Great Sand Dunes inspire adventure story

Corveaux Millions might not be a shredder of sand dunes. His nephew Landon is, though. A simple family trip to the Great Sand Dunes inspired a story that taps into an untapped fictional realm. 

The sand dunes have been written about endlessly and will be written about until they are blown away or washed back into the ocean. Most of those texts are scientific, research-based, or historic. Sand dunes have inspired great works of fiction throughout time. They’ve inspired people and beckoned adventurers. 

Frank Herbert’s Dune comes to mind. 

Millions and his wife, Luna, moved to the San Luis Valley just over five years ago. They came from Oregon where they started Toytime Entertainment. Based out of their home now, they hope to continue their work by entertaining the people of the San Luis Valley. Millions will be at a release and books signing event for The Duneshredder at Narrow Gauge Book Coop on Saturday, Sept. 28.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

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Alamosa Citizen: Corveaux Millions, is that your real name or is that a pen name?

Corveaux Millions: It’s my real name now. It’s not always been my real name. I was born, not that I would like that to be a big deal, but I was born under a different name. About a decade or a little more ago, I changed it because I was using it as a pen name. I had gotten kind of locally popular under my other name. When I started writing I wanted to separate myself from my father’s work. He was getting kind of popular and he and I write different stuff. He focused on children’s books and as much as I like to write children’s books, I’m also a science fiction writer. The story I was working on and have since published is a little different and out there and I wanted to have some separation from him with that so that people didn’t look at me like it was going to be a children’s book. I started writing that series under that name. I didn’t have a lot of attachment to my previous name. It was very common. I just wanted to be less common. I wanted to have a name for myself. 

AC: Where does it come from?

CM: French actually. My father’s from a town called, well it’s Lafayette in Macon County, Tennessee, and there they call it La-fay-ette. And so there’s some French roots there. There’s a lot of Creole in my family. I have Native American, Creole and very British roots. I was wanting to lean more into the not British side of my roots. I just wanted to pick a Creole name and it’s something I had heard as a kid. It just sounded like a cool name to me.

AC: It is. 

CM: That’s why I picked it. I wanted to have a neat pen name, something unique that stood out that there wasn’t a hundred of or a million of. I wanted to be my own unique thing.

AC: I think that sometimes it’s nice to say, ‘I don’t want to fit into this and attention is good because I have cool things I want to share.’

CM: Right. Yeah. That’s me, man. I don’t necessarily want the attention, but if everybody looks at The Duneshredder, that would be great.

AC: Exactly. I think that if people are brought to the author and the author brings them to the work, then that’s a job well done.

CM: That’s all I’m going for. That’s what I hope, at least I hope people enjoy what I make.

AC: From one writer to another, I know this is a loaded question, I know that you get into philosophical grounds, but what pulls you to write? Why do you write?

CM: Storytelling. It’s actually really simple. Writing is the basic tool for storytelling. It is the least expensive tool, I guess.

AC: Amen to that.

CM: I have a lot of imagination and really big dreams and I want to do these big things. Step one is getting it down on paper. I guess writing is my vessel to get the stories out. I want people to see the story. It doesn’t matter to me that it’s glossy or has a million dollar budget or a bunch of effects. I would rather people do all that in their mind. Your mind is so much better of an effects machine than Hollywood or I could create or buy. If I can get you to use that thing, then you’ll see my story so much better than I probably intended you to. 

AC: Many an artist has found their way to the San Luis Valley, whether by purpose or by accident. What was it for you?

CM: A purposeful accident maybe. … I spent about a year researching the San Luis Valley. I knew my time in Oregon was ending because of my living situation. … I had to make some decisions about life and where to go and how to keep everything moving forward. We were having trouble finding a house. Every house we had looked at had some problem that kept us from wanting to buy it. The last house we looked at was underwater the day we went to do the showing. We were getting really discouraged that we wouldn’t find anywhere in Oregon to live. I just got fed up and said well ‘I’ll build something’ and looked for land in Oregon. There’s not a lot there for a reasonable price. I started looking anywhere and everywhere. When I found the San Luis Valley, I saw a picture of Mount Blanca and it was, I don’t know, karma, faith, kismet, one of those words that mean destiny. I looked at that mountain and just saw home. It didn’t make sense for me to pick anywhere else after I saw it. Since I’ve moved here, I’ve wanted to know everything about the place and that mountain and see everywhere here. I think that I chose right.

