GUEST POST
There are three fundamental pillars to a good sci-fi story in my eyes. I call them the three C’s. They are Characters, Concept, and Conciseness.
The Characters:
They have to be well developed and consistent. If they are not, there has to be a good reason written clearly at the time that they depart from their consistent behavior. I’ve read too many stories where the main character makes sudden friends with their personal enemy because it is convenient for the plot. Too many others where the character experiences a traumatic event and simply continues on laughing and joking. There is never an accounting of their mental health or a reckoning of their sanity in stories like these. They are impossibly strong, and it makes them less relatable.
The Concept:
It has to be daring, crazy, and challenging. There are far too many sci-fi stories which can be reduced to a romance novel in space or a murder mystery in space. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with those stories, but they should be put in the romance and mystery categories respectively. Space is not science fiction. It is just as real as the Eiffel tower. If you can have a romance story in Paris, you can have it on a space station. Changing locations doesn’t change genre.
Science fiction is the only genre that is treated with such disrespect. It ends up being the garbage receptacle for all the stories that would not be competitive in the genre that they actually belong to. So, science fiction fans are supposed to eat it up simply because it happens in space. Then there are marketers who will market the story in sci-fi terms to sci-fi people to make it seem like it’s more than that. There are a great many people who make money wasting your time on yet another book that doesn’t have the guts to be really sci-fi.
On Conciseness:
Sci-fi and Fantasy both have an inherent problem with length. This is because it is easy to sing the praises of a story that is six books long when compared to a single-book story. There is just more material to praise. The incentive is that everyone writes super-series over three books long. Critics who are critical of the first book (and thus did not read the other five books) can be told that the first book is bad, but books two and three start to get good and book four is immaculate.
Poor writing is poor writing. If it takes your story four books to get good, then you failed as a writer in communicating your story. You aren’t allowed to shift blame on the reader by saying, “Well, did you make it to book four? You’re not allowed to judge my entire series until you do.” Conciseness is a lost art form, practiced by very few and contraindicated by reviews. But long unapproachable series becoming the norm makes the whole genre unapproachable.
Thanks for listening! I would love to hear other opinions on this.
Sincerely,
J.F. Bloomfield
In this harrowing tale of humanity well past the brink of insanity, Canadian author J. F. Bloomfield takes the reader on a dangerous adventure through the corpse of a world that went horribly wrong. Starting off unprepared and deathly afraid, the main character, Will, just barely makes it underground with some hiking and camping gear and has to plan his journey south into the remnants of the coastal United States to find his wife, who was on a company sales trip to Florida when the bombs fell.
What awaits him down the coast is nothing short of soul-rending. The freaks of nature and anomalies of physics take their toll and change both his body and his mind in disturbing ways. Who is he now? Will his wife recognize him anymore?
It becomes obvious to him that every part of the country was hit by a different experimental bomb that pushed the boundaries of what was possible to predict. What else would he find?
The author invites you to join him on this complex mission to discover who we really are when no concept goes unspoiled by the wildest impossibilities.
Author bio:
Author of mind-bending Sci-fi, Dystopia and other genres that beg thrilling questions. J.F. Bloomfield has over 35 books he needs to write including themes like Cyberpunk, Alternate History, Space Exploration, Planetary Expedition, Lost Biomes on Earth, Transhumanism, Futurism and many more!
Author Marketing Experts tags for social media:
Twitter: @Bookgal
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Amazon: https://amzn.to/4gs2gLJ
AUTHOR INTERVIEW
On writing:
How did you do research for your book?
Google Maps, believe it or not. When my characters were making their way through the streets and subways of New York City, I plotted their route incrementally down to the street names.
In your book you make a reference to nuclear war. How did you come up with this idea? What made you write a book about it?
It was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Suddenly we were watching a war in Europe for the first time since 1945. Usually, wars in Europe tend to draw in participants from all sides, so I was fearful of that happening again and scaling out of control. The book started out as a post nuclear survival horror, but then I thought more about how little we know of the harshness of the universe outside of us and that’s what brought me to sci-fi.
