Before I welcome our special guest today on the blog, I'd like to introduce him for those who have not officially met Mike Mullin, author of the ASHFALL series.
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. Sunrise is his third novel. Ashfall, the first novel of the trilogy,
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.
About SUNRISE
The Yellowstone supervolcano nearly wiped out the human
race. Now, almost a year after the eruption, the survivors seem determined to
finish the job. Communities wage war on each other, gangs of cannibals roam the
countryside, and what little government survived the eruption has collapsed
completely. The ham radio has gone silent. Sickness, cold, and starvation are
the survivors’ constant companions.
When it becomes apparent that their home is no longer safe
and adults are not facing the stark realities, Alex and Darla must create a community
that can survive the ongoing disaster, an almost impossible task requiring even
more guts and more smarts than ever—and unthinkable sacrifice. If they fail . .
. they, their loved ones, and the few remaining survivors will perish.
This epic finale has the heart of Ashfall, the action of
Ashen Winter, and a depth all its own, examining questions of responsibility
and bravery, civilization and society, illuminated by the story of an
unshakable love that transcends a post-apocalyptic world and even life itself.
____________________________________________________________________________
Thank you for agreeing
to this interview, Mike. I'm excited to talk about SUNRISE, as well as the ASHFALL trilogy. Having read all 3.5 books in this series, I found it an enjoyable
and satisfying read, one that my wife and oldest son have joined me in reading,
a series that can easily be a great read for the entire family.
I’m honored to learn
that your whole family is enjoying my work. I realize that I’m biased and
opinions may vary, but I think young men could do a lot worse than to learn
something from the way Alex conducts himself in my books. And I’m thrilled that
my books might be an inspiration for family conversations on all sorts of
important topics.
You've shown incredible
attention to detail throughout the series, and this is true for SUNRISE as
well. What elements of the series did you incorporate without research versus
those things which required extensive research to be included? What elements
can we expect to see in SUNRISE?
I research everything.
The sociology of disasters, the street names, the vehicles, the technical
marvels Darla and Uncle Paul cook up . . . everything. My early drafts are
littered with notes in all caps: “RESEARCH THIS,” “CHECK INTERNET,” or “NEED
TECHNICAL TERM HERE.” I replace all these notes with facts as I write my second
and third drafts. I do very little research during the first drafts, because it
can become a huge distraction and time sink, slowing my writing process.
I wrote a long guest
post on the research that went into ASHFALL on the Our Time in Juvie blog. That’ll give you a good idea of the scope of the work and travel
I put into getting the factual parts of my novels right.
ASHFALL focuses
primarily on Alex and Darla surviving and reuniting with his family. ASHEN
WINTER continues this theme, but extends to long term survival in order to make
it through a post-eruption winter. In SUNRISE, this is fine-tuned to
springboard into sustaining an entire community, and by extension the human
race, without losing our identities in immoral or corrupt choices for survival.
Absolutely. I’m
intentionally and consciously expanding the scope of my work in each
installment of the trilogy. ASHFALL is about survival and Alex’s relationship
with Darla. ASHEN WINTER is about family. And SUNRISE is about building a
community strong enough to outlast the long volcanic winter. Each novel also
has a larger cast of characters than the preceding one as the scope of the
trilogy increases.
ASHFALL and ASHEN WINTER
show the collapse of our government with the camps holding survivors in
"yellow zones" in nearly starving conditions. What happens in SUNRISE
further sharpens the need for community to sustain long term survival. What can
you speak about with regards to the government and how they play into the series,
as well as where this goes in SUNRISE?
People often ask me
where I got the idea for FEMA’s inept handling of the disaster. Sadly, I’m the
least creative novelist ever—I didn’t have to make anything up. Almost
everything Alex and Darla experience in ASHFALL is lifted directly from
incidents that actually happened during Hurricane Katrina. Pets being killed by
police? That happened. Punishment huts? Yep, something similar to that happened, too. Massive relief efforts led by Baptists? That’s real. If you’d like to know more about our response
to Hurricane Katrina, I recommend two non-fiction books: A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit and Zeitoun by Dave Eggers.