AC: I want to ask you about what inspires you about this place, but I also want to know where are your favorite places to go? I mean, do you have camp spots? Do you have places you just go to get away, to the mountains, anywhere in particular that you’re kind of fond of?

CM: My land is in the middle of nowhere. I’m not too far from much, but it’s still off of the beaten path from a lot of places. I don’t really have to escape anywhere. I can sit here and be escaped. 

What inspires me about the place is that there’s so much story. Back to the beginning of man you can trace the history of this place and the stories that have been told about just the people here, the different kinds of people here, the different generations and eras of people that have been here. It’s neat to think that it’s still so empty, even though so much has happened, so many different cultures have been here. That’s inspiring to me. 

AC: I want to talk about The Duneshredder and just a little backstory and make sure I’ve got this right. So you said you went on a dune trip with your nephew and this was kind of the impetus for this story?

CM: I had just finished my house and my mom wanted to come see it. My mom is, well, she’s in her late 60s, and my father passed a couple of years ago – about three years ago. She needed a companion to come out and see me, someone to fly with, someone to just be with. So she brought my nephew who I haven’t seen since my father passed. Before that I hadn’t seen him since he was a little kid. He’s grown into a writer himself and an artist. At 19 you want to do everything. [My mom] brought him out so I could talk to him, kind of get to know him a little better. I didn’t get to watch him grow up through his teen years, so I wanted to just get a feel for him. But I know he and I are very similar-minded. He’s on the path, so to speak.

I hope that he sticks with what he’s doing. We’re working on another comic together that’s his story. When he came out, he wanted to do the Sand Dunes. They were asking me what is there to do here? And I didn’t want to just go, ‘well, nothing.’ I told him the tourist stuff…. He asked, ‘Well, why would we go to a big bunch of sand?’ And I said, well, they sandboard, they slide these boards down and ride. And he goes, ‘Oh, that sounds neat.’

We rented him a sandboard and took him to the dunes. My mom wanted to see it. So we stuck her out there in the hot, hot part of the summer, let him take the board and just go crazy. He was a natural at it. It was neat to see because I looked at it like, oh, that’s for kids and I can’t do it, I’m old now. There’s no way my bones will allow that to happen. So when he just did it and it was like, wouldn’t that be nice to be 20 years old again? Just be able to pick up a sandboard and just do it.

Just have the balance and the ability just to jump on it and do it. I thought that was so cool and he was having so much fun doing it. I was looking around at all the people that were doing it, and I was like, man, wouldn’t this be cool if that was just some big thing people did, if there was some big marker up there and they had a slalom and if it was a real big deal. In my head, I imagined it was in some places, but here it’s not that big a deal in my head. What if it was a big deal? What if there was a guy like my nephew who was just so good at it and became a celebrity at that sport? And the more I thought about it, the sport doesn’t have anything like that. They don’t have a big name promoting it. There’s no Michael Jordan of sandboarding.

AC: Not yet. Not yet, anyway.

CM: I wanted to help push the sport along by getting this artifice and a character that people could get behind. I was taking pictures of my nephew and he was making jokes about being a model, and I said, well, what if you were? And he goes, what do you mean? I said, well, I got this story I’m thinking of, and I was doing it in real time. It wasn’t like I had planned it. I was like, well, I got this story in my head right now. I think it would be neat. And he goes, OK, and you know how 19-year-olds are. They don’t think you’re going to really do anything. I took a bunch of pictures of him and said I’m going to use these and do you mind if I use them. He goes, do whatever you want to with them, Uncle. And I said, well, all right, you’re the cover model for my new book. And I went home and I started writing right after they left.

AC: When we talked a couple weeks ago, you said you wrote this fairly quickly and I’ve always chased the fabled “stream of consciousness.” I mean, seriously, it’s not uncommon, but to hear it firsthand, like, oh, I just sat down and I wrote and I finished it. It’s something we all chase, but what was it like for you?

CM: Well, I’ve done it a lot. You sit down and you want to write something and you want to finish, you want to see your story done and in your head, it’s neat. You can sit there and change things and you’re still in the brainstorming process, but then when you actually sit down and start writing, that’s when you get to the ‘it’s real now’ point. You’re having to actually make it something. Sometimes it is a neat groove you just get into and then sometimes you’re fighting it. On this one, I didn’t fight it at all. I was just in the groove. 

