If you, like me, are at all involved in the indie scifi/fantasy author scene on Twitter, you may or may not have heard of Alexander Helene.
Alexander Helene runs one of the most active accounts in the New Pulp movement, and is a personal acquaintance of mine. His tweets have made my timeline entertaining, to say the least.
He is the author of The Last Ancestor which now graces my scifi shelf, and he was a beta-reader for my most recent novella The Fall Of Emrys (coming August 7th, 2022).
I want to personally thank him for taking the time to respond to my call for fellow authors to interview.
Tell us a little about yourself. Where are you from? Where do you live now? What did you want to be when you grew up?
My name is Alexander Hellene. This is not my real last name. I don’t want to get my wife’s business confused with my writing on Internet searches out of respect for her. I’m 40 ½ years old right now, but that’ll change relatively soon. I’m 6’2”, 230, with jet black hair, jet brown eyes, jet pink gums, and a fondness for passing off Frank Zappa quotes as my own. I’m from New England. I was born in Worcester, Massachusetts–pronounced “Worchestershire” if you’re not from here and “Wistah” if you are–home of Denis Leary; I’ll bet you didn’t know that. However, that is not where my family is from. We’re all originally from the New Hampshire seacoast, both my mother’s and my father’s side, coming there from Greece. My brother and I were born in Worcester, aka Wormtown, aka The Woo, because my dad was doing his residency at a hospital here. After a brief stop in Pennsylvania, we ended up in central New Hampshire, nestled in the White Mountains, where I spent ages 3 through 23 before moving to Boston. I spent five years getting a Master’s and then a Law Degree and then a wife before moving to central Massachusetts, interestingly enough, just outside of Worcester, where I currently reside. I’ve also spent just about every summer from 1981 until now in Maine. So as you can imagine, New England is a big part of who I am, for better or for worse. With the exception of three years in the Washington, D.C. metro area, I’ve spent my whole life here.
When I grew up, I wanted to first be an archaeologist, and then a construction worker, and then a comic book artist, and then a musician. I’m a lawyer now. Go figure!
What made you want to start writing? What motivates you to keep writing?
As you can see from my answer to your first question, I like to tell stories and make people laugh. I’ve always had a bit of a center-of-attention complex, which is weird considering that I’m also pretty introverted, i.e., I don’t like letting too many people see the “real” me. As you can imagine, this causes a lot of friction with friends and family alike. I’m working on it.
Flippancy aside, what I really like to do is entertain people and make them feel better. This is why I like to think I gravitated towards music. I didn’t grow up in a musical family per se, but my dad and mom are huge music fans, always listening to music and encouraging my brother, sister, and I to play. From clarinet and saxophone and tuba in school bands, I made my way to bass, guitar, and the drums. I had a natural aptitude for music, even though my singing is “eh”--I can hit the notes, sure, but the tone of my voice leaves a lot to be desired.
Anyway, rock bands were my thing. From about 2000 to 2012, that’s what I did. However, despite knocking on the door, I was never able to make a career out of it. So my artistic inclinations needed an outlet. I’m still a pretty good artist, but I was also always a reader and, to some extent, a writer. I had blogs back in the early days of the Internet, and wouldn’t you know it, people liked reading them. I’m still kind of ticked off I nuked my long-running blog Amatopia in a fit of rage, but I like my new one ahelleneauthor.com/blog better. Coming from a family of readers, I loved myth, legend, fantasy, sci-fi, biography, history, the works. Writing, it turned out, was a great medium to direct the energy that used to go into music. I love affecting people positively and making them think with my writing, and hopefully giving them a modicum of joy. So here we are. As you can imagine, music also plays a big part in my identity and writing as much as New England does.
What is your latest book about?
Right now I’m working on two: The Final Home is the concluding volume to my Swordbringer trilogy, a Christian-themed sword-and-planet that asks the question, what if a bunch of religious refugees from Earth landed on a planet full of hostile dog-like creatures who hate them? And what if a teenage boy becomes best friends with one of these hated aliens? This book is in the editing phase, and should be out before the end of the year.
