Meet the Lofter: Colin Alexander's New Release: A SMALL TOWN ON THE PLANET CALLED HEAVEN

One of the nice aspects of being indie and self-published is having the freedom to experiment with your writing, both genre and style. You do not have the expectations of your publisher about what type of book you are going to write. Of course, you do have the expectations of your readers, but you can write the book and put it in front of them. They will tell you what they think! Sometimes, you find new readers that way.

Over the last decade as an indie writer, I’ve hopped genres in science fiction and fantasy, jumping across hard science fiction, space opera, swords and armor, and portal fantasy. For my newest book, A Small Town on the Planet Called Heaven, I decided that I was going to use a different approach to telling a story than I had employed before.

The book is in the same universe as the Leif the Lucky series, a set of five books that follow the adventures of Leif after he wins a lottery for a berth on humanity’s first interstellar flight. In the course of this series, I played with a number of different science fiction tropes including the adventure of the first starflight, a murder mystery, postapocalyptic fiction, first contact, and a treasure hunt on Mars. In all of them, I lived behind Leif’s eyes, first-person point-of-view, narrated by Leif. They are also relatively hard science fiction where we are limited by the speed of light, turning star travel into a one-way time machine. Small Town was going to keep the science side but otherwise be different.

The book takes place on the planet Heaven, where Leif is instrumental in setting up a colony in the second book of the series (Murder Under Another Sun). That story ends with Leif heading back to the starship while two of the colonists wave good-bye. The question Small Town asks is: what happens after the starship leaves? So, the story is about the secondary characters from the previous book. Since we are jumping forward twenty years, it is also about their children, some of whom are reaching adulthood. I’ve never done this before.

In contrast to the first-person style of the other books, this one does not have a single, main character. Instead, multiple characters tell about the events from their own points-of-view, with those stories braided together. I chose to not break out the sections for each character as chapters, rather I let them flow within the course of each day. Definitely a different type of narrative from what I had been accustomed to use. The twenty-year leap from the previous book eliminates any smooth character arc for those who were in it. They are now older and in different circumstances. My favorite example of this is Penny. We meet her in the previous book as a twenty-two-year-old rather asocial polymath, who talks a blue streak and goes off on multiple tangents. By the time of Small Town, she is older, experienced, and harder, the mother of six having had multiple turns as the colony leader. Keeping the older character consistent with her younger self was an interesting undertaking. Dealing with the colonists’ kids was an equal, if different, challenge. The oldest of the children would, naturally, be twenty-three years younger than the previous generation and there are no people at the intervening ages at all. Talk about a generation gap! Add in that there is only the one town, and one school, on the planet, what would it be like to be a teenager? If those are always challenging years, these circumstances meant I had to make them more so.

If you read the story, I hope you will enjoy the way I experimented!

Colin Alexander is a writer of science fiction and fantasy. Actually, Colin Alexander is the pseudonym for Alton Kremer, maybe his alter ego, or who he would have been if he hadn't been a physician and biochemist and had a career as a medical researcher. A Small Town on the Planet Called Heaven is his thirteenth book. Colin is an active member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, Mystery Writers of America, and the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.  Away from writing fiction, his idea of relaxation is martial arts (taekwondo and minna jiu jitsu). He lives in Maine with his wife.