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.

 

 

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.

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.

ashfallpb_hires

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!

So, I got talked into doing this by the talented and hardworking author Shannon Lee Alexander, who you’ll all be hearing lots about this fall, when her debut novel Love and Other Unknown Variables takes the young adult world by storm. Here’s her post in the blog hop.

I’m supposed to answer these four questions:

1) What am I working on?

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.

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?

My ASHFALL three-and-a-half-ology is different from much apocalyptic fiction in that it could really happen–in fact, it will happen someday. I meticulously research nearly every detail in my novels–from the geology of the volcano to survival strategies and the sociology of disaster communities–to lend my work verisimilitude that isn’t always present in other apocalyptic books.

3) Why do I write what I do?

I write young adult fiction because that’s what I read. I started when I was ten, reading Peck, Cormier, and Blume, and never quit.

4) How does my writing process work?

I sit down in the morning and try to write 500 words. If I get 500 words, I give myself a reward. I’m such a nerd that my reward is usually a walk to the library. Then I sit down at the library and try to write another 500 words. If I get my second 500 words, I get to eat lunch. Yum, lunch.

I was also supposed to invite three authors to follow the week after this post. And I did, I really did. But one of the authors I invited doesn’t even have a blog (doh!) and the other two had already been invited to do the blog hop by someone else. And I’m flying to Arkansas tonight for three full days of school visits, so I’m throwing in the towel. Sorry about that.

I do happen to know that Yvonne Ventresca will be posting about her writing process next week on her blog. You should check out her forthcoming novel, Pandemic. It’s awesome! Some dude said something like this about it:

“The best novels are multi-layered, presenting the reader with new questions at every turn of the page. Pandemic is truly exceptional in that regard–its teen protagonist, Lily, is struggling with a dark secret from her past, her first tentative romances, and a horrifying pandemic that throws her town into utter chaos. Ventresca’s debut novel will appeal to those who love realistic coming of age stories, romances, or disaster fiction. Bravo!”

Pandemic will be available in May 2014. Shannon’s book, Love and Other Unknown Variables, will be available in October 2014. Enjoy them both!

EDIT: I’m not as big a slacker as I thought, because now Jesi Lea Ryan is joining the blog hop, too! Here’s her blog.

If you’d like to read Jesi’s work, I suggest starting with Arcadia’s Gift. Here’s what some dude said about it, “Cady–short for Arcadia–is an appealing heroine, and I enjoyed cheering for her as she confronted the tragic death of her twin sister, the collapse of her family, the vicissitudes of teenage romance, and the amazing discovery of her gift.”

Enjoy!

I’ve been collecting research for an article I proposed on the value of reading. I found some fascinating stuff that might be of benefit to many of my readers, so I’m sharing it here:

Reading for pleasure has immense benefits to your brain, including improved creativity, improved ability to retain information, better critical thinking, increased ability to concentrate, and a lower incidence of mental disorders. There’s an article with links to the research here: “Your Brain on Books: 20 Proven Benefits of Being an Avid Reader.”

Low levels of literacy in children and teens are correlated with aggressive antisocial behavior, juvenile delinquency, and gang membership in teenagers.

Reading difficulties are found in 50% of youth with a history of substance abuse:

Sixteen-year-olds who read for pleasure do better in math (yes, math!), have larger vocabularies, and spell better than their non-pleasure-reading counterparts.

Girls with below average reading levels are two and a half times more likely to become pregnant as teenagers.

Edit 5/20/14: Here’s another useful article on what reading does for your brain, pointed out to me by Janet Spaulding (Thanks, Janet!)

Edit 9/13/14: Interesting infographic on the health benefits of reading.

Edit 8/5/16: A newly published study shows an association between reading and longer life. Yep, readers live longer.

Any other interesting reading facts you’ve found? Let me know in the comments, please.

I’m frequently asked about an ASHFALL audiobook–Why doesn’t one exist? When will ASHFALL be recorded? Lots of people–including me–rely on audiobooks for entertainment on car trips. But the appeals that hit me the hardest are the folks who want to share their love of my work with friends who can’t consume normal print due to visual impairment or dyslexia.

Tanglewood Press has been working on a possible audiobook for more than two years now. They’ve auditioned narrators–some of whom were very good–but none of whom seemed perfect for ASHFALL. I agreed to read my own work, but my voice is closer to James Earl Jones’s than a typical teenager’s voice, and my editor wisely nixed that idea.

So I’m thrilled to announce that Tanglewood Press has hired one of the best narrators in the business, Kirby Heyborne, to record ASHFALL. If you’ve listened to Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist by Cohn and Levithan, Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, or any of dozens of other amazing novels, you’ve heard Kirby’s work.  He recently won The Odyssey Award–The American Library Association’s version of the Newbery for audiobook narration–for reading Scowler by Daniel Kraus.

I’m excited to hear what Kirby does for my work, and want to once again thank Tanglewood Press for their dedication to presenting ASHFALL so well in all formats, and to thank my fans who have been waiting only somewhat patiently for this for years now.

It’s a ridiculous question, right? When you love a book, who cares if a man or woman wrote it? Although to be fair, I reviewed the list I keep of my all-time favorite books, the ones I read over and over and over, and 80% of them were written by men. I certainly don’t consider the gender of the author when I’m deciding what to read, but it’s entirely possible that I have an unconscious bias.

Grammarly commissioned a study to see if there’s a bias among readers at large, and the results are interesting. Fifty-nine percent of the respondents believe that women are better writers than men, a result I find both surprising and encouraging. Surprising because books written by men get far more coverage in literary journals. Encouraging because, hey, maybe the public at large doesn’t share the literary world’s apparent bias, or is actually biased toward female writers. The survey appears to be reasonably scientific, with a sample size of 3,000, 54% of whom were men. It was conducted by Google Consumer Surveys. Here’s the infographic:

MenvsWomen_Writers_infographic

Many thanks to the folks at Grammarly for doing the study, providing the infographic, and donating $50 to Reading is Fundamental in my name in return for this post. Somebody over there knows exactly how to offer me an appealing bribe. Grammarly is an automated grammar checker. I’ve never used it, but I probably should.

I’m speaking at the Iowa Association of School Librarians (IASL) conference on April 12th in Des Moines. I’d love to stay over on Monday the 13th and Tuesday the 14th to visit schools and/or libraries in the area. Since IASL is paying my airfare, any events scheduled Monday or Tuesday would be significantly cheaper than normal. Full information on my school and library visits can be found here.

I’ll also be speaking at Garnet Valley High School near Philadelphia on Tuesday, April 21st. I’d love to do other events on Monday, April 20th. (I’m already booked in Indianapolis on Wednesday.) Garnet Valley is  paying my airfare, so a visit on Monday the 20th would be significantly cheaper than normal.

If you’re interested in either of these opportunities, please email me at mike@mikemullinauthor.com before February 15, 2015. Thanks, and happy reading!

*I guess I won’t be taking a Romanian airline to either Des Moines or Philadelphia, but I wish I could. It can’t be any worse than the U.S. companies!

Didn’t get enough romance on Valentine’s Day? (I did, my wife and I went shopping for a washer and dryer!) Well, I’m here to help. Kaylie Corban told me part of this story on Twitter, and I just had to know the rest. Writing can be a lonely profession, (not that I’m complaining, I make up lies and get paid for it!) but sometimes I wonder if what I do really matters–does it make a difference in anyone’s lives? Well, here’s the true story about how ASHFALL and a ridiculously long signing line helped Kaylie meet her boyfriend. I loved the story so much that I asked Kaylie to share it with you in honor of Valentine’s Day. –Mike

There I was, at the book signing that would make my year. Mike Mullin,  the man that wrote the ASHFALL trilogy, my favorite book series, was standing right in front of me! Well, about thirty feet across the school auditorium because of the infinitely long line I’d been in for the past half hour. I felt like a stalker with how long I’d just been staring at him, waiting for the line to shorten, but I had nothing else to do! It had already been so exciting, but I was bored, egregiously. Bored enough to tear my hair out! Why hadn’t I brought another book? I would have read my copy of Ashfall again, but I’d read it three times in the past week alone!

There was, however, a remarkably cute guy in line ahead of me. At least he looked like he might be cute. All I’d seen was his back.

It was a hard decision, but I knew what I had to do. I tapped on his shoulder, and said, “Hello.” My heart was racing like a driver in the Indy 500. I hate introductions with a passion, but this one was an exception. He turned around, and I inspected his face. Yep, cute. He had adorable green eyes and big bushy eyebrows that I just couldn’t get over.

Crap! I’m staring!

I immediately looked down at my shoes.

“Hi.” He replied quietly.  His whispery  tone made me want to hear more so I kept asking questions.

“What’s your name? I don’t think I’ve met you before.”

“David,”

“David who?”

“Just David,” and for a second, just a second, I saw him smirk. It was incredible. I’d later find out that it was because it was a book reference that I didn’t quite get. Which baffled me, because I thought no person in the world read more than I. But he had. As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one that had a really close friendship with the school librarians.

Our hour long conversation about Ashfall spilled out. I was so nervous, more than I usually would be, but at the same time I felt a sense of comfort at the soft sound of his voice.

By the time we got to the front of the line, I was so absorbed in him, I had forgotten where I was! I got my book signed by the Mike Mullin and left both him and “just David” to themselves. That was the start of the best and longest relationship of my life, and it’s still ongoing. I fell in love with David thanks to Mike Mullin’s ridiculously long signing line. It would’ve been the perfect day… if someone hadn’t stolen my newly signed copy of Ashfall fifteen minutes afterward. –Kaylie Corban

Aww, my heart is melting. Thanks for the inspiring Valentine’s Day story, Kaylie. As a thank you for your bravery in letting me post this on my blog, I’d like to send you a signed set of hardcover first printings of the ASHFALL trilogy. These are collectable editions you can’t buy in stores anymore. I think I should sign them to Kaylie Extraordinary and Just David. –Mike