My brainstorming process was really short on this because I kinda knew what I wanted to do. It’s not anything new. The ‘new’ about this book is in the sandboarding aspect and the creation of the character, but the tropes and story model is very much a standard, mainstream, safe story for teenagers. It’s Scooby Doo meets Johnny Quest with a little bit of extra suspense…. It’s very much intended for people to just get a little happy moment out of and not overanalyze me or my writing style. It’s just a fun story.

AC: Just hearing about the character and the situation, I was just thrust back into childhood and watching all these movies of the kid who kind of falls into the wrong sport or is the underdog, just that story that you could fit any person into. And I love when I don’t have to – and please don’t take offense to this – when I don’t have to be a critic or I don’t have to pay attention. You know what I’m saying? My whole life is analyzing and criticizing and to just to be sat and entertained is so valuable.

CM: That’s what I was going for. I didn’t want anyone to have to overthink about it. Really what I wanted was a story that showed in a very normal way, in a very safe way, the San Luis Valley, the people here, what it would be like if you would just had an innocent experience coming to the Valley and you didn’t have any of the crazy stuff happen to you. You just came, you had a good time because that’s what my mom and my nephew got to do…. And I thought, man, if people knew you could do that here. People move here and they realize, oh man, it’s really hard to live here, it’s really hard to make it here. Well, it is, but it’s also really nice to just come here and enjoy it sometimes. If you don’t put that burden on this place, it is an awesome place…. That’s what I was trying to do with the book is to show that even though it does have some heightened suspense moments and some kind of funny moments, it’s really just a good time.

AC: I guess this might be too early, but what would you write next? I mean, do you have a one for them, one for me, or is it just kind of story by story?

CM: I want to be selfish and tell you that I have a one for me for them, one for me system. I’m actually more sporadic than that. It’s more about inspiration. I really would like to be able to keep track of what I’m doing better and be able to tell you what I’m going to put out next. I have a hundred stories planned and half of those are half written. I know what I want to do next. I’m working on the sequel to The Duneshredder right now, and that’s just so I keep it topical. I’m going to take the next one to the Pacific Northwest where I lived before and do the same thing there – show that there’s a good part of that place that you can have a lot of fun at too. 

AC: There’s also some pretty gnarly dunes over in Oregon, too. You think you’d make your character travel around a little bit, maybe take it to the world circuit?

CM: That’s the plan. I’ve actually planned the first four books. I want to have it keep going pretty quickly. It’s not a hard series to write. It’s like how I imagine The Hardy Boys went. You just get on a roll. What I wanted for the character is that I wanted to have a series of different adventures in different places. He’ll go to the Pacific Northwest next. Then I’m going to deviate out of the story a little bit, and I’ll let everyone wonder why when it’s time. Then the fourth book goes back and continues his journey to become the best sandboarder ever.

AC: One of the things I was kind of caught by with The Duneshredder, and maybe just because it’s fresh in my mind, I think we can thank Frank Herbert, but these giant sand piles inspire such mythos. Do you have a mythos in your book that kind of carries this gravitas, this element of something bigger at play?

CM: Not really. Just to fall back on what I was saying about it being safe is I didn’t try to put any cryptic anything in it. I didn’t try to stretch people’s imaginations too far. There is a larger storyline going on throughout the series, but it’s more comical. It’s Jaxon’s interaction with the antagonist. They’re like a Boris and Natasha kind of character set. It’s him continuing to run into the same sect of antagonists throughout the series haphazardly, and it just being kind of coincidentally funny. Other than that, there’s no large overarching narrative or any deeper big mythos being created. Nothing like that. If anything, the mythos is around Jaxson himself. He is the big legend…. I want Jaxson West to be the same thing as Reacher or any of the Clive Cussler books that have the same protagonist in every book. That’s what I want for him. But I want it to be for teen readers. 

AC: What you are getting at is something that not a lot of teenagers around here get. It’s a story that is from their home, from their perspective. Something that they maybe they’ve done before. It’s a unique thing to go to the Dunes on vacation. It’s an entirely other unique thing to grow up with them.

