Mike Mullin's Blog

Kevin Cordi runs a wonderful project every other year called The StoryBox Project. Authors contribute unfinished stories to the box, and it circulates among schools, where students have the opportunity to finish the stories and send them on to new schools and students. If you’d like more information, here’s Kevin’s website.

We presented about the project at the OELMA and ALAN conferences this year, and it struck me that finishing an author’s story, as a way of doing authentic writing, need not wait for the arrival of a physical box. So I offered to put my unfinished story online for educators to use if they wish.

I hereby grant educators and librarians a limited license to use the story below for any non-commercial purpose desired. You may print as many copies as you need or distribute the story electronically if desired. By using the story, you acknowledge that I retain copyright to it, and any commercial use is forbidden without my express written consent. This includes its use in commercial testing materials, anthologies, or sale online or in physical form.

The Cottonwoods by Mike Mullin (Updated 11-21-18)

One of my earliest memories of Grandpa is of a stalk of Big Bluestem grass shooting from his mouth. Dad had just told him that a new family, the Joneses, was settling on a plat not two miles from our farm in Iowa. Two weeks later, we’d loaded up our wagon and were on our way to the Nebraska Sandhills.

Our new homestead was a poor one. The Sandhills are dotted with small lakes, but the 320 acres our family claimed under the Homestead Act had none. There was a creek, but it ran dry part of the year. Grandpa loved that land anyway. We were still living in our wagon—hadn’t even built our first crude soddie yet—when Grandpa hitched our mules to his new Deere plow and carved a furrow in the hillside above the creek. I toddled along behind with Dad, helping plant the Cottonwood cuttings we’d carried with us.

Every year from then on, we celebrated Planting Day on April 10th, pacing off the length of the tree’s shadows and comparing them to our own. Grandpa taught me how to use the ratios to calculate the tallest tree’s height while I was still young enough to sit on his knee. We made a little ritual of it, recording those trees’ heights in the family Bible, where most folks wrote births and deaths. By the time I turned eight, both me and the Cottonwoods were big enough for tree climbing. Many days I’d enjoy the breeze from their topmost branches, some 30 feet above the ground.

The rains fled from the hot winds of 1893 and our grass withered. We were forced to sell most of our stock at ruinously low prices. Grandpa had enough cash put by to get us through that year and the next. But when the drought continued into 1895, the bank foreclosed and we moved on to North Platte. Grandpa passed on April 8th that year. I’m not sure which killed him: being forced to live amidst the 3,300 souls that thronged North Platte, or the prospect of spending a Planting Day away from his beloved Cottonwoods.

Eventually, things turned around and Dad got work in the stockyards. He had found his calling and quickly became a partner in a cattle-dealing business. Every April, he’d take a few days off, and we’d trek to the old homestead for Planting Day. By the time I turned sixteen in 1901, there was a towering line of majestic trees—the tallest measuring a full 71 feet. Each year when we returned to North Platte, Dad scribed the mightiest height in the old Bible in a slow, meticulous hand.

I taught myself to bark an auction and joined Dad in his business. We did well for ourselves, and made the 1907 Planting Day trip in style in a new Duke side-spring runabout pulled by a matched pair of Morgans. That year, the tallest of our trees topped 90 feet.

The next year they were all stumps. The Millers, who owned the land now, had done poorly in the Panic of 1907 and sold our trees for fence posts. Dad slugged old Ernie Miller, and I had to drag him back to the runabout and drive us home. Neither of us had the heart to make an entry in the family Bible for 1908.

In April of 1909, Dad went back up to the old homestead and apologized to Ernie. I stayed back in North Platte. I couldn’t bear to look over that row of dead stumps again.

When Dad returned from that trip, he was white-faced and furtive. I asked after his health, and he grunted and turned away. I fetched a box of Dr. Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People, thinking his was precisely the condition for which Dr. Williams had formulated his patent medicine. But Dad banned me from his study.

Some days later, I was moved by some impulse to lift the front cover of the family Bible. In a tremulous hand Dad had written, “1909: 93 feet.”

