Dayton Ward is no stranger to Star Trek, getting his start in the Strange New Worlds contest and going on to write dozens of books in the franchise, including entries in SCE, Vanguard, Seekers, a couple Trek Travel Guides, and the wonderful Kirk-Fu Manual.  We open our conversation by being grumpy about AI writing, but quickly move on to talking about Shore Leave, a show he’s been going to since 2003.

He talks about his sweet personal library and predicts that he’s going to die happy down there, an enviable goal if there ever was one, and we both agree that unread books are still a valid part of a personal library.  Anyone disagreeing with that can go build their own library of books and leave us to our unread ones.

I ask him a line of questions about the Incredibuilds kits, I have them on STBC because there’s a book that comes with them and I’ve never managed to get my hands on it, at least not yet, and he lets me know what’s in those books.  Spoilers: it’s all Star Trek content to give background on the build that you’re incredibuilding.

He and his writing partner Kevin Dilmore recently had a comic book adjacent project released, “Captain America: Declassified“, which is a riff on “The Last Interview” series of books, featuring interviews with comic books characters to gain insight on how they viewed the big events that happened in the Marvel Comic Universe. This might sound familiar because I recently spoke with Kelli Fitzpatrick and she has a book in the same series coming out next year, hers will be Captain Marvel themed.

He gives some good advice to first time convention going folks like me at the end of the talk, I’m grateful for it and I’m already taking him up on some of it!

Dayton Ward can be found on his website, Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, and Twitter