Where do you get inspiration for your stories?
Usually, it’s a matter of taking real things to their logical extent and building a fictional world based on that. The greatest inspiration for dystopian fiction, for instance, is the way that values are handled now and then taken to the extreme.
There are many post-apocalypse books out there. What makes yours different?
It has to be the overt craziness of the story. Just about every other post apocalypse story is entirely devoted to its own grittiness and realism. I wanted something else. I wanted to build an end of the world that didn’t result in a predictable wasteland. I wanted an end to the ability to understand reality itself and separate fact from fiction.
What advice would you give budding writers?
Write the story that’s in your heart. Don’t write to a market and don’t subscribe to one genre. Write that story and then decide what genre and market it falls into later.
Your book is set along the Eastern US coast. Have you ever been there?
Yes! Despite being a Canadian author, I actually grew up in North Carolina. I’ve been all up and down the East Coast throughout those years.
How long have you been writing?
I started out by writing non-fiction. I wrote two books, neither of which I was confident to publish. I was just flexing my writing muscles back then. That was five years ago. At some point I realized that what I really wanted to do was create and write stories.
Do you ever get writer’s block? What helps you overcome it?
The beginning of a story is always the most challenging because there are a million ways that a story idea can go when it’s just a few sentences. Major choices have to be made very early. Personally, I start every book on a farm in Kansas. I know that sounds insane, but since none of my stories have anything to do with a farm, I can correct all the details of the story until I have my first few pages done. For instance, it wasn’t actually a farm in Kansas, it was a shipyard for spaceships on mars. It wasn’t actually corn he was gathering it was spare parts that looked valuable so he could re-sell them, etc.
What is your next project?
I don’t have a finalized name for it yet, but my next book is a space exploration sci-fi set in a world recovering from the loss of all human knowledge in an intergalactic war that no one can remember. Viruses infect computer systems and sabotage any new information we may try to collect, AI systems are seeing ghosts, and exploration is a very treacherous thing.
What genre do you write and why?
Science fiction all the way. There’s lots of promise in sci-fi and I believe it’s one of the more important genres to get right. In it we hold our hopes and fears for the future, for technology or each other. At the same time, I feel like most sci-fi stories hold back too much. As if they’re scared to look crazy. I embrace the craziness of the unknown and unpredictable.
What is the last great book you’ve read?
Don Quixote. It was written over 400 years ago, but its humor, wit and madness are timeless and represent the pinnacle of writing.
What is a favorite compliment you have received on your writing?
One of my Amazon reviews said it was a “wild ride of a story”. That’s really what I want more than anything. In a note at the end of my first book I promised my readers to only write the craziest stories I could possibly think of. That’s my goal and my dedicated skill as an author. It’s wonderful to see that people appreciate that.
How are you similar to or different from your lead character?
We are very different. I wouldn’t last a second in this world I’ve created. The main character, Will, is made of some different stuff.
What were the biggest rewards and challenges with writing your book?
The biggest reward was seeing the world and the character grow from just random thoughts in my imagination into a structured novel. The challenges were largely schedule based. Once you stop writing for a few days, it’s very tough to get back into it. I had to make sure I was writing at least something every weekday.
In one sentence, what was the road to publishing like?
Difficult, full of delays, and a learning experience like no other.
What is one piece of advice you would give to an aspiring author?
Have a story first. Don’t even think about being an author as a career or a title until you have a story burning in your heart. Something that demands to be written. You’ll save yourself a lot of anxiety this way.
On rituals:
Where do you write?
In a room that has plenty of daylight coming in and plenty of quiet. It makes my mind feel lighter for some reason.
Do you write every day?
Monday through Friday. I try to leave the weekends alone to recharge and relax. It really helps one’s creativity when the story isn’t on their mind 24/7.
What is your writing schedule?
Usually from 11-12:30, then I go to the gym, then I do more writing from 4-5:30.
Fun stuff:
If there is one thing you want readers to remember about you, what would it be?
That he wrote the craziest stories he could think of, and he did that A LOT.