The second book is tentatively called Set the Controls, and yes, it’s a reference to the Pink Floyd song “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.” It’s about a prison ship where U.S. government, after a takeover by a decidedly based President and military, gathers all of the criminals, stuffs them on a fully-equipped ship where they can build their societies as they see fit, to live out the rest of their lives as the ship travels inexorably towards the sun. Unfortunately, there’s a woman who’s been falsely imprisoned on the ship. And she’s pregnant. Our hero, named Eric Hawkins, is a rock musician of some fame who doubles as the President’s bagman in capturing corrupt politicians. He’s sent to the ship to rescue her and the baby, survive whatever society is on the ship, and bring her back.
When did you start writing (originally, not this specific book)?
I started writing novels in 2008, when I finished my first book, an unpublished detective story called Sahara, New Hampshire. I worked on it mostly during my internship during the summer between my second and third years of law school. It’s over 1,000 pages and pretty awful. I have something like four complete, unpublished novels, including Sahara, before I wrote A Traitor to Dreams, the first book I wrote worthy of releasing, which I did in 2018. Three of those unpublished novels will see the light of day someday, as will a novel I serialized on my old blog called Reset. Sahara, however, will not.
I have another book I wrote in between A Traitor to Dreams and The Last Ancestor (Book 1 of The Swordbringer) that I really like. I just need to polish it some more.
How did you come up with the idea for this book specifically?
I normally don’t like talking about the origins of my ideas, but for you, I’ll make an exception.
Don’t laugh, but the impetus for The Swordbringer series has been in gestation ever since I saw the video for the band Angels and Airwaves’s song “The Adventure.” Yes, the Blink-182 guitarist and UFO enthusiast Tom DeLonge’s other band. That video takes place on some other planet (I think), and there was a scene where Tom DeLonge is standing on a rocky landscape, staring wistfully at a planet in the sky which might have been Earth. I dunno. In the video, DeLonge is wearing a leather jacket with an American flag patch on the arm. I thought it looked cool and was a great image. Not a bad song either. I then thought about what if he had an alien as a friend? The dog-man alien idea came from another idea I had, my take on Masters of the Universe, a planet full of animal men. The religious aspect came next, and the idea snowballed from there. It’s also a firmly anti-Gnostic series.
Set the Controls didn’t have as long a gestation period. I had this idea maybe in 2019 or 2020. I added wierd ancient sex cults into the mix, esoteric symbolism, and musicians as intelligence assets based upon a lot of reading I did about the CIA’s role in the 1960s counterculture. I think you’ll all enjoy it when I’m done writing it.
How was this book different than any of your others?
The Final Home is not really different than my others, because it’s a part of a series. Set the Controls is different because it’s intended for mature audiences.
How did you go about publishing your book? Would you do it that way again? Why or why not?
I self-published, and that’s how I’ve done all five of my books. I’ll do it this way again for the foreseeable future because no one else will publish my books. Okay, that’s a lie–I haven’t sent any of them to agents or publishers. Maybe I’ll do that in the future. But I like self-publishing. It gives me complete artistic and aesthetic control. I’m big into the cover art, the interior design, and the overall vibe of the book in addition to the writing. And in case you’re wondering, I always hire a professional editor.
Are you planning on writing more? If so what are you working on now? / When is your next book going to be coming out?
I plan on writing until I die. As I said, I’m working on getting The Final Home ready to publish, and I’m finishing the manuscript for Set the Controls. The former will be out before the end of the year, God willing, but I’m making no promises about Set the Controls’s release date. I need to stop writing multiple books at once.
Can you tell us about your other books?
A Traitor to Dreams is about a woman who buys a device that will remove unrequired desires from your mind. However, our hero decides to fiddle with the device and opens it up against all warnings not to, and gets sucked into a bizarre landscape created from her dreams, hopes, and desires. It’s full of shadowy creatures that represent her deepest longings and insecurities, but there is also beauty, including the winged swordsman responsible for slaying her dreams.
I’ve touched upon The Swordbringer series, in one of my earlier answers, but to elaborate a bit, it discusses the impact of Christianity on the planet’s various nations and races. And it’s not always a positive impact, at least immediately.
