Can I just say the success of this series supports my love of the good guy, especially the complex, tortured good guy? (Please refer back to my obsession last year with North and South. Richard Armitage. O.M.G. I even have fan fiction on Wattpad for that one.) I know that bad boys are somewhat the rage right now with their tats and their pasts completely devoid of love and understanding. But I like me a sexy nice guy.

I’m releasing one to you almost as we speak. In one week, Rhyolite Drifts: Yellowblown™ Book Two will be released with the continuing story of Violet and her slice of heaven, Boone, all on preorder for 99 cents. So grab yourself a handful of Hotness.

Sitting in the truck on the prairie, the night sky blocked by ash, was like sitting in a closed refrigerator, minus the threat of suffocation. Boone reclined in the passenger seat, gingerly exploring the cut and bruise over his eye. At least the lid wasn’t swollen shut anymore. Sneaking over the train trestle bridge with fifty-percent vision hadn’t been the wisest journey he’d ever made. Violet wouldn’t call him Dudley Do Right when she heard about that.

If.

Distance was supposed to break the bond. That’s what had happened with his high school girlfriend, and with Twyla. He’d gone on to the next phase of his life and they’d receded. He wasn’t so cold that he hadn’t worried about their hurt feelings, but he hadn’t been broken. He hadn’t shuddered with guilt in the daylight and woken at night filled with longing.

He’d been alone—solidly alone, without even a friendly conversation at a gas station—for a little more than two weeks and learned he wasn’t very good at it. Especially now, when time and distance weren’t working in his favor.

Leaving Violet hadn’t been a real choice. He’d had to go. He had to find his parents.

A girl he’d only been with a couple of months couldn’t tag along, even if she asked fervently enough to squeeze his heart. This wasn’t a trip to the county fair, after all.

But the damned bond wasn’t breaking the way it should. It wasn’t even weakening.

Rhyolite Drifts on Amazon

If you need to start at the beginning, Eruption is also on sale. You can find the purchase links here.

Make sure to visit other people on the hop by using the Click Here link below.

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Click here to find the other authors on the Book Hooks hop.

As services are disrupted, Violet Perch uses her bike to deliver mail to her rural neighbors and steal some alone-time for her sanity. She sees the flag up on the mailbox at a house she’s never stopped at before, and is pretty sure the note in the box requesting she come to the slightly creepy house to get a message is just a ploy to lure her into the clutches of serial killer.

I left my bike by the road as a signal that Violet had been here. That way if the cell towers were down and my phone’s GPS failed, the homicide detectives might know where to find the blood spatter with their black lights. Were forensic scientists still employed? I wondered this as I shuffled through the dead leaves in the driveway. It would actually be a great way to evaluate careers. How would such a proficiency test question be worded? “Is it important to you your career remain viable through an apocalyptic event?” Perhaps if I survived the next quarter hour, or the next year, I would take a serious look at who still had jobs and then go get training for whatever they were doing.

As I mentioned above, books one and two are both on sale for 99 cents, so it’s a great time to get started with the Yellowblown™ series. Eruption: Yellowblown™ Book One is highly recommended to be read first, and was a BTS eMag Red Carpet finalist in 2014.

You can find Eruption: Yellowblown™ Book One here:

Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MRHAIRO

Barnes and Noble http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/eruption-j-hughey/1120343037?ean=9781500866051

Kobo https://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/eruption-3

iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/eruption/id977183578?mt=11&uo=4

Rhyolite Drifts: Yellowblown™ Book Two is available for preorder at Amazon and will be on other vendors on or around May 5, 2015.

Here’s a blurb:

Abandoned by Hotness.

Held hostage by the Yellowstone eruption, I’m stuck at home instead of loving life at college.

Sanity is restored when my college roommate arrives, but I’m still trapped in my hometown with a bunch of people just trying to survive. Some of them are surprisingly interesting, like the HAM radio opera singer lady. Or the pop star who crushes on me while waiting for an air filter for his tour bus.

Unfortunately there’s also my roommate’s gangster little brother who pushes Grandma to her conservative edge, and the local entrepreneurs determined to capitalize on hard times. They tick me off.

