How My SKYBOY Book Series Came to Life: One Writer's Adventure

On The Origins of Skyboy‍

The Moment Skyboy Was Born

Like most of my stories, Skyboy evolved out of a few different ideas.

First, when I lived in Los Angeles I had a dog named Ace, the inspiration for the namesake of Jacqui’s rescue robot—he was a very good boy! Ace loved taking long walks around the block and it was on one of these walks that I noticed someone had written one word on several freshly poured tiles of sidewalk cement.

That word was SKYBOY and, without any context whatsoever, my mind started wandering and thinking about the very story Rold Novick tells in Konstant’s living room, one about a boy who’s bullied and forced to write this unwanted nickname in the cement by some relentless neighborhood kids. That was probably 2012-13 and the word stuck in my gourd also because I thought it was a cool title for a story…

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Turning Real-Life Experiences into Fictional Worlds

Second, I’d been thinking for a while about the disparity in some of my favorite science fiction worlds. In the futures depicted in Blade Runner or The Fifth Element or the planet Coruscant in Star Wars, the presence of flying cars is pretty much taken for granted. They’re cool, they’re useful — but never once is the underlying tech that drives them ever explained.

I’ve shaved literal years off my life sitting in traffic in LA and other cities all over the world, often fantasizing about a magic button on the dash that would put my car into “flight mode.” It was during one of these daydreams that the question arose: “who exactly builds the first commercially viable flying car?” And I’m not talking about cars with wings, but purely in the science fiction sense where the problem of gravity is circumvented in a fantastic way.

How Skyboy Took Shape

The answer to that question gave me the seed for the idea of Metronome Logistics and I wrote about 100ish pages of a novel about… corporate espionage. It was boring and yet it featured some of the key players: “Harold” Novick, his daughter Rose, the young genius Konstant and his “Uncle Edgar” as well as the titular repulsor device that would eventually become the key component to said flying car. But those were about the only similarities to the novel I’d eventually go on to publish.

Frustrated, I put the project down in favor of others… it was only when I moved to New York City in 2018 that I decided to pick the story up again with one central conceit as my North Star: if it was brilliant young folks who ushered in the era of the flying car, then the story should fit somewhere in the Young Adult genre. That gave me constraints but it also gave me specific models to riff off of in that vast genre…

The first one that came to mind was Charlie and The Chocolate Factory and once I had that I was off to the races. The novel Skyboy takes its structure and some of its themes from the children’s classic (so much so that I decided to give that author’s name, Roald Dahl, to Harold “Rold” Novick as a tip of my hat). I subbed the world’s greatest candy company for the world’s greatest technology company and then I was off to the races!

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If you enjoyed this post, other helpful links for writing science fiction are posted below:

How to write science fiction by LitReactor

Mastering the Art of Writing Science Fiction by WritingMastery.com