Kay Eaton

Basic Information[]

Name: Kathryn Clara "Kay" Eaton, née Hunter (alias K. C. Hunter)

(NB: Her legal name at this point is undoubtedly Kathryn Hunter Eaton, but since she never uses the names in that order for anything other than legal documents, she never refers to herself as such)

Username: poorneedyand

Series: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode 6x13, "Far Beyond the Stars"

Played by: ar

Age: 42

Height: 5'8"

Appearance: A slender, pretty woman with short red hair and huge, dark brown eyes.

Birthplace: Indianapolis, IN, January 26, 1911

Abilities: Writing, secretarial skills, general grownup life skills

Occupation: Senior staff writer for Incredible Tales of Scientific Wonder magazine

Original Application: Here

Background Information[]

Canon History[]

Kathryn Clara Hunter was born in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1911, the third of four children. She was a sickly child who spent much of her formative years laid up in bed with piles of books on either side of her, the only real entertainment to be had when faced with bouts of whooping cough, pneumonia, and chronic bronchitis. She preferred fantastic stories like the works of Verne and Wells, borrowed from the public library, and at twelve and thirteen years old convinced her parents to buy her issues of the then-new magazine Weird Tales. Her family didn't always have much money, but her parents always managed to find a way to indulge the thin, pale girl who spent more time staring longingly out the window than actually playing outside.

Kay's health improved significantly around age fifteen, at which point, she resolved to spend as little of her time in bed as possible; she filled her high school years with socializing, schoolwork, and half-baked tales of terror, written well after she ought to have been asleep. Upon graduation, she was accepted to a women's college in New York City and managed to convince her parents to allow her to attend. Unfortunately, her freshman year at school was 1929, and so she entered college a scant month before Black Tuesday. The onset of the Great Depression left her parents unable to continue to fund her education, forcing her to drop out of school after the completion of her first year.

With no desire to return to Indianapolis, she found work in a Manhattan bank as a secretary and kept herself financially afloat in a spartan efficiency the size of a postage stamp. In her free time, she began scribbling in earnest, writing stories out on paper, in longhand or shorthand dependent on how much time she had to her, and typing up the final drafts on a library typewriter. Her efforts paid off; by 1933, at age 22, she sold her first story to Weird Tales, the first of several stories about a spaceship pilot and smuggler called Southeast Jones. Her career began to blossom; she began corresponding with H.P. Lovecraft and wrote a variety of other stories over the next several years, including the first sword & sorcery tales to feature a female protagonist, Loriel of Lineret. [Nota bene: These pastiches of Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry are not canonical but fit the pattern of how the titles of classic scifi stories were translated to the world of "Far Beyond the Stars." "I, Robot" becomes "Me, Android," "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" becomes "I Have No Voice So I Must Shout," and thus Northwest Smith becomes Southeast Jones.] She wrote under the name K.C. Hunter, not by choice but necessity: her work was unlikely to be well-received (if it even saw publication) if readers knew it was written by a woman.

In 1936, Kay received a piece of fan mail from a Julius Eaton, praising "Mr. Hunter's" work. Eaton, four years her junior, was a fellow correspondent of Lovecraft--who had, in fact, passed on Kay's address to him--and aspiring writer who sold his own first work that year. They kept in correspondence, eventually meeting, at which point she disabused him of the notion that she was male, and he, her assumption that he was white. They married in 1940, after which point, they cowrote nearly everything they wrote. While one story might have more Julius than Kay in it, or vice versa, they often wrote round-robin style, ending in the middle of a paragraph or sentence and letting the other pick up the thread from there; between that habit and their tendency to edit each others' work, they often couldn't say for sure who wrote which parts of a given story.

Farbeyondthestars035 — "White Rose Redi-Tea. What an appalling concept."
"I bet H. G. Wells would've liked it."
"I doubt that. No self-respecting Englishman would."

And that, for all intents and purposes, brings us to 1953. At some point prior to the episode, Kay and Julius began selling the bulk of their work to Incredible Tales of Scientific Wonder, where, at the time of the episode, they are among the magazine's regular writers, if not among its best-paid. To the contrary, they receive two cents per word to colleague and Julius' arch-nemesis Herb Rossoff's four cents. Their work is not universally well-regarded, getting called "that fantasy crap" by Rossoff during the show; rather than focusing on hard science fiction concepts, they tend to write about interesting characters in unusual situations. Throughout the episode, Kay is supportive of colleague Benny Russell's work and is one of his most ardent supporters when he tries to argue for the inclusion of a Sisko story in the latest volume of Incredible Tales.

Point in Canon[]

Kay left New York on November 8th, 1953, very soon after the end of the episode.

Luceti[]

Upon arriving in Luceti, Kay made Apartment 5 of Community Housing Building 1 her own. Soon after, she invited Mildm

ay, a taciturn ginger whose interest in stories matched her own, to live with her.

Since that point, she's been reading exciting genre fiction from the ~future~, writing stories (and leaving a lot of them incomplete), and trying to figure out how she might manage to publish said stories.

She misses Julius terribly and tries to tell herself she doesn't; since he's not here, she chats with other people, about fiction and real things, and does her best to carry on writing without him. (It goes a lot slower that way.) While Kay's a fiercely independent woman, her husband is someone she's used to seeing all day, every day, and it's not an adjustment that can just be blown off.

Events[]

Personality Reversal: Kay went from being her usual tough-cookie self to Donna Reed (Life With Elizabeth, June Cleaver, Harriet Nelson, I Married Joan--take your pick of early sitcom roles for women, and we'll go with that) (except not June Cleaver, because June Cleaver was a badass motherfucker and in a category all her own) (the mun may be biased here) (and has a lot of Feelings about the history of television, DID YOU KNOW). For a week, she was the ideal 50s housewife, ready to vacuum every day and stuff the neighbour children full of pie, whatever their actual ages might be.

Tropes[]

Captain Ersatz/No Celebrities Were Harmed, Creator Couples, Fiery Redhead, Married to the Job (subverted insofar as that's part of what makes her marriage to Julius work so well), Mixed Marriage, Most Writers Are Writers, Moustache de Plume, Neutral Good, Politically Correct History (subverted), Power Hair (as contrasted to the long locks that Darlene has), Real-Life Relative (OOC trope)

Kay as a child is an Ill Girl.

Links of Interest[]

On Kay's Journal:

Outside Resources:

1953 on Wikipedia
1950s fashion
The Supersizers Eat the Fifties (note that it isn't totally relevant to Kay, who lives in the United States, but it is a great watch)
Retro Recipes