CM: I actually went around and I talked to a bunch of kids from here, a handful…. I wanted to get the local experience of what it was like growing up here. One of the characters in the book is a native from here. I tried very much to make her seem like one of you guys that grew up here, like she could have been in class with you guys. I don’t have the full experience of what that was like, but I wanted to make a character that people here could relate to. When you read the story, she’s kind of the character you’re supposed to like the most. Even if Jaxon is the [protagonist], he’s still the Shaggy of the story. I wanted to make her the local hero. I even gave her a local family name from one of the people that have helped me out here. I wanted to just acknowledge them in the book in a minor way. I used their last name.

AC: Who was that family, if you don’t mind my asking?

CM: The Roybals. When I moved here, I didn’t have to live in an RV or build a quick shack to live in or anything on my land. I didn’t have to struggle. I was very much taken care of by just the generosity of my previous landlord, the guy who rented me the house I lived in. He was very understanding of what I was doing. After moving here he took a liking to me and he’s been kind to me ever since and I appreciate it. Without his help, I don’t know how I would’ve succeeded here…. I just gave him a nod in the book. Turns out his brother’s middle name is one of the character’s names, so he can claim it if he wants.

The book is dedicated to the good people at the San Luis Luis Valley…. I know that people come here and they bring their ideologies with them, and they are resistant to, I guess, the way of the Valley. We make jokes about it all the time. There’s Valley time and there’s the Valley way. If you live here and you want to live here, you learn all that stuff. It’s not the big city. It’s not little suburbia. It very much is a make-it-or-break-it place. Everyone from here who’s been here has made it or broke it….

AC: And you’re here, you’ve built your house here, you and your wife live here. Do you plan on staying?

CM: Until the day I die, hopefully. I’ve never put this much effort into all my living conditions or my future. When you’re young, you don’t think about life in a hundred-year time span. You think of it in a two- or three-month time span, and that gets bigger and bigger as you grow up. At some point just when the whole reality of what was happening in Oregon and us losing our place and well, it made me have to think in a much longer timeframe. Before I moved here, I wrote down a five-year plan, and I knew it was going to probably take that long to succeed at it, and it did. It took just shy of five years to finish what I was doing. Then I knew that the plan after that was to use this to make the company bigger again, because we’ve gone through phases of being bigger and smaller. I kind of want to stop fluxing. I don’t want to fluctuate anymore. I want to just grow. That’s kind of what my goal is. To build, to slowly grow here in the Valley, hopefully with acceptance and become a good entertainment company.

AC: You think it’s important for an audience to get to know the author of a book?

CM: I think it’s important for people who are fans of any media…. I think it’s important for you to be able to connect with your audience and have your audience connect with you. That’s a big part of the interaction, a big part of telling the story. I think we live in an era where the artifice of the machine, just everybody being able to look at a screen and get it real quick, takes some of the experience away from the storyteller and the audience. It’s a much more fun time when you can look each other in the eye and smile at the funny parts together and laugh together and have that experience with each other around the work…. It makes the work have meaning. So if a bunch of kids show up and I read it to ’em and they really enjoy it, I hope that the impact from having it read to them by the author is greater than if they had read it or if somebody had read it to ’em. I hope they take the memory with them.

AC: How do you see, in today’s society, in today’s generation, how important is it to have a physical book?

CM: Very, unfortunately. I would love to say that people use their screens to read the right things. If everybody was using their tablets and phones to read eBooks and just still be reading books, I probably wouldn’t have as big a problem with it. But you don’t see that. What you see is people with little experience influencing other people with little experience through short form media. There’s no real growth in learning happening and reading a book, it’s hard to compete with the growth and learning process of that, even if it’s a fiction book, even if it’s just for fun. There’s an accomplishment you feel at the end of reading a book that you won’t get at the end of a YouTube video…. 

I think we’ve lost that sense of just being happy with what we have. That’s not the audience’s fault. I mean, it could be the industry’s fault. It is more of a problem with what’s being made, I guess, is what people expect to be made. These companies that have a lot of money to do these things, they look at the audience and see a crowd that can’t be entertained. They’re trying to do anything but tell a story. If I had it my way, what I would change in the world is that storytelling would go back to being storytelling. We would be focusing on the storytelling aspect of it, not the advertising or marketing or fan service part of entertainment. 