It took a whole year to tease the story out of him. My every entreaty was rebuffed or worse. After Dad returned from his solo trip to the row of stumps in 1910, he finally was moved to confide in me, “Son, I’d thought it a hallucination, but it’s an unlikely phantasm that happens twice. On Planting Day, Pa’s trees still cast a shadow.” Then he allowed me to observe as he scribed, “1910: 95 feet” in the family Bible.

Now Dad married late and Mom bore me later still, so he was getting on in years. I chalked his odd behavior up to the ravages of age, that harmless softness of mind that afflicts so many of our elders.

And so it went. Every year Dad drove the runabout up to the Miller place. And every year when he returned, he added an entry to our Bible.

Woodrow Wilson declared war with Germany on April 6th, 1917. Like many other Nebraskans still in the vigor of our youth, I did my patriotic duty and enlisted, sending a telegram to Omaha to that effect. Neither Dad nor I thought anything would come of it for months, seeing as the wheels of government grind slowly. So Dad left on the 8th for his annual pilgrimage to our old homestead.

As luck would have it, the next day I received a telegram ordering me to report to the recruitment center in Omaha on the 12th of that same month. If I took the last possible train to Omaha, I would leave before Dad returned, and miss my final opportunity to say goodbye before joining The Great War. I began a breakneck ride, hoping to reach him at the old homestead the next day.

It was near twilight on Planting Day when I finally reached the Miller’s property. The earth was scorched and brown, with white sand blowouts everywhere. It looked as though it hadn’t rained on the plat in ten years.

My normally trusty horse shied, and I was forced to dismount. The Cottonwood stumps lined above the dry creek were grey and weather-beaten. Long black shadows crept up the hillside from each stump. Each formed an image of a mighty Cottonwood in stark black relief on the dead ground.

My father’s runabout was slewed at the far end of the stumps with one wheel thrown and its team unaccountably absent. I stole along the row, my heart hammering in my throat, fearing that each footfall within those supernatural shadows might be my last.

When I reached the final stump, I found my father sprawled against it. His face was as grey and dead as the wood itself.

His right hand clutched a Cottonwood sprig, its leaves green as a rainy spring.

Writing a book is a long process, at least for me. I work through something between six (ASHFALL) and seventeen (SURFACE TENSION) drafts of a novel. At some point in the process, I like to take a trip and drive the route my characters take during the novel. In the course of writing the ASHFALL trilogy, I’ve been to northeast Iowa and northwest Illinois at least eight times. For SURFACE TENSION, I drove to North Carolina, following the route Jake, Laurissa, and Betsy take near the end of the book.

BLADES OF SPRING (ASHFALL #4), also involves a road trip, from Speranta, located near Warren, Illinois to Lake Charles, Louisiana. So last year, I applied for a grant from the Indiana Arts Commission to fund a research trip, and in November, I took the trip. My wife and I spent about a week and a half on the road, meeting people and photographing the places that serve as setting for BLADES OF SPRING.

I’d like to take this opportunity to publicly thank the Indiana Arts Commission for their support. Sometimes, being a writer in Indiana can feel a bit weird. There are larger groups of authors in New York, Boston, and even Nashville, TN.  The state isn’t exactly known as a hotbed for the arts, and the values  of its political leaders are sometimes wildly at odds with the values of most artists. (If you doubt that, I could link a few choice videos featuring our former governor here. But let’s not go there. Shudder.)

So it’s heartening to me that we have an institution such as the Indiana Arts Commission that supports and nurtures artists and arts organizations. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, not only for your support of my work, but for all you do to make our state a richer, more livable place.

