Boldly Going Where Many People Have Already Been

Behind the Scenes of "In the Gloaming" and "Heart Music"

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

I did not start life as a sci-fi writer or reader. I have watched sci-fi movies and shows like Star Wars, Firefly, Event Horizon, and some of the various Star Treks. I even have strong opinions (if you ever want to waste an hour of your life, ask me what my opinion is about the Star Wars sequel trilogy).

However, I have read significantly more fantasy. Compared to the hundreds of fantasy novels and short stories I’ve imbibed in my lifetime, I think I have read less than ten sci-fi books, and one of them I didn’t even finish (looking at you, Paolini). Therefore, while I know what the sci-fi genre looks like on the big screen, I have less experience of genre expectations on the page.

Imagine my trepidation, then, when I decided to write my first science fiction story, “Wind Chimes at the End of the World”. And, to be honest, I’m not even sure if that story classifies as sci-fi. But it was well-received, and it emboldened me to make another foray months later when I wrote “In the Gloaming”.

Terror Turned to Wonder

I knew I wanted to write a story set in Advent or Christmas, to fit the season in which the story would be published. As I tossed that around in my head, the first theme to form was that of family and its opposite dynamic, which is loneliness. That led me to think about situations of loneliness. Initially, I began to imagine what it would be like to spend Christmas alone on a space station while overlooking Earth, but that didn’t feel compelling enough.

And then the image of a man switching on a battered, plastic Advent “wreath” bloomed in my mind. With that came questions: Who was he? Was there a story behind the wreath? Why wasn’t he home?

I am not a plotter by nature. I wasn’t going to find those answers until I started writing the story. In fact, the knocking coming from outside the ship was as much of a surprise to me as to the junkers. And I had about as much idea as them as to who or what was knocking.

In this story, the influences are pretty easy to spot. My first introduction to grimy spaceships and the men who fix them were the TV show Firefly and its companion movie Serenity. A lot of the back-and-forth banter in “In the Gloaming” has its roots in Joss Whedon’s work, in fact.

A critique partner/friend said the story came across as “Bradburian” to him, because of the supernatural aspects in the story. While I have read Ray Bradbury, I have only read The Martian Chronicles once, and I have very little recollection of it. I don’t think I’ve read any other sci-fi by him. However, a sense of wonder and the supernatural resides in all of his work.

Where Robin McKinley has a story council and Stephen King has Mr. Muse (who lives in a basement), I have a story well. Into that is dumped everything I have read, watched, and observed in my lifetime. Whatever crawls out gets written. Maybe there’s more Bradbury in there than I realized.

Here We Go Again

It was not my intention to return to science fiction a second time in a row. Writing sci-fi puts me out of my comfort zone, and I wasn’t that interested in doing it back-to-back. But then two things happened. One, I came across

SDG Lemaître

’s “Christmas in Selene City” collaborative. Second, I established a New Year’s goal to take part in one or two collabs in 2025.

So, it was time to pull on the spacesuit again.

Writing for collaborative projects is difficult. It’s similar to writing fan fiction in that the world’s rules and setting are already established. It’s dissimilar from fan fiction in that, while there may be some backstory, the characters and tone are up in the air. It’s sort of like walking into an empty house. You can’t change anything structurally about the building, but you have to make it into a unique home.

I did struggle a little, balancing my character’s problem with the requirement for weird music coming from outside the station. The original ending fell pretty flat and left my critique partners unhappy. So, I yelled down the story well, begging for something better.

What crawled out was straight from John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). Spoiler alert for both film and my story: the film ends with an unsettling non-ending.

I felt this sort of ending worked best for “Heart Music” because I didn’t feel like it was my job to solve the mystery of Selene City. The answer to the music, or what happened to the eccentric billionaire, was not for me to divulge. What mattered more were the people currently in the story, and the tension between duty and love, between scientific discovery and the common good. And the answer posed in the last scene—was it worth it to hang onto a symbol of peace when it could possibly put others in danger—is one that is not actually answered.

A Common Thread

What’s common in both stories, other than genre, are unanswered questions. In fact, that’s a common thread in a lot of what I write. Things just aren’t entirely explained. That’s for a few reasons.

One, the answer to the question behind the creature or the event isn’t the focus of the story. I’m a big believer in only putting into a story what directly relates to the characters and the plot. I don’t like extraneous details. Rather, I prefer to put in enough to help my reader enter the world and experience it with the characters. And if the characters don’t know what’s going on, why should my reader?

Secondly, I want my readers to continue thinking about the story and insert their own explanations and interpretations. And it is in that process that the story is really “finished”. Readers make it their own and they can’t do that if I’m shoving explanations and unnecessary backstory down their throats.

Finally, it’s just a fact that not everything in life is explained. We all have those experiences, and we all have to learn to live with them.

Once, when I was a teenager, I wanted to go stargazing. So, I took a flashlight and our dog to a field on the other side of a treeline behind our house. I settled into the tall grass, switched off the light, and got to gazing. It wasn’t long, though, before the dog (whose name has been lost to time) started to growl. Something very large was moving through the tall grass maybe six feet away to my right. I told myself that it was most likely a deer.

But my dog’s throaty growl and the moonless night kicked my survival instincts into high gear. I stood and switched on the light. And there was nothing there. I swept the light over the entire field and never saw anything. I did not hear anything flee. It was as if whatever it was had vanished as soon as I turned on the light. I decided I didn’t want to be a main character in a creature horror film and went home. To this day, I have no idea what I was sharing the field with that starry night.

If stuff like that happens in real life, why not in story?

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