Dreamers & Misfits is a non-fiction book all about the fandom surrounding the famous Canadian progressive rock trio Rush. I was inspired to write it after the band’s drummer and lyricist Neil Peart died of brain cancer in January, 2020. Specifically, why did this celebrity death have such a profound effect on me, and so many millions of others? I conducted a pretty extensive fan survey, and got over 600 responses. I also got in touch with Donna Halper, a Massachusetts local, who helped break the band way back in 1974 when she was a DJ in Cleveland. Awesome lady! It was a really fun book. I interviewed a lot of other cool people, including an Orthodox bishop who is personal friends with Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson. It’s about Rush, about music, about art, about fandom, and the deep impact it all has on regular folks like you and me. In some ways, this is the book I’m most proud of writing.
Lastly, Pulp Rock is an anthology I put out in February of this year. It was an excuse to get a bunch of my writer friends together to write stories inspired by music. It’s a lot of fun and people seem to like it.
What helps you to write? Music, pets, reading, specific pen, etc.?
Cigars. I will not elaborate.
What has writing taught you?
On the personal end, it’s taught me discipline and focus. Conceptually, it’s a lot like music. You can’t be all peaks, there needs to be some valleys too. I’ve also delved deeply into what makes a story work, the structure, the characters, word choice, length, and all of that good stuff. Of course, there’s the aspect of taking criticism. Music helped with that. I don’t have stage fright despite the immediate feedback of either your bandmates or an audience not liking your music. You either do it right, or you don’t–no hiding it! The same goes for writing. If I could sum it up, it’s taught me greater humility, something I all too often lack.
On the other end, it’s taught me that people still read, and that there’s a huge audience hungry for stuff outside of the mainstream. They deserve stories too.
What authors inspire you?
J.R.R. Tolkien was the big one, him and Robert Jordan. I can’t tell you how many unfinished fantasy stories I started. Fantasy just doesn’t seem to be my forte, though. As a youngster, I was also hugely influenced by Margaret Weis and Trach Hickman, Tad Williams, George R. R. Martin, Stephen King, and Michael Crichton–I swear, in middle school and high school I read every single book Crichton wrote. Later, I got into the classics by writers like Herman Melville, Miguel de Cervantes, Fyodor Dostoevsky, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Alexandre Dumas, Bram Stoker, and Frank Herbert. Of course, Homer and Greek myth in general had a huge impact on me; my maternal grandmother was an English teacher, avid reader, and lover of the classics, and she used to tell my brother and me Greek myths when we were little. Later, I read The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri and Paradise Lost by John Milton, which reallys tuck with me.
More recently, Dan Simmons absolutely blew me away. For my money, he’s the best living sci-fi author. There’s so much to his sci-fi stories. That’s what I’m trying to do I also really enjoy Artuo Perez-Reverte, Rafael Sabatini, Cormac McCarthy, and Michael Chabon.
On the indie front, I have to say that Brian Niemeier, Schuyler Hernstrom, Alexandru Constantin, J. D. Cowan, Jon Mollision, Jon Del Arroz, and by friend Rawle Nyanzi are big inspirations that made me realize that there was no reason for me not to throw my hat into the ring. Being published by a New York-based publisher is not a signifier of quality.
Do you go back and reread your writing after it’s been completed?
No. Actually, that’s not 100 percent true. I have to re-read parts of earlier Swordbringer books to make sure there is continuity between the books. But otherwise I do not. I’m always excited about the next thing. The book I’m currently writing is always the best thing I’ve ever done.
What is your advice for writers?
Read.
Other than that, it’s to constantly hone your craft. The emotional, romantic, artistic stuff is only half of it. After that, you have to work on the nuts and bolts of writing.
And lastly, as cheesy as it sounds, never give up! Listen: there are so many fundamentally and mechanically bad writers who make a living doing this. There’s no reason you can’t as well. We need more stories that speak to us, now. There will always be this need.
Is there anything else you want to add?
Thank you for interviewing me! You’re doing great work, Ian. Keep it up!
Sincerely,Alexander Hellene.
Thanks, Alexander.
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So what are you waiting for?
Thanks for interviewing me, Ian! You ask very insightful questions. I hope that some people find my answers useful.