Below is a real email I received recently. I’ve gotten the sender’s permission to share it with you, and changed her name and identifying details per her request:

“Dear Mr. Mullin,

You were at my school today (Large Midwestern Middle School), and you are going to be at my public library tonight. I can’t come, even though it would be awesome, because my mother isn’t too into my whole “I want to be an author” thing. I know you probably get these e-mails all the time, but it would pretty awesome if you could give me some advice. I have a crisis:

I spend all my time writing. I jot things down on sticky notes in class, and day-dream about ideas I should think over for the book I’m trying to write. I stay up late, and wake up early because I’m always wanting to write. But, I don’t know how to pull it off. I’ve tried Microsoft Word and Google Docs, but it always looks like a huge mess. Microsoft Word constantly loses my works, and I don’t know what to do. And, I’m always losing hope for it when it comes to my peers and family. I feel like they don’t take it seriously — like this is some little kid going up to his teacher and telling them they want to be the first person on Jupiter.

I want to write. I want to write as an adult. I know, and have known, that this was what I’ve wanted to do since I was really little and wrote my first poem.

Please, it would be pretty helpful if you could give me some advice.

Emily Notrealname”

Here’s my response, in hope that it might be helpful to other students in the same situation:

“Hi Emily,

First, let me apologize for taking so long to reply to your email. My new book launches tomorrow, and things have been a bit crazy, but I don’t normally get this far behind with my email.

Many writers go through the kind of thing you’re confronting. Dav Pilkey’s fourth grade teacher told him he’d never earn any money drawing or writing–now, of course, he’s sold 44 million Captain Underpants books and he’s rich and famous.

Your parents are probably just scared that you won’t be able to make a living writing. And they’re probably right, in the short term. Let me explain: almost all writers go through a period during which they have to do something else to stay alive while they’re honing their writing skills and working to break through. Gary Paulsen worked the beet fields of North Dakota. Dan Kronos took the midnight shift at a gas station and wrote between customers. Richard Peck and Stephen King were high school English teachers. I worked in a wide variety of corporate and construction jobs.

So here’s what I’d suggest: Figure out what you’re going to do to stay alive while you build a career in writing. Pitch your parents on the “staying alive” job. Tell them you’re going to keep writing and try to build a career as a writer, but show them you’ve got a solid back-up plan. Once your writing career takes off, you can quit the “staying alive” job.

To build your writing career, you’re doing exactly the right thing. WRITE! Even if you can only steal a few minutes in the morning or at night, write. Andre DuBois III wrote his breakout novel (House of Sand and Fog) in short spurts sitting in his truck on the way to or home from his construction job.

One other bit of advice: You’re going to have to master Microsoft Word. I know it sucks, but everyone in the publishing industry uses it, so your only choice is to suck it up and learn it. Take some classes if you need to–being able to use MS Word will be useful in lots of careers, not just writing, so I can’t imagine your parents will object. Figure out a good system for backing up your work. I use Google Drive and save a new copy of my file every day. Google Drive automatically backs up the work in progress files from my laptop to the cloud and to my desktop computer. Saving your work every day has the added benefit that you can prove when you created it, which will be handy in the very unlikely event that you ever need to prove the work is yours for a copyright case.

Good luck–it’s hard work, but you can do it. And writing can be a very remunerative career–I’m certainly doing well.

Best,

Mike

p.s. Could I use your email and my response as a blog post? I think other young writers are probably in the same situation you’re in. I could change your name if you like. Let me know one way or the other, please. Thanks!”

Hope that’s helpful. If you have questions, comment below or email me at mike at mikemullinauthor dot com.

The most frequent question I get from fans right now is some variation of “When can we read ASHFALL #4?” The answer is that I don’t know. I’ve written the first half of the book three times now. Each time, I get to a point where I’m not satisfied with the story and start over. I may have unrealistically high expectations for myself around this book. I think that’s because I’m so moved and flattered by all the love you’ve given the ASHFALL books, that I’m a bit terrified that I may let you down with the fourth one.

The book is now late–it was due to my publisher at the end of 2017. I spoke to my editor about it, and she’s still very enthusiastic about the book and wants to publish it, but also wants me to take the time to write the best book I can. For which I’m immensely grateful. So, I’ll keep working on it and try to get a good book into your hands as soon as I can. Sorry about the delay, and thank you for your patience!