The series has
introduced one of the harshest forms of survival in cannibalism. Gangs,
including the Dirty White Boys (DWBs) and Peckerwoods are often among those who
are called "flensers," known for eating human flesh. In SUNRISE,
you've shown where this ultimately leads, and why it is not a viable option for
Alex and his family and friends. What revelations did this provide you along
the way as you wrote this into the series?
I researched cannibalism
(along with nearly everything else in the trilogy). The book that was most
influential to my thinking on this topic was Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond.
He argues that environmental degradation was a primary cause of societal
collapses among the Maya, the Easter Islanders, and other cultures. In that
sense, their fate is similar to that of victims of a supervolcano—the ash and
climatic changes would be a form of total environmental disaster. One of the
traits nearly all these failing civilizations had in common was a descent into
cannibalism.
SUNRISE introduces a new
vicious and ruthless villain in Red, the leader of Stockton, whose adoption of
"the old ways" makes building a community of survivors difficult for
Alex and Darla (to say the least) being so near the wall-of-upended-cars city.
Without spoiling anything, what can you say about Red? I was especially
intrigued by his array of knives (each with their own name), and his vast
medical knowledge of the human body.
The idea for Red came in
part from a real person described in Sam Sheridan’s excellent work of narrative
non-fiction, The Disaster Diaries: How I
Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Apocalypse.
Throughout the series,
you've written many detailed, seemingly minor characters that lend a tremendous
sense of harsh or grim reality to the novels at times. In ASHFALL, I
think immediately of the woman with the small children trying to survive
in a car, who ultimately dies, prompting Alex to give the
children what they can from their meager supplies. In ASHEN WINTER, Alex
chooses to help Alyssa (mistaking her for Darla) and Ben, and Ed, all
of whom join his community and have significant contributions to Alex's
survival. How did you keep track of all of these details, and why did you
include them in the novels?
Late in my drafting
process in each novel—around the fifth or sixth draft—I build a spreadsheet to
keep track of all the minor details and characters. It lists every scene in the
novel, which characters appear, what they do, what they’re wearing, and scads
of other relevant details.
The minor characters are
always there for a reason—otherwise I would have cut them in my editing
process. The Barslows are introduced in ASHFALL to show the reader how the vast
majority of people would deal with an apocalypse—by being as decent and helpful
to their neighbors—and even strangers—as they can. It’s a necessary
counterpoint to Alex’s later encounter with the family at the gas station and
the prison escapee, Target.
Alyssa and Ben allow me
to show just how bad the apocalypse can be. Alyssa doesn’t have Darla’s
mechanical skills, and must use very different strategies to survive. Ben came
about because I was thinking about what kind of person would have the most
difficult time in an apocalyptic environment. Teens with autism need
predictability and routine—an apocalypse destroys all hope of that. So it was
an interesting challenge to think about how Ben and Alyssa would cope with the
loss of everything from their pre-apocalyptic life.
With Ed's character, you
show the redemption of a character who has a past among the
"flensers." This arc brings home the idea that every choice
has consequences, some good, some bad. For Alex, he gets into a lot of
trouble when the part of him that wants to help others gets in the way of
the practical side of him who should be focused on the mission of survival and
the good of those he cares for. Alex pays the price time and again for his
idealistic "boy scout" choices. Why did you feature him
among all the characters you've written for the series?
