Scott Coon

Writing began for me in the third grade. I wrote poetry about chess and Norse mythology. With no writers in my life, I have no idea what inspired this. Later I fell in love with The Hobbit and the entire world Tolkien created. But Star Wars and Star Trek drew me to science fiction. Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut inspired me further. So, thanks to Adams, in the middle of my extremely emotionally traumatic Godless Armageddon, you’ll get hit with a random joke tailored to the moment.

I often draw upon my current experience as a computer programmer and my past experience as a U.S. Army Electronic Warfare Signals Intelligence Analyst for my work. In Lost Helix, the main character is the son of a hacker, and thus, he is a hacker himself.

In the opening scene of Godless Armageddon, we get to know the characters before they all die, and then the story truly starts. In that opening, you experience the Rangers storming Pointe Du Hoc during the Normandy invasion of World War II. In addition to my own military experience, I used the After-Action Reports of the actual attack to make this authentic. Though I did condense and fictionalize events for the reader.

After a spiritual journey of my own, I became the atheist I am today. But pondering the nature of our existence, I wondered if souls could exist and how they would exist within the context of what we know about our universe. I’ve also been disappointed in the depiction of the afterlife in every work of fiction I have ever read. So, I created a never before imagined afterlife that fit into the universe as we know it, leaving room for aliens, religion, reincarnation, and ghosts.

Also, when I was in the Army, I was an atheist, I did get ‘no preference’ when I asked for atheist on my dog tags, and I did send it back to be corrected. I was told by a drill sergeant that if I died in battle, having atheist on my dog tags would get my body deprioritized. I don’t know if that is true, but I was disgusted by that sergeant’s prejudice, and I still am.

For Lost Helix, adventure and mystery went hand-in-hand. The fun part about the mystery aspect of the story is that the main characters know less than the reader. When DJ’s dad goes missing, DJ and the reader are in the dark about what happened to him. But the reader knows why he went missing, while DJ can only guess. DJ doesn’t even know the real reason why the corporation sends agents after him, nor does he know he’s toting around the story’s McGuffin the whole time.

For a short story you have to bring the wider world and required subplots into the story in a concentrated way that still provides the depth the story needs. In a novel, you need to conceive of a story that will naturally fill the breadth of the book. Subplots and descriptions have more room to breathe, but you must keep the main plot in the story at all times.

I have a structure that I loosely follow. A copy of that structure is free to download as a PDF from my website Scott Coon SciFi under the On Writing page. I always outline.

I also use what I call the ski-jump method of outline. A ski jump ramp starts at a high point, descends quickly, then swings back up at the end for the skier to jump. That shape is the density of my outline: very detailed at the beginning, dropping off quickly into very low detailed outlining, then back up to more detail at the end.

You want to know how your story ends so that everything builds to it, that’s why you need more detail there. But along the way, you will add and modify elements of the story, so you’ll want to leave yourself latitude by having a less dense outline. When I get to a low-density outline section, I will add outline details before I write the scene.

When I start outlining, I often write the opening scene so I get a feel of the voice I will use for that work. When writing dialogue, I will write it as a script first, then go back and add the setting, dialogue tags, and action around the finished dialogue.

My biggest challenge was education. Simply learning how to write has not been easy…but it has gotten easier to find the resources you need. The first thing a writer needs to know is that you cannot learn how to write a novel. You can learn how others do it and then figure out how you do it, because every author does it a little differently. But concepts like ‘voice’ and ‘show, don’t tell’ were hard to find learning resources for. Fortunately, the internet and an explosion of books like The Emotions Thesaurus have made it easier to learn.

If you watch a lot of science documentaries, you’ll find a lot of inspiration. Our universe is so amazing, and we’ve barely started discovering it. I like to stretch the boundaries of the science we know to the science we might learn later. The afterlife in Godless Armageddon is inspired by the multitude of unseen particles and waves that pass through us all the time, completely undetected by our senses. The settings in Lost Helix are inspired by our own solar system and where our current technology is taking us. For example, the terraformed planet of New Greene wasn’t just made livable; it was fully planned with designated city spaces, transportation routes, and farms with planned flood pains and dry hills for housing. Even the fauna was purposely selected from Earth stock to benefit the future colony.

All people count as people. Intolerance is intolerable. Godless Armageddon has some very overt anti-bigotry messages. In one scene, Thom confronts David and points out that not all Germans are Nazis. So, if he’s going to hate Nazis, hate Nazis, not Germans. I also touch on sexual tolerance, not just for people of different orientations but of the spectrum of proclivity too. Whether you’re promiscuous, conservative, or asexual, just do your thing and don’t try to force your proclivity on everyone else. In other words, mind your business.

I was submitting Godless Armageddon for a couple of years, trying to find an agent or publisher, when I saw an article about atheist publishers currently seeking work. Most of them were non-fiction only. But two were open to fiction, including Hypatia press. My first novel, Lost Helix, went through a lot of editing with Dancing Lemur, but Godless Armageddon had almost no notes from the publisher at all.

Godless Armageddon was difficult to turn into something easy for a reader to follow. It’s a new type of world where people are clouds, but they can also enter memories and manipulate those memories for or against another soul. So, it went through two writing groups at least two times each group. After all that, it became the engaging, easy to follow story it is now, with hardly a comma out of place. I could not have achieved this without my writing groups.

In addition to studying writing, I also studied the lives of writers. I found successful writers need other writers (usually). And I definitely needed someone to critique my work, even though I was getting short stories published without that help. So, I tried to start other writing groups while living on the east coast, before the internet had fully matured. I had no luck. When I moved to California, I found Writers of Sherman Oaks already existing. Its founders had already left, and new members were running the group. During covid, I took the lead to keep the group going over Zoom and then later over Discord, where we are now. I owe my success to the members of the Writers of Sherman Oaks.

Writing every day will teach you how to write every day. I did one year of making sure I wrote at least a little every day—holidays, workdays, sick days. Now it is a solid habit. No matter my mood or my physical condition, I can sit down and accomplish some writing goals. To quote Throw Mamma from the Train: “A writer writes, always.”

NaNoWriMo has been a big part of my writing life. The writing group I am a part of came together thanks to NaNoWriMo. I was even a municipal liaison in 2022. I had a wonderful time working with other writers. And the challenge helped hone my writing skills.

I have a young adult novel in Lost Helix, a very adult-level novel in Godless Armageddon, and now I am under contract for a children’s book, “Bernie and Mitch…and Pirates, Oh My!” which will be for six to ten-year-old readers.

Bernie and his uncle, the Great Wizard Mitch, live in the wizard city of Ta-da, which is on top of the giant jellyfish that floats in the sky above the endless sea. When they fall off the jellyfish, Bernie is captured by pirates. But his Uncle Mitch will save him!

I also have multiple other novels I am currently marketing—Random Ruin, The One Adventure of Mitch the Adequate, and The Analog Wanderer. I hope to find a publishing home for each of them soon so you all can read them!

I don’t remember how I found AllAuthor, but I’m glad I did. As an author, I greatly appreciate the information AllAuthor provides. I regularly check my activity on AllAuthor to see how effective my marketing is. AllAuthor is one of the best sites for writers and readers to connect. I greatly appreciate the work that you do.