Hey guys! Let's welcome YA author Mike Mullin to YA Bound! His awesome debut YA is releasing October 11 of this year (My Bday, yeah, he did that just for me. JK! ;) But I can't wait! Here's a little bit about Mike and Ashfall before we start the miniview.
Mike Mullin’s first job was scraping the gum off the undersides of desks at his high school. From there, things went steadily downhill. He almost got fired by the owner of a bookstore due to his poor taste in earrings. He worked at a place that showed slides of poopy diapers during lunch (it did cut down on the cafeteria budget). The hazing process at the next company included eating live termites raised by the resident entomologist, so that didn’t last long either. For a while Mike juggled bottles at a wine shop, sometimes to disastrous effect. Oh, and then there was the job where swarms of wasps occasionally tried to chase him off ladders. So he’s really hoping this writing thing works out.
Mike holds a black belt in Songahm Taekwondo. He lives in Indianapolis with his wife and her three cats. ASHFALL is his first novel.
From Goodreads: Under the bubbling hot springs and geysers of Yellowstone National Park is a supervolcano. Most people don't know it's there. The caldera is so large that it can only be seen from a plane or satellite. It just could be overdue for an eruption, which would change the landscape and climate of our planet.
Ashfall is the story of Alex, a teenage boy left alone for the weekend while his parents visit relatives. When the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts unexpectedly, Alex is determined to reach his parents. He must travel over a hundred miles in a landscape transformed by a foot of ash and the destruction of every modern convenience that he has ever known, and through a new world in which disaster has brought out both the best and worst in people desperate for food, water, and warmth. With a combination of nonstop action, a little romance, and very real science, this is a story that is difficult to stop reading and even more difficult to forget.
MINIVIEW:
ASHFALL is your debut novel. Congrats! And I’m psyched to read it! Can you tell us how you came up with the idea of using a supervolcano? Are you secretly a science nerd? (I hope so, will feel better about my geek self)
Secretly a science nerd? Um, step into my living room. See the six bookcases packed with science fiction? (The YA is upstairs.) Oh, and check out the bookcase that overflowed into the foyer—the one with all my non-fiction. Yes, I’m a science nerd. And no, I don’t even have the decency to keep it secret. Feel better now?
Yes! I knew it! And that does make me feel better about being a tech-y nerd.
Writing that paragraph reminded me of a summer physics camp I attended in high school. (Yes, I was incurably nerdy then, too.) The lead instructor, Dr. Kaplan, took me aside at least three times during those two weeks to tell me I should become a science journalist. He could tell, even then, that I wasn’t quite sharp enough to become a physicist, but I wrote better than any of the kids who were. Well, Dr. Kaplan, you got your wish. Sort of.
So, what does the person with 87 gajillion books at home do for fun? He walks to the library to get more, of course. On one of those trips about three years ago, I spotted the huge illustrated edition of Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything on a display. It’s an impressively-sized book, but still not nearly big enough to be a history of nearly everything. So of course I checked it out, determined to discover what hubris led Bryson’s publishers to select that title.
I read the chapter on the Yellowstone Supervolcano later that night. And that was all she wrote. Or the start of what I wrote. Whichever.
You’ve blogged recently about the reason there aren’t more boy books in the market. Awesome post, by the way. What's your personal reason for choosing to write boy books, will you continue to write them, and how does it feel to conquer the market and have one of the most anticipated books of the year?
I write from a guy’s perspective from a noble aspiration to uplift the hordes of young minds suffering—
Oh, who am I kidding with this bull? I write from a guy’s perspective because I can’t write from a girl’s. I have a drawer novel written half in female point-of-view. It’s been “read” by my paper shredder more times than by any human. It’s become kind of a ritual, feeding that thing to the shredder after the latest complete rewrite. I’ve done it five times now.
And yes, ASHFALL has female characters. Many early readers love Darla, which is a relief, to say the least. But even with Darla, I cheated. If you took my brother Paul, made him seventeen, considerably less nice than he is, and gave him a sex change, then presto, you’d have Darla. (I really hope Paul doesn’t read this.)
Right now I’m finishing up the sequel to ASHFALL, titled ASHEN WINTER (Tanglewood Press, Fall 2012). I’d like to write a third and final volume in Alex’s story after that. Beyond that, I may try my hand at a female point-of-view. One of the stories that’s whispering “write me” is a science fiction tale with a teen girl protagonist. But that story is so out there that gender doesn’t mean the same things that it does to us. In other words, I’ll be able to cheat again.
Conquer the market? You’re kidding, right? I feel like a fly buzzing around the heads of the giants who preceded me. I’ve been thrilled that my heroes, people like Richard Peck, Michael Grant, Cinda Williams Chima and many, many others have supported and encouraged me, rather than swatting the annoying fly buzzing in their midst.
My hope for ASHFALL is twofold. 1) That readers will enjoy it, and that it will maybe lead a few of them to ponder the impermanence of our time on earth. And 2) that it will sell well enough that I’ll be able to continue writing and selling my work.
I will say that holding a finished hardback of ASHFALL for the first time was one of the great thrills of my life. Just looking at its dusty blue endpapers is enough to give me geek-bumps.
Ha! Fantastic, and that would so do it for me, too! Great answer.
Your main character Alex has to face some major hard times. Can you give your fans some insight into his character? What is his biggest fear and his greatest dream? (I can ask questions all day about this character ;)
Alex’s biggest fear is himself. He’s not self-aware enough to verbalize it quite that way, just as I wasn’t at his age. But both of us struggled with an inner rage and propensity to violence. Both of us were forced to cope with the self-loathing and fear that is the aftermath of violence. What if I hadn’t stopped fighting? One of the defining moments of Alex’s childhood was when he walked away after kicking his sister’s bully in the face, rather than continuing to fight. One of the defining moments of mine was when I held another boy’s head in my hands and somehow found enough self-control not to smash it against the sidewalk. Even after a supervolcano, there are no monsters beyond us as terrifying as the monsters within.
In Ashfall, Alex confronts a world in which he must use violence to survive. One of the pivotal moments in the story comes when Alex has an opportunity to kill a man who has severely wounded him. Alex chooses to flee instead, searching for a place where he can die in peace. When given a stark choice between survival and retaining his humanity, Alex chooses his humanity. But instead of dying, Alex meets Darla and discovers a new reason to value survival.
Alex’s greatest dream is to earn the respect of those closest to him. He knows his family loves him, and he’s desperate to find them, but they still see him as a kid. Even Darla initially sees him as a helpless hanger-on, a leech. To earn the love and respect he craves in the midst of the worst natural disaster in recorded history, Alex will have to shed his teenage skin and become a man.
Wow, that just gave me geek-bumps. Alex is an amazing character. I can't wait to get to know him better!
Thank you for this miniview, Mike, and thank you for sharing your characters and stories with us all!
If you'd like to know more about Mike Mullin and Ashfall, you can find him at these links:
