Mike Mullin Guest Blogs "How to Get 100 Monkeys to Write Your Novel"

Today on Angela WRITE Now, Mike Mullin is visiting. If you haven't heard of him, you--are rock dweller, and the rest of you know how I feel about those! Mike is a fab friend and a fab writer, read the deets bellow then comment on the AWESOMENESS.



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.


About ASHFALL

Many visitors to Yellowstone National Park don’t realize that the boiling hot springs and spraying
geysers are caused by an underlying supervolcano. It has erupted three times in the last 2.1 million
years, and it will erupt again, changing the Earth forever.

Fifteen-year-old Alex is home alone when the supervolcano erupts. His town collapses into a nightmare darkness, ash, and violence, forcing him to flee. He begins a harrowing trek in search of his parents
and sister, who were visiting relatives 140 miles away.

Along the way, Alex struggles through a landscape transformed by more than a foot of ash. The disaster
brings out the best and worst in people desperate for food, clean water, and shelter. When an escaped
convict injures Alex, he searches for a sheltered place where he can wait—to heal or to die. Instead, he
finds Darla. Together, they fight to achieve a nearly impossible goal: surviving the supervolcano.


The first two chapters are available on his website: www.mikemullinauthor.com. You may reprint the
first two chapters in whole or in part on your website so long as you do not charge anyone anything to
access them.

How to Get 100 Monkeys to Write Your Novel

Step 1:

Buy beer. This is actually a generic step 1. Assembling a grill? Buy beer. Cooking a cake? You guessed it, buy beer.

The type of beer matters. You want a classy brand, like Budweiser. It’s the King of Beers. There’s nothing classier than that. You’re not going to lure any monkeys to your writing cave with that Natural Light crap.

Also, if this plan fails horribly, at least you have beer.

Step 2:

Use beer to lure monkeys out of zoo. Bring extra for Zoo Security.

Step 3:

Share smuggled beer with Bubba, your new cellmate. Offering Bubba Natural
Light is even worse than offering it to a bunch of monkeys. You’ll be glad you
bought Bud.

Step 4:

Buy 100 Mac Air laptops for your monkeys. Émile Borel’s monkeys may have
been content with typewriters, but modern monkeys don’t work on that crappy
outdated equipment.

Step 5:

Buy a snowshovel. Yes, even if you live in Las Vegas. It’s for cleaning flung monkey
poo off your walls, not fluffy white stuff off your driveway.

Step 6:

Dig a basement. Or lure 100 gorillas away from the zoo to do it for you.

Step 7:

Give up, drink the beer yourself, and hire Angela Kulig to ghostwrite. She cranks
out 10,000 words a day. What do you need monkeys for anyway?