Psychological research
has shown that for the vast majority of us, our ethical choices are
situational. There’s a famous research study which showed that 90% of seminarians on their way to deliver a
talk on the good Samarian would not stop and help a person in distress if they
believed they were late to the talk. Only about 10% of us are truly
altruistic—i.e. will try to help others even when it results in harm to
ourselves. Alex is part of that 10%. That, plus his impulsiveness, gets him in
a lot of trouble in ASHFALL and ASHEN WINTER. But that empathy saves his life
repeatedly in SUNRISE, as he starts accumulating a group of followers like Ed,
Darla, Alyssa, and Uncle Paul—people who would literally lay down their lives
for Alex if necessary. Empathetic people make fabulous leaders, although they
rarely want the responsibility that leadership brings. I believe George
Washington was one such leader—a man who agonized endlessly over the hardships
his people were facing, and ruled just long enough to insure that our budding
democracy would survive and then retired to his farm.
You are the master of
cliffhanger chapter endings. Specifically, I'd love to go through the entire
series and just count those chapters that end with someone holding a gun (or a
weapon) pointed at someone else, usually Alex or Darla. This definitely
led me to keep furiously turning pages. Why must you torture your characters
so?
I took some advice I
read in Cheryl Klein’s excellent book Second
Sight to heart. She recommends ending every chapter with either a
cliffhanger or a fermata, which she defines as an emotional summation of the
chapter. I want to write books so engaging and so fast-paced that teenage guys
will put down the controllers of their X-Boxes and read.
I work in the mental
health field with school aged clients, many of whom have significant trauma
histories. I noticed the theme of PTSD touched on at times, and in SUNRISE, I
think this played out with Alex's mom. Why does the ASHFALL series lend itself
to addressing such topics, and what have you learned about the way this affects
our humanity?
One of the worst aspects
of our culture is the way we trivialize violence. As you know from your work,
real violence is terrifying and often leaves both physical and emotional scars.
I was stabbed by a homeless man last year. I’m fine, and he’s in jail now, but
the incident left me nearly unable to sleep for a week, and still has a
near-daily impact on my life.
There would be violence
in the aftermath of an apocalypse. I didn’t feel I could write a realistic book
on this topic without including a lot of violent content. So I intentionally
tried not to trivialize the violence. I tried to make it as graphic and
shocking as I could. Because real violence is graphic and shocking. I also
tried to get the emotional and physical consequences right, and I’m absolutely
thrilled that you, a mental health professional, recognized the theme of PTSD
throughout the trilogy and particularly with Alex’s mom in SUNRISE.
ASHFALL has been
optioned for production as a television series, and I’m thankful that the
production company is not considering turning it into a movie. The Motion Picture
Association of America has had a horribly pernicious effect on American culture
by banning all blood from PG-13 movies. So we get a completely fictitious,
bloodless, consequence-free depiction of violence from our most popular movies.
The Hunger Games, for example, was
intended in part as an anti-war statement—a message that comes through clearly
in the book but is mostly lost in the glitzy movie. Television—particularly
cable television--can be more honest in this respect, and some of the best
film-making today isn’t film—it’s T.V.
You've written and completed your first series.
Congratulations. How did you do it? Can you speak about what it took to keep
everything organized? You've got many storylines which extend through all three
books, or two books. How satisfied are you with the way the series turned out?
Did it say everything you wanted it to? What elements of the books were
you not able to explore, and might we see any future writing for this
series or these characters?
I got partway through
the first draft of ASHFALL and realized that I had way more story than would
fit in one book. So I sat down and outlined the whole trilogy. I’ve been
working from that outline for five years now. I changed it and diverged from it
in many places, but the basic turning points in the story and the ending for
the trilogy were all laid out in my original outline.
Currently, I’m not
planning to write any more books in the ASHFALL universe. Perhaps some of the
fanfic community will pick up the slack.
What writing projects are you working on now
(that you can talk about)? When might we expect to see these projects come our
way?
I’m about 30,000 words
into the first draft of SURFACE TENSION, a young adult thriller. It’s about a
teen who sees a group of terrorists crashing an airplane from the ground. He’s
the only one who knows how they did it, and they want him dead. I haven’t sold
it yet, so I don’t know when or even if it will be published. Wish me luck!
