Today I welcome Mike Mullen, author of Ashfall and the newest installment, Ashen Winter which will be out mid-October. If you love post-apocalyptic YA, then this is just the series for you. I have thoroughly enjoyed both books and my review will post later today so I was very excited to interview Mike. Enjoy the interview!
Did you dive right into writing Ashen
Winter after finishing Ashfall, or did you take a break?
I did a very rough outline for the whole trilogy before the first
draft of ASHFALL was even finished. As I worked on ASHFALL, I kept thinking of
interesting ideas that wouldn’t fit. So I’d open up the ASHEN WINTER file on my
computer, write down the idea, and then go back to working on ASHFALL. When I
finished ASHFALL, I already had twenty or thirty pages of notes and ideas for
ASHEN WINTER.
ASHFALL sold on a one-book deal. So when the last edits for
ASHFALL were finished, I wrote a proposal for ASHEN WINTER–the first three
chapters and an outline—and sent it to Tanglewood Press. They agreed to buy it
on spec—even before ASHFALL had been released. After I finished my happy dance,
I got right to work on ASHEN WINTER.
If you could travel anywhere, where
would you go?
I’d love to go back to Northeast Brazil: Fortaleza, Belem, and
Recife. I’m using some of the royalty money from ASHFALL to take my wife to
Mexico this spring, and we’re getting our passports renewed for that. Maybe if
the books keep selling well we’ll go to Brazil next.
What three things do you need in
order to write?
My laptop. I’m stumped for the other two. Totally stumped. I was
going to say hands, but I think I’d write even if I didn’t have hands. Come to
think of it, I could write without my
laptop—I’m pretty sure I have a pen lying around somewhere. But I really,
really hate to handwrite anything.
Do you have a favorite line in Ashen
Winter?
Yes! I put a lot of my own opinions in Rita Mae’s voice—she’s the
librarian in Worthington. Here’s one of my favorites:
“He’s a child, Rita Mae,” Kenda yelled. “Without children we
don’t have any future.”
“Without freedom,” Rita Mae yelled back, “why would we want
a future?”
I totally get the impulse to protect kids. But as a teenager I
valued freedom over safety, and even as an adult, I worry that we sometimes
draw the line too far on the side of safety. The best, most durable lessons
come only when we have the freedom to make mistakes.
Who is your favorite character?
That’s like asking a father which kid is his favorite. Not fair! I
like Alex, because he’s based in part on myself as a teenager. I like Darla
because she’s based in part on my wife, Margaret. I love Rita Mae, because,
well, she’s a librarian and thinks a lot like the adult Mike Mullin. I like
Alyssa, because she’s just as tough as Darla but in a totally different way.
And I love Ben, because I didn’t think I could write an autistic teen
successfully, but most early readers—including two ASD teens and two parents of
kids with Asperger’s—tell me I succeeded, so that’s gratifying.
Thanks Mike!
Thanks for joining the blog tour, Crystal!
Author Bio
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 glad this
writing thing seems to be working out.
Mike holds a black belt in Songahm Taekwondo. He lives in
Indianapolis with his wife and her three cats. Ashen Winter is his second
novel. His debut, Ashfall, was named one
of the top five young adult novels of 2011 by National Public Radio, a Best
Teen Book of 2011 by Kirkus Reviews, and a New Voices selection by the American
Booksellers Association.
Social Media Links
About ASHEN WINTER
It's been over six months since the eruption of the
Yellowstone supervolcano. Alex and Darla have been staying with Alex's
relatives, trying to cope with the new reality of the primitive world so
vividly portrayed in Ashfall, the first book in this trilogy. It's also been
six months of waiting for Alex's parents to return from Iowa. Alex and Darla
decide they can wait no longer and must retrace their journey into Iowa to find
and bring back Alex's parents to the tenuous safety of Illinois. But the
landscape they cross is even more perilous than before, with life-and-death
battles for food and power between the remaining communities. When the
unthinkable happens, Alex must find new reserves of strength and determination
to survive.
Purchase Links
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3 comments:
Great interview. That's a great idea to rough outline the whole series. Though it sounds hard to know it all well enough to do. So excited for Mike.
This is a post having some crucial information.
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I want to read the next book so badly. I loved Ashfall so much.This was a great interview.
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