Story-Teller’s World Is One for the Books

In the afternoons, while Lynn Hightower’s husband is at work and her children are at school, she travels to worlds we have not dreamed of.

Hightower, 31, writes science fiction.

“I’m somewhere else when I’m writing,” she said. “That may sound strange, but when I’m writing, I don’t have to live in the everyday world.”

When she returns to reality, however, she has had to face what most writers face, the process of getting published. She is familiar with rejection. Her first story was turned down by a magazine when she was only 16. More rejections followed.

But she kept trying, sustained, she said, by a supportive husband and a love for putting stories together.

Now things are coming together. Hightower had a science fiction novel bouncing from publisher to publisher for the last few years. In August, Pageant Books agreed to buy it. The book, “The Stars as Witness,” is due out before year’s end.

It is the first thing Hightower has sold.

“It was like being pregnant for 5 years and then the baby comes,” she said.

As a writer, Hightower is interested in entertaining readers, not delivering some message about the meaning of life.

‘Let Me Tell You . Story’

“Some writers do sit down and make a statement,” she said. “But I can’t see myself doing that. My motivation was always more along the lines of, ‘Sit down and let me tell you this really neat story.’ ”

Hightower wrote her first novel when she was in fifth grade. It was a Nancy Drew-type mystery.

“One year at Jessie Clark school, I had a girlfriend, and we wrote a book together,” she said. “She would write a chapter and end it with a cliffhanger. Then I had to figure a way out of the cliffhanger, write another chapter and leave her a cliffhanger to get out of.”