In the meantime, SURFACE TENSION releases on 5-8-18. It’s a fast-paced YA Thriller meant to appeal to fans of ASHFALL. More info here. I hope you enjoy it!

–Mike

p.s. I’m calling ASHFALL #4 BLADES OF SPRING while I write it. That title may or may not wind up being the final one, however.

Kirkus just recognized SUNRISE, the conclusion to the ASHFALL trilogy, with a STARRED REVIEW! I’m thrilled and humbled by the recognition. You can read their review here. My favorite bits?

“Throughout the novel, every decision has consequences, and characters must constantly decide what they are willing to pay” and “A story about how hope is earned, as heart-pounding as it is heart-wrenching.”

In other news, Rafflecopter has selected the eight winners of my ARC giveaway. They are:

I’ve already sent emails to each of you–please get back to me with the address where you’d like your ARC sent as soon as possible. Thanks and congratulations!

March 21st is the last day to enter the SUNRISE pendant and complete set of ASHFALL books giveaway! Open everywhere. Here’s what you could win:

 And here’s how you enter:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Want to know what the value of a great school librarian who stocks the latest books, displays them, and gets them into the hands of students is? Check out this fanmail I received yesterday. (Note, I have changed the student’s name to protect the innocent. Also, this post contains SPOILERS for ASHFALL and ASHEN WINTER):

Hello Mr. Mullin,
My name is Rob Samuel, I am a freshman attending Rockhurst HS in Kansas City MO. Three days ago I walked in to our school library in the morning and sat down, I didn’t have anything to do. No homework, none of my friends were there, I was bored of all my apps, and didn’t want to sleep. So I thought I might as well look at some books. One thing you must know is I had not read a book that was not required for school in 5 years! I saw a book called Ashfall. I picked it up and thought maybe this will help me fall asleep. It did the exact opposite! I was stuck in the book. I was there next to Alex when he ran from Cedar Falls. I felt his pain when Target plunged his hatchet into his side. My day rushed by and every spare second I had I was reading! By the end of the next day I had finished Ashfall and all that I wanted to do was get to school and start on Darla and Alex’s journey to find his parents! I grabbed it the second I got to school I started, the plot twists kept on the edge of my seat the whole time and I was crushed when Darla fell! I was even more intense when they arrived home! It is now around 9 at night and I gave finished Ashen Winter! And I want to skip the weekend just so I can read the next one! In conclusion thank you for writing these amazing books and sparking a love for reading in me. I’m going to be rereading the Ashfall trilogy for years to come. Thank you again and please write more!!!!!

The most common question I get is what’s next? What am I writing  now that the ASHFALL trilogy is done?  I’m going to answer it here so that I can just refer people to this post instead of typing out a long response every time someone asks.

First, yes, the ASHFALL trilogy is complete. I’m not planning to write any more  books or short stories set in that universe. I like where I left Alex and Darla. Yes, they still have some things to work out, but if you want to explore that, let me suggest that you try writing or reading fan fiction. I’m completely pro-fanfic as long as it’s free.

I’ve started drafting what I think will be a stand-alone young adult thriller. The working title is SURFACE TENSION. It’s about a teenager who sees a group of terrorists causing a plane crash from the ground. He’s the only one who knows how they’re crashing planes, and they want him dead.

Edit 5/11/14: A few weeks ago I was asked about a fourth ASHFALL book during one of my school presentations. I gave my usual answer–that I liked where I left Alex and Darla and that a series should steadily expand in scope as it progresses. The quintessential example is Lord of the Rings. The first book opens with Bilbo and Gandalf at a birthday party–the scope is tiny. By the time the trilogy ends, there are dozens of characters involved in a world-spanning struggle–the scope is immense. And then it struck me–an idea for expanding  the scope in a fourth ASHFALL book. So it’s possible that I might revisit Alex and Darla’s story. I”m going to finish SURFACE TENSION and then, if the sales of the ASHFALL books continue to be good and my publisher is interested, I might–MIGHT–write a fourth ASHFALL book.

