Austin Aslan

I graduated from the University of Arizona in 2000 with a degree in Wildlife (seriously…Wildlife Biology). Later that year I successfully appealed my only parking ticket. David Copperfield once disappeared me in front of 2,000 people at Caesar’s Palace, but I found my way back. I have appeared in two movies: The Getaway with Alec Baldwin and The Postman with Kevin Costner (Huzzah!). Starting in 2001, I served a three-year stint in the Peace Corps in Honduras. While saving the world, I freaked out way too much about colorful birds and made lots of hideous tortillas. Upon returning to the States in 2004, I served as the campaign manager for a U.S. Congressional bid. From 2004 – 2011 I worked as a professional community organizer in Sacramento, California. I spearheaded several comprehensive strategies to reduce youth violence in the Sacramento region. I met with important people all the time and I always got what I wanted by headbutting them. Out of many worthwhile accomplishments, I’m particularly proud of a successful campaign to remove the name of a sordid Sacramento eugenicist from a county park and a middle school (the school was renamed Rosa Parks). There’s a great Wall Street Journal article about that campaign here. Once my wife completed her PhD in Ecology at UC Davis, we quickly vacated to the Hawaiian Islands, where we set up shop for a year in the rainy town of Hilo on the Big Island. Austin the Great Austin takes his place in the Vatican amongst some of the greatest thinkers and rulers of history. In Hawaii, it was my turn to go back to school while my wife earned the paycheck. I completed my Master’s degree in Tropical Conservation Biology in the spring of 2013. In the spring of 2012, I won a competitive and prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship for my work on rare Hawaiian plants and their non-native bird pollinators. Meanwhile, my wife and I are successfully raising two awesome kids that seem to have been given to us as gifts for something we must have done really well in past lives. For the past ten years I have been constantly writing. Novels, screenplays, picture books, short stories, essays (and a thesis, urgh!). I write because I have to, but I’ve long dreamed of seeing my own published works on the shelves of bookstores and libraries. While in Hawaii, I wrote a YA disaster/survival novel with sci-fi elements cover to cover in less than three months, knowing that something was very different about this particular manuscript. (I had always thought my writing was the real deal–but trust me–something really felt different this time.) I sat on the rough draft for a while (a new strategy for me–man, how I used to flash my crap around immediately after writing it!) and then polished the book to a nice glossy sheen over the spring and summer of 2012. Less than two months after starting the query process for “The Islands at the End of the World,” I landed a great agent at one of the best literary agencies in the world. Then came 12.12.12. The day I got “the call.” ISLANDS AT THE END OF THE WORLD, sold, to Wendy Lamb of Random House, in a two book deal. This journey was tough. I know how heartbreaking the quest for publication is, and in addition to promoting my works, one of my principal aims with this blog is to be a guiding light for other prospective authors out there. I made a lot of mistakes that unnecessarily lengthened my time in the wilderness, and I’ve learned so much along the way. I hope I can pay this knowledge forward as I enter this exciting new phase of my writing career.