Note: This blog does not contain any spoilers about the sci-fi books I've written myself.
A long, long time ago, in a land far away, I was a college student in a creative writing class, and someone in my class asked if I was going to take a certain class the following semester. I hadn’t heard of it, nor had I planned my next semester’s classes yet, but it sounded interesting. It was about science fiction & pop culture, which I’d never really considered myself a big fan of.
Cut to that next semester, when I was taking that class with two of those classmates from creative writing, and I realized not only was I a fan, but I had been all along. The books we were talking about, I’d read and enjoyed. The shows we discussed were ones I’d seen. When I had to write a paper for this class, it was actually about this very topic – it was about the fact that I used to identify sci-fi with geeks and nerds who came to the bookstore where I worked at the time and played those games with the dice and talked about wizards and trolls; how none of that had ever made sense to me. Then, I got into this class, and not only was this group of 20 or so people unbelievably welcoming, they loved sharing the books they loved, the shows they watched, and the movies they’d seen. They’d poke fun if you were Wars over Trek or vice versa, and they introduced me to the movie Fanboys, which is a great movie if you haven’t seen it. I realized that I belonged there. In fact, I was the one who brought in my Dark Angel DVD for us to watch the first episode. Later, I took a science fiction & philosophy class, where we talked about Star Wars (sorry, not a huge fan), Star Trek (not sure how many of those there are), and others. One of the professors was a huge Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan and quizzed me on trivia while we talked Plato.
I like most genres when it comes to books, TV, movies, etc. I can just as easily enjoy a good fantasy, a romance, historical drama, thriller, true crime, horror, and most others. There are some I like more than others, of course, but mostly, all that matters is that it’s done well. I’ve been writing since I was a little kid, and in that creative writing class I took, I had to write a short story of some kind with no real restrictions, so I’d written a fan fiction (before I knew that was a thing) for Dark Angel (because it was a good show, people, until it got canceled on a cliffhanger). I’d written Buffy fanfics. I’d written something for Alias once that I never finished. Same with Charmed (OG version). And Buffy, while not really being sci-fi in my mind, was and still is my favorite show of all time.
While I love writing romance, I’ve also written a lot of them and published a lot of them as well, so I was looking to branch out a bit, mainly for myself. I like challenging myself as a writer whenever I can. Sometimes, it can be by writing traditional romance but giving myself something unique or different in it to challenge myself. In this case, I wanted to still write about two women falling in love but also include a different kind of plot.
Future Wife was my first stab at it, and if you’ve read it, you might call it sci-fi because it involved time travel, but it’s also a romance with a little history mixed in and deals with the ethics of time travel as well.
After that, though, I wanted to try creating my own world, so I did. I wrote a science fiction book called SoulMatch, where I had to create the environment, the lexicon, the customs, and culture. I came up with a concept that is realistic and a little scary even for the present day, and I based the book in the future where those scary possibilities are now a reality.
To me, the best sci-fi isn’t so far out of this world that you can’t relate to it.
It’s something like Firefly, where, yes, it’s space cowboys, but it’s humans having to take to space because the world isn’t so much habitable anymore. It’s the possibility that there would be a governmental force regulating space, and some who fought against that while others still turned bad and hurt people. It’s the human stories (alien, too, sometimes, of course) and the relatability of it. It’s all the scary possibilities that make it good – in my mind, at least – so I wrote something that I think might make my old professor, who let me bring in Dark Angel on DVD and debate the ethics of Ursula K Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, proud.
So, why sci-fi? Well, it turns out I’m a fan. ;)
SoulMatch
Stand-alone
Genre: Sci-Fi, a bit Dystopian, with a side of Romance
Release Date: November 16th, 2023
Formats: Kindle, Paperback, and Hardcover
Length: 116,000 words
