See, that's the thing about secrets: if they are central to your story, they have to work. The alien at the end of Alien? That worked, and the film has become a classic. The alien at the end of Alien Resurrection? That piece of crap failed utterly, and thus so did the film. The conspiracy at the heart of The X-Files? Didn't work, because it never fucking happened; I watched that show for years, but eventually I'd had my chain yanked one too many times and decided that the big secret wasn't worth the price of sticking around.

I love the phrase "the secret of the Star of Canberra" as a driving force behind the Space Pirates Project, but I have no idea what that secret might be. Partially because we have little idea where the show is going. It has been decided by informal majority vote to make it an infinite show, i.e. no predetermined end, but rather we'll just follow the story wherever it takes us. Okay, so where do we go? In the first season, the stars of the show - the three friends who suddenly find themselves as space pirates - wrestle with the dilemma of not wanting to hurt anyone or steal anything. They wanted the adventure of being space pirates, they didn't want to kill anybody. But if they don't toughen up they are going to get killed. How do you survive in a cutthroat situation without losing your soul? Okay, there are lots of possibilities there, we can make that work. But where do we go after that?

It is in my nature to work backwards. Once I establish a character, my natural inclination is to discover how exactly they came to be that person. You could say then that I'm better at endings than I am at beginnings. I feel a compulsion to know how it all ends and right now that's simply unknowable, which I find crushingly frustrating.

Also, you know, I wouldn't have to work on playing nice with others if I naturally played nice with others.