AC: One of the things I’ve always appreciated about good Sci-Fi is they just drop you in and they don’t explain anything. You have to fill in the blanks. You have to live in this world. And I think what The Duneshredder is doing is that you’re saying here’s this world – The Great Sand Dunes National Park – welcome, and that’s it. Here’s this character in this world. Here’s this story. You think that that’s kind of an accurate representation?

CM: Absolutely. As the reader, you’re supposed to think this character has been around. This is not his first adventure. This is his next adventure. He’s pivoting from the stories you would’ve read about him before into this new person.

You’re being dropped into Jaxon West’s new life as a sandboarder, and you’re supposed to imagine that he had an old life where he was famous, but for not quite the right or not the reasons he wanted, and he’s trying to fix that. I’m totally making you use your imagination to believe that this person came from somewhere and that I dropped him into an established setting that you will recognize. Other people would have to bend their imagination just a little or maybe take a plane trip or a car ride and be able to. 

AC: What about the Dunes immediately caught you?

CM: The ginormous, expansive nature of it. It is really hard to go to a place that is so different from what’s right next door to it. You could go to the wetlands right down the road, and it looks just like the rest of the prairie, maybe a little wetter, but it’s the same…. Then you drive 20 more minutes down the road and you walk into a totally different universe. Once you look over the dunes and you see the mountains behind them, you’re like, OK, yeah, I remember where I’m at.’ But for a moment, when you’re in the middle of the Dunes, you might as well be in Africa or in Australia or some far-away place that’s not just in the middle of Colorado. It’s this neat experience when you go, because you don’t expect it to be so big…. I grew up in a place where people didn’t go any further than 30 minutes from their home. If they went and saw something, it was a weekend adventure. Since I’ve left Tennessee, I’ve not lived like that. I’ve always tried to go out and experience everything around me.

AC: You said your dad was a writer, if you were able to bring him to the Valley, what do you think he would say about this place?

CM: He got to see it once before he passed. 

AC: He did? What did he say about this place?

CM: I think he’s jealous.

AC: Yeah?

CM: See, you’d have to be southern to get that joke. I guess my dad loved it. He was so proud of me. As sons, when we look at our fathers, all we really want is for them to go, ‘Yep, yep, you’re a good man. You did good. You’re great. Don’t worry about it. You’re good. You turned out right. I’m proud of you.’ And my whole life, I had searched for that, but I’ve always been kind of aimless. When I was a teenager – we were all kind of rebellious, and I was the same. I was no different. I very much couldn’t make up my mind who I wanted to be or what I wanted to do or any of that. My dad always wanted better for me. He always wanted more for me. And then when I moved away,  [we] didn’t talk for a long time. He had gotten sick, and you know how guys are. We just don’t pick up the phone. I didn’t talk to him a whole lot through my 30s. The year he kind of knew when he got sick, knew what was happening to him, he wanted to come see me again in his life before he didn’t have the chance.

He wanted to see what I had done in the time. He didn’t know me. I think he was very impressed with the Valley. The funniest thing is, I even have a picture from when I was 2 years old. They had come to Pueblo. They had come here on vacation and bought a shirt. I’ve got pictures of my dad wearing the shirt and me in the shirt. It was almost like a portends. Even that long time ago when I was just 2 years old. It’s like he knew this is where I’d gone or where he wanted or whatever…. So I think when he came out here, he looked at me and went, ‘Yep, yep, you figured it out.’ And so that’s why I said he’s jealous.

AC: That’s, man, that’s powerful.

CM: Every guy needs to hear their dad cheer ’em on at least once in their life, just to know that your male role model appreciated how you turned out. I’m glad he got that, and I was glad to get that, too. I think he liked it. He thought it was neat. I took him and showed him the whole place.

AC: What’s your next adventure? What’s next for Corveaux?CM: Oh, I’m going to take on the world, man. I’m going to do a thing. I’m actually just speaking probably way too candid right there. I’ve always wanted to show who I was to the world and my whole life, I’ve kind of hid it. And it was not out of fear or shame or repressed artistic nature or anything like that. I wanted to be sure of who I was before I said, ‘Hey, here I am.’ I am pretty sure who I am right now. Right now, I think is my moment to where I go, ‘Hey, look at this’ and see maybe if I did turn out to be what I wanted to be or if I’ve still got some work to do.