Mr. Mull granted the JagWire an exclusive interview.
Jagwire: You've talked a lot about how you daydreamed as a kid, but that doesn't necessarily mean you always wanted to be a writer. Where did you see yourself at 35 when you were in high school?
BM: Yeah, this is where I wanted to be. When I was in high school I wanted to be a writer. I wasn’t confident that it would happen, but it was kinda my dream or my goal. If you're going to succeed in the arts you have to charge really hard. You have to get lucky on top of it. It's smart to have a plan B, you know what I mean? I got a public relations major and then I went and worked doing marketing stuff while I wrote my books on the side, and that functioned well. It let me live a normal life and still pursue my dream and my hobby, and when I transitioned from being a marketing guy to a writer I changed jobs once the writing was making more money than my day job. So, like, my family never suffered.
Jagwire: You've talked about the unofficial stuff to become a good writer. What college classes should you take?
BM: I got an English minor at BYU. I took creative writing, and that was useful for me. I also wrote for the school newspaper, which was useful, and I wrote for a sketch comedy troupe called Divine Comedy, which is actually a great writing workshop to write and perform sketch comedy.
Jagwire: Can you tell us a bit more about that?
BM: We performed once a month. We did a two hour show of all skits. I'd usually write like a third of the show, maybe half the show sometimes. It kept me writing all through college. It was a Saturday Night Live kind of format. Lights would go off between skits and pop back on and the skit would start and it would just be two hours of skits, everything from song parodies to….If you go to divinecomedy.net you can see some of my old skits. My skit “Lord of the Engagement Rings” is still pretty funny. The Ringwraiths are ex-sister missionaries who want the ring, you know what I mean?
Jagwire: What would you say the greatest influences are on your writing style and what you write about?
BM: When I was a kid, the Chronicles of Narnia were the first books that I loved, and after I read those books I started daydreaming about fantasy ever since. Because I daydreamed about fantasy, I kept reading those kind of books, like Lord of the Rings and whatever was available. When I was young there wasn't as much young adult fantasy as there is now, and so I would have been more happy now as a kid. There's all this cool fantasy now written for young readers, but even back when I was a kid that was always what I liked the best. I daydreamed about that stuff and because I daydreamed about it a ton it became what I wanted to write about.
Jagwire: What's on deck after Fablehaven?
BM: My next series is called The Beyonders, and I think I have a really cool story to tell. It'll be about a couple of kids who cross over to another world, so for the first time they build a world? I think I've designed the worlds to be pretty cool. It'll just be three books, but it'll be three, like, tight books, and the third one will just kill everybody. If Fablehaven four killed you, just read Beyonders. Beyonders will kill you.I think a lot of what’s cool about Fablehaven is cool about Beyonders, and it's not the same story over again. There's also going to be a sequel to Candy Shop War. There wasn’t going to be at first, but I came up with a good idea and I'm working on it, so probably the second half of 2011 you'll see it. I tried to keep the spirit of what was fun about the first one alive, and I think I found something that’s as good or better.
Jagwire: What comes after that?
BM: I will write a book or two a year for the rest of my life.
Jagwire: Your books are unusually clean, even for childrens' books.
BM: I try to think about what my kids would like to read....I try to think about stuff as a parent I would want my fifth grader to read, you know what I mean? That kind of guides me. Would I want them to read something boring? No. So not boring, fun. But yeah, there's certain things I don’t want in there, and I don’t put that stuff in there. It bugs me because sometimes stuff, it's like this "Family Friendly” - and it's also just dumb, you know, boring and restrictive. My goal was to write something that was family friendly and also cool - that you didn’t notice it was family friendly, sort of. You're just like, “Oh, this is cool. It's just fun, and oh yeah-  it happens to be clean.” I want to do it that way. 
Jagwire: But your books can be a bit scary for kids.
BM: I love to try to make it a little bit scary, because one of my theories is if you're scared you're not bored.

Jagwire: Just to end, let's talk about your house "above a prison on a flat mountain." That was probably Draper, right?
BM: Correct. Just going by the bios, right? If you know Utah you can figure out almost everything about me,  - there's like, two years in Chile…yeah, I don’t say a mission, but if you know LDS culture you’re like, “Yeah, I bet he went on a mission.” Cause, you know, I didn’t want to scare all the Baptists away from the book. “Oh no, this is going to be terrible, it's written by a Mormon person!” The goal [with the author bios] is to give [them] some personality, cause I figure you’d want your fiction from somebody with personality, so do the bio that way. Maybe people might be curious. Instead of saying “Brandon Mull was an English minor,” “Brandon Mull lives on the side of a mountain above a prison.” Draw some fun details. Like, it lists a bunch of my jobs that I had before like a comedian, a filing clerk, a patio installer, a movie promoter, a copy writer, a chicken stacker -  all true.
Jagwire: Thanks for your time and many happy returns on your books.