Without spoiling a major plot point, Chapter 38 of SUNRISE—particularly the last page—literally led me to tears. The reality of struggling to survive is as sharp as the edge of a knife at this
point, and both Alex and Darla face their harshest brush with death yet.
What can you say about this, and why did you have to go there?
That scene was not part
of my outline, and I had no idea I was going to write it that way until I did. I
try to imagine each scene in each character’s perspective, and as I was
thinking through what Red would want from that scene, the idea struck me. At
first I was a little bit aghast with myself, but then I decided I needed to
write it that way. The results played havoc with the rest of my outline, of
course, but I think it was worth it.
SUNRISE brings in
the next level of survival, human creativity and resourcefulness. I was
impressed with how this played out in the middle and end of SUNRISE. At times,
I cheered and gasped with the thrill of the finds that Alex and Darla are able
to utilize for the community of survivors in their care. How does this impact
the story as a whole? Where might this lead beyond the story of SUNRISE?
I’m planning to leave
what happens next up to the reader. So your answer as to where Alex and Darla
go from here is every bit as good as mine.
Hope and security
are important themes addressed in SUNRISE. For Alex and Darla personally, it
determines whether they can carve out a future where they can marry and have
children. Without hope and security, the idea of getting married or conceiving
a child are too risky to consider. Alex and Darla aren't the only characters
affected by these topics. Why is this so central to the story you tell in
SUNRISE?
It’s a topic I’m
interested in, particularly in light of my and my wife’s decision not to have
children. For a post-apocalyptic society, though, children represent the
ultimate declaration of hope—a declaration that there will be a future for
those children to inhabit.
The tension and
stakes present in SUNRISE (and the entire series) are huge, all the
way up to the ending. I would describe it as a thriller. Do you
agree? Why or why not? What made you write at such a break-neck pace?
Yes, I’m flattered that
you would describe it as a thriller. I don’t think of my competitors in the
young adult market as being other writers. My competition is everything other
than reading that teens can do with their time. Computer games, movies,
television, etc. I’m doing my best to write books so enthralling that a
teenager who puts down the X-Box controller to read one won’t be disappointed.
What can you say
about the mechanical elements to the story and plot? My absolute favorite
example is Bikezilla, and all her iterations. BZ250 and BZ450, for example.
What were your personal favorites, and what mechanical marvels didn't make it
into the story?
When I have an idea for
a mechanical marvel, I usually call or email my brother Paul and ask him how
Darla would accomplish it. I had an idea for storing potential energy and water
via the two watertowers in Warren, Illinois, but ultimately figured out that it
would take too much energy to keep the water liquid, and so that idea had to be
scrapped.
Where can we get all
of your books, and in what formats are they available?
Purchase Links
I'd like to ask whether
Tanglewood Press would consider putting together a boxed set of your books with
extra goodies for fans of the series as a whole?
For example, could the boxed
set include a map of the United States detailing the destruction of the
eruption, the zones, and the rough path Alex travels throughout the books? Can
the boxed set include schematics of the windmills, designs for Bikezilla, the
camps, the gristmill, and the greenhouses?
Please leave a comment below if
you'd like to let Tanglewood Press know of your interest in purchasing a boxed
set of these books.
That would be awesome!
It’s not really up to me, though. If you’d like to let Tanglewood Press know
about your excellent ideas for an ASHFALL boxed set, contact them here:
Thank you so much for
joining me for an interview, Mike. I appreciate the chance to chat with you
about your books, and I look forward to the next ones yet to come. Thank you
very much! Best of luck on the launch of SUNRISE. Where can readers find
out more or join in with the blog tour?
Social Media Links
SUNRISE Excerpt
Rafflecopter for giveaway:
This giveaway is sponsored by
Books With Bite.
It is one complete set of The Ashfall Series (Ashfall, Ashen Winter & Sunrise) from The Book Depository. Please make sure they ship to your country. Open to everyone! It also includes a second prize of
Sunrise Pendants. This is also open International.
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