Lost Helix by Scott Coon
Lost Helix
By
Scott Coon
Lost Helix is the key…
Stuck on an asteroid mining facility, DJ dreams of writing music. His dad is a corporate hacker and his best friend Paul intends to escape to become a settler in a planet-wide land rush, but neither interests DJ.
When his dad goes missing, DJ finds a file containing evidence of a secret war of industrial sabotage, a file encrypted by his dad using DJ’s song Lost Helix. Caught in a crossfire of lies, DJ must find his father and the mother he never knew.
When the mining company sends Agent Coreman after DJ and his guitar, DJ and Paul escape the facility and make a run for civilization. Will DJ discover the truth before Coreman catches him?
Print ISBN 9781939844682 $17.95
EBook ISBN 9781939844699 $4.99
Science Fiction – Actions & Adventure/Mystery
Release date – June 2, 2020
Scott Coon ~ Author Journey
Writing began for me in the third grade. I wrote poetry about chess and Norse mythology, though I have no idea what inspired me to do that. Not the mythology or chess—the poetry. No one in my life read or wrote poetry. However, my first submission was not poetry. It was an article for Dragon Magazine. They rejected it of course but I was on my way! …to many other rejections.
In high school, my senior year creative writing project was to write a novel over the course of the school year. Mine was an Ann Rice clone. While reading weekly chapters to the class, no one seemed to be listening. But nearing spring, my novel reached a scene where two vampires were sentenced to death by sunlight. As a door opened to reveal their sun-bleached bones, someone yelled, “Hey! Why did you kill them? They never did anything wrong.” I was surprised and flattered. And hooked. I wanted to be a writer.
After high school I became an Electronic Warfare Signals Intelligence Analyst for the U.S. Army. I was stationed in Texas, Massachusetts, Virginia, Georgia, Camp Humphries in Korea, and various parts of the Middle East. Between the wars in Kuwait, there was little to do so I read Robinson Crusoe and War and Peace. In Korea where the base library offered many classics, I read Asimov, Heinlein, Wells, and many other books. One by Pierce Anthony included a forward where he said that a writer needed to write and discard three or more novels before getting it right. I went with the “or more” plan.
After the Army, I became a computer programmer, which was easy to become in the 1990s. I taught myself to program in DOS Basic in about two weeks. Many of my peers were programmers, hated it, and became other things. I stuck with it since it afforded me time for school and writing. And I was good at it.
In college, I studied computer science, but I also took every creative writing course that the Rutgers’ Camden Campus had to offer. It was heavy on the poetry, which I am happy for. When I took back-to-back Shakespeare, I found myself writing in iambic pentameter without thinking about it. Another course required us to write poems mimicking the styles of masters like Gertrude Stein and Langston Hughes. It improved my prose greatly and taught me how to control my writing voice.
I graduated in 2002 and went to work on short stories. What Rutgers didn’t teach me was much about plot and storytelling. It also did not cover writing emotional scenes, the show-don’t-tell rule, and a lot of other important elements of writing a good story.
Fortunately, I had Writer’s Digest Magazine. But I had no first reader. Despite that, in 2006 I was finally published by Nth Degree Magazine. It was “Firewall”, a story about a psychic computer hacker. I’d have another eleven short stories published before finding a whole group of first readers at my group, Writers of Sherman Oaks. Thanks to them, my story, “Enduring Winter,” was a finalist in the 2017 L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Awards and also the runner-up in the New England Science Fiction Association’s 2017 Short Story Contest. My writing group also helped me polish my first published novel, Lost Helix.
I always have novels in the works and more short stories too. Once people have had a chance to read and enjoy Lost Helix, I will be ready to give them more. I also have promotional events being planned for Lost Helix. To read more of my work and to find out where I will be appearing, visit www.ScottCoonSciFi.com and sign up for my mailing list.
About
Scott Coon
Scott Coon has been published in various magazines and has won accolades for his short stories. He served for six years in the U.S. Army as an Intelligence Analyst, including a tour in Kuwait where he received the Joint Service Achievement Award. Now a software developer for a major bank, Scott brings his computer and military experience into his work, along with a sense of spectacle. See his website for links to his published shorts and his papers on the art and business of writing.
http://www.scottcoonscifi.com/
http://www.losthelix.com/
June 2, 2020 @ 09:21
You spent a lot of time studying, reading, and writing – that’s how it’s done! Bog congratulations.
June 2, 2020 @ 07:28
Thanks for featuring Scott and Lost Helix today.
I started writing short stories and what I called song lyrics. (As no one I knew wrote poetry and I could always imagine the words to music.)
June 3, 2020 @ 10:53
Your Welcome. Cool! Music is poetry. Poetry like music is about meter and rhythm, all about the sound of it when read, and the feelings it evokes.