were talking about where they considered them infidels, basically.

Armin Shimerman:
Basically. I don’t think that, but there’s some hints there. You have to take it with a grain of salt. There’s some hints. And it’s nice to think that perhaps he did write one psalm.

David Read:
Thank you for sharing that. Just to go and take another look at it and say, “What if? What are the similarities in there?” That’s really cool. Diana, thank you so much. This was a treat.

Armin Shimerman:
Yes, thank you.

David Read:
This was great. Putting two academics together.

Armin Shimerman:
And good luck with your teaching as well, Diana.

Diana Botsford:
Thank you. I’m like you, I love watching the light bulbs go off. It is a high. It’s a drug, really. It’s incredible. And it is a legacy. I used to teach at Missouri State University before I moved out of there. We lived there for a while. LA, Missouri State, and now Michigan. But I still stay in touch with over 75 of my former students thanks to the digital realm. And it’s such a high to watch them walk through their lives and knowing that I may have helped to shape them a little bit.

Armin Shimerman:
Precisely. It is a legacy. It is the legacy that we can see. We can’t know about our writing. I certainly can’t know about my acting. But we can see as teachers, yes, we have made a difference.

David Read:
Thank you both. My name is David Read. You’re watching the Stargate Oral History Project. If you enjoy Stargate and you wanna see more content like this on YouTube, please click the Like button, it really does help the show grow its audience. And if you wanna be notified about future episodes, click Subscribe. Thank you to Antony and Marcia for keeping an eye on everyone for this episode. And we’ve got a few more heading your way today. Herbert Duncanson is joining us in about an hour. He’s gonna be with us at 12 noon Pacific Time. He played Grell, also known as Doug… What was this character’s name? It was Douglas Anders in the Wormhole X-Treme episodes. And then we have a webisode of Wormhole X-Tremists on our other sister channel. And then Alison Matthews, who played Brenna in SG-1’s “Beneath the Surface,” which is SG-1’s answer to one of the greatest science fiction films of all time, the first one, Metropolis. She’s gonna be joining us at 3:00 PM Pacific Time. Thanks so much for tuning in, everyone. I appreciate it, and I will see you on the other side.