What TV series are you currently binge watching?
Attack on Titan. I was one of those people who swore off anime entirely because I had been exposed to some bad ones. After FMA Brotherhood and Death note, I am convinced that anime holds some of the best shows I’ve ever watched.
Tell us about your longest friendship.
We first met in second grade. We bonded over Bionicle after both of us had brought one to school. Then we bonded over video games like Halo. I’ve known him for over 20 years now.
BOOK EXCERPT
The Grocery Store
In the middle of this parking lot, there were three juvenile trees scattered randomly among the parking spaces. One of the trees had upended a car that used to park there. The scene looked as though the tree grew underneath the car with such force that it eventually toppled the car over and it landed roof first on the car beside it. Will locked his focus in on one particular family out of a dozen or so. This family was heading in the direction of the upturned car. Their shopping cart was closer to him than all the others were, so he kept his cover. He stared around the corner with one eye and noticed that their cart was violently shaking through the lot. The wheels were hitting every vine and root and tossing their groceries from one side of the cart to the other. They were a husband and wife and very happy. They laughed while saying something Will could not hear. The husband pushed the cart into position behind where their flipped car used to be and where the tree now commandeered the space. The wife brought out her keys and made all the motions necessary to pop the trunk and the husband started putting the groceries into nothing but air. It was as if they were pretending to still have their car there.
Will was puzzled by this behavior. If these people were aware enough to get groceries, why could they not see the obvious state of their car? Nobody seemed to notice the state of the parking lot or of the vicious war the land was waging on the otherwise desolate city. The grocery bags hit the ground, the woman closed the non-existent trunk, and the man returned the cart to the overgrown corral. They both opened the doors to a car that was no longer there and then tried to sit down in it and fell to the ground. They then got up quietly and stone-faced. Their disposition was no longer that of a happy family but was all business now. They stopped pretending they had a car. The man picked up the groceries from the ground while the woman grabbed the cart back from the corral. Then, like robots on a production line, they moved back towards the store for a reason that Will couldn’t guess.
Will emerged from the corner and moved towards the store. He was emboldened both by his curiosity of this new situation as well as the fact that these people seemed oblivious to everything about how their environment had changed. He deemed them no threat. He caught up to them with a jog and simply followed. He knew he wasn’t dreaming now. The sounds were too real and then there was the smell. The land here smelled the same as earlier, like fresh-cut grass, despite the fact that it was a parking lot. It was a nearly sickening aroma. The groceries in this store were probably spoiled. It was then that Will realized everyone had “reset”. Some people were headed back towards their cars and others to the store, but altogether drone-like and inconsiderate of each other.
There was no more talking and no more laughing. He followed them into the store, which must have had the doors open when it lost power. The produce which should have been kept fresh with mist and refrigeration now decomposed on unmanaged shelves and hung the air with the stench of decay. The whole store was bustling with the commotion of what appeared to be an army of shelf stockers. All of the people who had been shoppers now worked diligently to put everything back where they found it. All the cans, bottles and packages were stocked back on the shelves by rote memorization. Will tried to move so that he wasn’t in the way of all of these worker bees. Or perhaps “zombies” was a better term for them. The most anti-social zombies in the world with a mean streak for obsessive repetition.
Will watched until everyone had dutifully completed their seemingly God-given tasks. Then it was like everyone had hit play on the video of their lives again. They were coming into the store, grabbing hand carts and push carts and gathering the things they needed for the next cycle. They were talking again and laughing but the whole store came to life too. The cashiers beeped items through the checkouts and the whirring of refrigerators came online. There was just one issue. There was still no power. Will didn’t think it possible that the refrigerators could start working again. If the produce was any sign, then the refrigerators weren’t running at all. So, what was that sound? Will looked at the checkout lanes very intently for a few seconds, only to realize that the people playing cashier were making the beeping noises with their mouths. He looked to the refrigerated section and everyone who opened the door mimicked the whirring sound of a fridge purposefully as they took their undoubtedly spoiled prizes out. It was starting to dawn on Will that these people were some other kind of crazy.
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