Despite all this I’m determined to find a path to the fabled land of Adulthood even if my heart is broken and all the roads are ash covered.

And where the heck did that Nebraskan cattle rancher go, anyway?

Everything is changing but my heart and my hopes don’t want to change with it.

Admit it, you’re hooked. Give the first book a try for 99 cents.

Also, visit the other authors on todays Book Hooks blog tour by using the Click here link below.

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Click here to find the blog list.

Originally under the direction of the Secretary of the Interior, the department lacked the budget, legal authority, or manpower to manage activities within Yellowstone’s borders. They struggled to fend off commercialization of every sort while also dealing with poachers and vandals. In 1886, control was given to the big guns, (the Army) that built a post at Mammoth Hot Springs, and soldiers’ cabins all across the park to allow for regular patrols. This plan was so successful that soon the Army also had control of Sequoia, Yosemite, and Kings Canyon National Parks.

Woodrow Wilson created the National Park Service, an agency within the Department of the Interior, in 1916. Much had been learned from the years of military management, and many of the policies—even the fun ranger hat—were carried forward. The NPS not only oversees our fifty-nine US National Parks, but also monuments, historic sites, battlefields, and hundreds of other locations important to the identity of our country and its landscapes.

So, happy birthday, Yellowstone! You were such a brilliant idea that there are now over 6,000 national parks in the world, on every continent except Antarctica, if I read this Wikipedia list right. You are the fun-to-watch fluffy kitty sitting on top of a roaring lion of a hotspot, and hopefully you will continue to provide lessons about ecosystems and geologic wonders for many generations to come.

If you found this interesting, you might like to check out the other Yellowstone posts I’ve written so far.

Talking points

Why is Yellowstone Hot?

Geological History: What is Yellowstone’s Potential?

In my last post on the topic of Yellowstone, I discussed what gives it the heat, and mentioned it is known as a super caldera. Super does not refer to the size of the caldera detectable in the northwestern corner of Wyoming, an oval bowl about 34 by 45 miles well concealed by the acres and acres of evergreen trees in the national park. No, the super description refers to what it has proven it can do over the last 16.5 million years.

The United States Geological Survey requires a volcano to put out 1,000 cubic kilometers of ejecta (lava, ash, etc.) to earn the super caldera (or super volcano) tag. Some scientists go as low as 300 cubic kilometers. Give me something to compare this to, you say. Well, Mt. St. Helens maybe put out 1 cubic kilometer in 1980, the only comparison most North Americans can relate to. Three hundred times that is enough to kill and inconvenience many people. One thousand times that is a climate-altering shedload.

So let’s go all the way and use the 1,000 cubic kilometers standard. There are two Yellowstone eruptions in the last 2.1 million years believed to achieve the USGS’s “super” designation. The most recent was 630,000 years ago with an ejecta volume estimated to be right on the 1,000 cubic kilometers number. The biggest known was two million years ago that put out a whopping 2,500 cubic kilometers. OMG. There was another in between those two, 1.3 million years ago, at a volume of about 280.

Are all these numbers making your eyes glaze over? They probably should. It is almost impossible to conceive of eruptions of this size when what most of us visualize from a volcano are the placid, picturesque flows of Kilauea in Hawaii or the relatively localized devastation from Mt. St. Helens. Admittedly, most of Yellowstone’s volcanic activity is on a similarly small scale. There’ve been fifteen to twenty eruptions identified since the hot spot’s oldest known one, when it was percolating below what is now Nevada’s northern border. Possibly two of those were super. And there are probably many that were so small they have been lost to the geologic record.

Next time, I’ll discuss the fact that sizable volcanic eruptions are anything but localized events, and the blast of a super caldera anywhere on Earth would impact every living thing on our planet. I’ll give you a hint: having measurable ash fall on you is only part of the problem.

A few weeks ago I posted some concise talking points about Yellowstone so you could sound smart at your holiday gatherings, and I promised a continuing path to geekdom. Join the journey today, as I expand on point number one. Yellowstone is hot like a romance hero. Well, duh, everybody knows that. It’s gorgeous, steamy, and explosive.

But why is it hot? Deep underneath Yellowstone—from eight to sixteen kilometers depth, according the the United States Geological Survey (USGS)—lies a chamber of magma forty to eight kilometers wide. (Magma and lava are molten rock. Magma is lava that hasn’t erupted yet. If you can see it above the ground, it’s lava. If it’s still hiding underground, it’s magma.)

Not all of the chamber is full of melted rock. Some areas are probably solid or semi-solid. The point is there’s a minimum of something like 12,800 cubic kilometers (8,000 cubic miles) of freakin’ hot rock sitting down there. It heats everything above it, including creating super-heated water, hence the geysers, bubbly mud pools, and hot springs. Occasionally this gentle release of heat isn’t enough and it erupts, usually in a small way and other times like a Roman candle. As in one-thousand times the Mt. St. Helens eruption.

That epically large potential is why Yellowstone is known as a super volcano. (Call it a super caldera if you want to be really geeky and correct, which you do.) We’ll get into the “super” part more next time, but a caldera is an area of volcanic activity that sinks to fill the void left when a volume of magma exits. While we picture most volcanos as cones sticking up, a caldera is a saucer dipping down. If they were belly buttons, calderas would be innies. They make beautiful lakes, such as the aptly named Crater Lake.

If you have any questions about what I’ve written so far, ask away. I’ll do my best to answer or let you know if there is a future post that will address it.

Next step on the path to geekdom? The geographical size and eruption history of the Yellowstone caldera.

I was logging onto my Yahoo account, minding my own business, when an article about Yellowstone caught my eye. Since my current writing project centers around an eruption of Yellowstone, obviously I had a professional obligation to read said article. And then read every article linked within said article. I even understood most of it, though the unit “microstrain” must have been invented since I graduated with my geology degree in 1989.

Many folks, when I mention Yellowstone, say something like “Oh, it’s so beautiful there, I can’t wait to go back,” or “Visiting Yellowstone is on my bucket list.” The eruption concept of my series fuels a few to admit worry about impending volcanic activity at the USA’s first national park. (They get an A for even knowing about the possibility. I recently had a reviewer who actually asked in the middle of the review if Yellowstone was really a volcano. As if I would invent that plot twist, and as if he/she couldn’t have answered that question with a five-second online search. Definitely not a geek.) For those of you now scratching your heads, here is a list of key talking points about Yellowstone. If you have geek-like tendencies, you might want to know more, which is why I’ll tackle some of these as single topics in 2015.

1. Yellowstone is, at its essence, a volcanic caldera. That’s why it’s hot and steamy, like a great romance hero.

2. The potential of Yellowstone is massive. It is part of an elite club known by commoners like us as super-calderas. There is no firm definition of what constitutes a super-caldera, but to even apply to the club, a volcano must have emitted in a single eruption at least three hundred cubic kilometers of stuff. (Picture a solid block with each edge long enough to reach from New York City to Baltimore, Maryland.) Some scientists hold the bar quite a bit higher, at one thousand cubic kilometers. Yellowstone has done all that and more, so it’s a gold card carrying member.

3. Volcanoes are just local events, right? Wrong. Remember the volcano in Iceland that screwed up air travel in Europe for several weeks in 2010? During it’s troubling second phase, it ejected one quarter of one cubic kilometers of stuff, or a cube with edges equal to something like the long side of a city block in Manhattan. That is a trifling sneeze compared to a super-caldera (see point 2.)

4. Yellowstone will probably not erupt, and is much more likely to do so in a small way, like a tiny garden wedding as opposed to the mass weddings of the Unification Church.

5. Though even Yellowstone isn’t monitored as overwhelmingly as curious scientists would like, we’ll probably have warning signs of a massive eruption, so as long as you have a go-bag for the southern hemisphere, you’ll be fine. Or you’ll at least survive longer than the rest of us.

6. Of course, Yellowstone isn’t the only super-caldera to worry about.  There are at least six known on Earth. If any one of them cuts loose in your lifetime, buckle up.

Curious enough to dash down the path of geekdom? Here’s the article that got me meandering into this blog post in the first place, or you can follow my blog so you know when I post the next fact-filled blast.

And here’s a link to my Pinterest board where I collected images for my series. There are some really impressive photos of volcanic eruptions! I definitely want to see an active volcano in person some day, though I hope it is one that is sort of gurgling along, like Kilauea, not a super-caldera with the potential to end life as we know it.

