Looking into the multiverse of Mauna Kea Rising.
Thank you all so much for making my debut novel, Mauna Kea Rising, a success. As always, it’s reader enthusiasm that what makes this all work! Thanks to you, the book reached the top 100 in fictional metaphysics on the US Amazon site within a week of its launch. And several libraries and book clubs have picked it up. It’s also been great hearing from so many of you who enjoyed this adventure in the multiverse.
It’s also been great hearing from so many of you who have either finished the book or are in the process of reading it. I’m super glad to hear you’re enjoying it!
Today, just for fun, I wanted to share a few of the behind-the-scenes stuff I collected when writing the novel. First, you can check out my Mauna Kea Rising Pinterest board, featuring characters, animals, and settings that appear in the book. These pictures adorned my corkboard scene sketches and helped me to envision characters’ expressions and actions. My YouTube channel also has a playlist of some of the music I listened to while writing the novel.
Mauna Kea Rising Pinterest board
Now, let’s turn to how the book came about. Years ago, I started my writing practice like many other authors by crafting short stories. After writing The Wayfinders, a short story about a Polynesian navigator sailing across the Pacific in 1054 CE, I came back to it over and over again. Three years later, it grew into my first draft of Mauna Kea Rising. The story originally served as a prologue for the novel, but for many reasons, it really didn’t work out. However, parts of the story lived on as a “frame story” (story within a story). You might recall how Elle sent Hellen cryptic messages in her book, The Wayfinders. Well, you guessed it. The characters in the short story show up again in Elle’s novel warning of impending doom, each representing the main characters, Hellen, Brett, Charlie, and Elizabeth.
The premise of Mauna Kea Rising came out of a 2014 space weather workshop I attended in Boulder, Colorado. Daniel Baker of CU-Boulder gave a talk on the Solar Storm of 2012. He described a “near miss” in which a double-CME solar eruption missed hitting the Earth by only two weeks. The storm tore through the solar system with a blast larger than the Carrington Event of 1859. Those of you who have read Mauna Kea Rising know that the Carrington solar storm directly hit the Earth, ignited auroras as far south as Hawaii and Tahiti. The ensuing geomagnetic flux fried global telegraph lines, disabling the “Victorian Internet.” Had the 2012 storm hit us, we would have suffered catastrophic damage to our power grids and telecom networks. The National Academy of Sciences estimates that the storm’s economic impact would have exceeded $2 trillion, or 20 times the cost of Hurricane Katrina’s recovery.
As I write this, I’m well into the next book in the Lost in Multiverse series. Nineteen-year-old Elle Akamu slips from 21st century Earth into the 1970s of the New World. A stranger in a strange land, Elle spends her life unraveling the mystery of her accidental journey into a parallel world. You can expect to see it early next year.