WHAT PRICE ROLE MODELS?

If pop culture actually produced a decent role model for your teenage son, would it be worth $2.99? You want THIS.

CLEAN INDIE READS INTERVIEW

Many thanks to Lia London at Cleanindiereads.com for this nice interview! You can find it in its original form HERE.

CIR: What inspired you to write Wade Boss: Hybrid Hunter?
MM: When I taught middle and high school English, parents would express to me how difficult it was to find decent new material for their teenagers to read. And by “decent” they didn’t just mean well-written, they meant optimistic, uplifting, wholesome – not obsessed with darkness. Wade Boss: Hybrid Hunter is my answer to that lament. It’s principally an action-adventure story, but with a lot of humor layered in – and even a dash of CLEAN romance!

CIR: So, is this geared for your former students?

FAITH AND REASON

Faith and Reason are like the twin blades of a pair of scissors: always complementary, never at odds — except in the befuddled mind of postmodern Man. Their edges intersect elegantly and precisely from one end to the other, such that they always kiss but never clash. Only working in concert can they decapitate the two-headed dragon of Doubt and Superstition.

YES.

“I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.”

― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

THE IMPORTANCE OF AWESOMENESS (BULLWHIP PRIMER)

Folks who work with youth these days have their work cut out for them, and holding the attention of boys/young men can be especially challenging.

The reality is that we parents, teachers, and youth workers have got to have more than just a soft spot in our hearts. We have got to be competitive.

All sorts of things clamor for the attention of boys: video games, movies, the Internet, girls, and so on. American popular culture specializes in sizzle without the steak, and even though you may have a Grade A filet mignon, you’ve still got to grill it so it can be heard.

As my wife is fond of saying, “If you can’t reach ’em, you can’t teach ’em!” Which brings us to a little something I like to call...

THE IMPORTANCE OF AWESOMENESS.

ON PORTRAYING EVIL

The author’s challenge is to represent evil without expanding its acreage — to portray seductiveness without seducing. To faithfully represent darkness for what it is, and yet not darken the minds or hearts of one’s readers — especially if they happen to be children or young adults.

I think the key to walking the tightrope is to spend as little time as possible on the glamor and allure of evil, and to focus instead on its consequences — to give readers a strong sense of the victim’s experience. Not that a writer should necessarily wallow in gruesome details, either — the goal is not to blot out the sun. I simply mean to say that when readers vicariously feel what it is to be on the receiving end of evil, they are less likely to mistake it for being “cool.”