The lead character in my new release, Eruption, has one best friend/college roommate. The two of them seem like opposites on the surface, but Violet likes Mia’s eccentricity, and Mia likes Violet’s normalcy and steadiness. They’ve both been burned by people they’ve trusted before, so they take nothing for granted with each other.

In this excerpt, we see Mia helping Violet get ready for her first date with a guy she’s been crushing on for a year.

EXCERPT

Mia and I dug through my wardrobe on Saturday, a day of perfect football weather. Chilly temps on the walk to cafeteria “brunch” morphed to blindingly sunny and warm by noon. Mia and I had totally different taste in everything, which meant I couldn’t pull off her ruffled mini skirt and black leather jacket look. She understood me, though, and we settled on a pair of skinny jeans, a yellow sleeveless top with black trim (school colors!), and my sporty flip-flops with floral straps. I slathered sunscreen on my shoulders and arms while Mia searched her collection of hair clips.

My brown hair rested a tad below my shoulders. I finger combed a sloppy part down the middle most days and usually had at least one side tucked behind my ear. I tried not to pull it up all the time ’cuz the bulk made the top of my head look too wide. Mom said my face was heart-shaped which I interpreted to mean my chin was too narrow for my forehead.

Mia twisted the front pieces of my hair back and secured it with a bobby pin so it didn’t blow into my lip-gloss if a breeze kicked up at the stadium. (I’d rejected a rhinestone clip and a daisy barrette.) “You sure you won’t wear some eyeliner?” she asked for the third time. “I could make your eyes look big as pool balls if you’d let me.”

“Just the look I’m going for,” I said, picturing one of those big-eyed puppies that adorned every greeting card a few years ago. “This is a football game, not the prom.” I already felt overdone with one coat of black/brown mascara.

“If one wants to be treated like an aristocrat, one must dress like an aristocrat,” she said in a voice like the Queen of England’s.

“I’m a Copperhead, not Princess Kate.”

“Whatever.” She sulked. “Ooh, ten ’til one. I’m outta here.”

“You don’t have to leave.” The panic I’d been fighting since daybreak changed my breathing to hitching gasps. Boone Ramer. Here. To get me. Soon. I thought I might puke up my ham and cheese omelet.

The best roomie ever grabbed my shoulders to show me my reflection in the mirror screwed into our dorm room wall. “You got this thing, sister. His Hotness obviously likes you, and you’ve been ready to have his babies for a year. Be you. Except lose the expression of terror.”

I nodded and smiled and practiced not looking like a deer in the headlights.

Mia grabbed her jingly neck lanyard and skipped through the open door.

END OF EXCERPT

These two will go through plenty together in this book—including Mia’s only half joking encouragement for Violet to jump Boon’s bones—and they’ll experience plenty more growing pains in the series.

Eruption Blurb

I’m in the middle of the perfect college semester, hundreds of miles from Mom, with an awesome roomie and my freshman crush finally becoming a sophomore reality—Hotness! I’m figuring out calculus, I’ve got both hands on the handlebars and the wind of freedom in my hair. What on earth could slow my roll?

How about if the Yellowstone volcano erupts for the first time in 630,000 years, spewing a continuous load of ash (crap) all over North America? Think that’ll put a kink in my bicycle chain?

Make that kinks, plural, because here’s a scientific fact I’ll bet you didn’t know. Nothing ruins the perfect semester like a super caldera. Now that I’ve made you smarter today, maybe you can tell me how to keep my life cruising in the right direction—no to Mom, yes to roomie, double yes to Hotness!—during a global disaster?

My lame name is Violet and, in the interest of full disclosure, I’m not hanging from the side of a cinder cone on the last page of this trauma, but there’s definitely more to come. Unless, of course, humans become extinct and then there’s not. Duh.

Eruption is available for preorder, released on September 13, and will be on sale for 99 cents until September 27.

Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MRHAIRO

I’m giving away some cute swag with the book cover and Yellowblown™ series logo charms made into necklaces, bracelets, and bookmarks. Sign up for my newsletter at www.jillhughey.com/contact for a chance to win one of your choice!