Edit 4/16/15: There will be a fourth ASHFALL book! I signed the contract a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately, there will be a long wait since I’ve only written four chapters and an outline so far.

Eighty two gazillion people have shared articles with me over the last couple of days that suggest Yellowstone is about to erupt. One of the worst of them comes with an absolutely ridiculous “threat map.” I have no idea where they got this thing, but I suspect squatting was involved:

If you want to know what’s going on at Yellowstone, check with the experts. The foremost among them is Robert Smith at the University of Utah. He’s been one of the lead scientists on nearly every breakthrough in research on the Yellowstone volcano in recent years. Here’s what he had to say about the recent earthquake: “…the earthquakes are in a system that’s dominated by faults as opposed to a system that’s dominated by magmatic activity.” In other words, the quakes aren’t even in the same area as the volcano’s caldera. Plus,the recent level of earthquake activity is completely within historical norms for Yellowstone.

And the running bison? That happens every winter. The footage of running bison predates the recent quake by at least several weeks.

Why are you seeing all these scary articles? It’s simple. People can make money by scaring you into clicking on their article or YouTube video and viewing their ads. Heck, you could argue that I’m guilty of the same thing, profiting from a scary (but clearly labelled as fictional) book series imagining a super-eruption at Yellowstone.

Look, if you hear Robert Smith saying he’s worried–then it might be reasonable to worry, too. Or if you see the USGS’s alert level change from its current status of normal and green, then it would definitely be reasonable to worry. But the recent flurry of poorly researched internet articles are nothing but fear-mongering click-bait, and certainly not worth worrying about.

Tomorrow morning I’m speaking at a high school that starts classes at 7:15 a.m. I’m not going to mention the school’s name, because the librarians organizing the visit are two of my all-time favorite people in the world, and the ridiculous start time isn’t their fault. In fact, they offered to let me start my presentations during second period instead of first, and I chose to accept the early start. There’s nothing wrong with an adult (me, purportedly) beginning his work day at 7:15 a.m. But there is something wrong–tragic, even–about requiring teens to start that early.

Teens are different from adults. Duh, you say, but it extends even to their physiology and sleep cycles. Adult and preteen brains begin releasing melatonin (triggering sleepiness) when it gets dark outside and quit when it gets light. Teenage brains delay the release and shut-off of melatonin for about 90 minutes versus adult brains.  Which means that teenagers are naturally wired to go to bed late at night and rise late in the morning.

What happens when schools interfere with this natural cycle of late to bed and late to rise? Teens get insufficient sleep. And lack of sleep has been demonstrated to contribute to higher rates of clinical depression and suicide in teenagers. Did you catch that? Early school start times are literally killing our kids. And early start times aren’t just deadly due to increased suicide rates, they’re also part of the reason why “young adults are responsible for more than half of the 100,000 ‘fall asleep’ [auto] crashes annually.“

You really don’t need any more reasons why having an 8:30 a.m. or later start time for high schools is a good idea, do you? But just in case there are a few sick puppies out there for whom saving kids’ lives isn’t a good enough argument, here’s one more: high schools that have moved start times later have scored dramatic gains in standardized testing.

What should you do? Well, if you’re a school administrator whose high school starts at 8:30 a.m. or later, pat yourself on the back. Good job! If your high school starts before 8:30 a.m., what are you waiting for? Fix that shit.

If you’re a parent, move your student to a school that starts after 8:30 a.m. If someone told you that your kid’s car was defective and had a very small chance of killing him or her, you’d get it fixed, wouldn’t you? High schools that start before 8:30 a.m. are defective. If you can’t move your teen to a non-defective school, demand that he or she be excused from classes that start before 8:30 a.m. If enough parents complain, things may change.

If you’re a student, refuse to go to classes that start before 8:30 a.m. Offer to make up the work at a reasonable hour, otherwise some administrators are just going to assume you’re trying to put one over on them. If enough of you organize and do this together, your school’s schedule will change. You could also try pointing out that teens who are sleep deprived are more likely to become drug addicts. Parents and school administrators are generally terrified of drugs. Good luck!