It gives me great pleasure to interview Craig Leener about his YA Book There’s No Basketball On Mars, Why he writes YA, About his Autistic character, his thoughts on instant replay, find out what his stand-out basketball moment is and more…
Firstly, let’s start with the blurb for There’s No Basketball On Mars and then on the interview.

Blurb

Lawrence Tuckerman is a fan of probabilities — well, any numbers and math, really. It’s an interest that goes hand-in-hand with his autism. It’s also how he met his best friend Zeke, who is off fulfilling his dream of playing basketball at the University of Kansas. Now Lawrence expects his life in Los Angeles to become even less social and more routine — just the way he likes it. He plans to finish high school as he pursues his own far-off dream of manning Earth’s first mission to Mars . . .

Then the improbable happens: Lawrence is recruited for a top-secret mission of cosmic proportions! The whole operation relies on him realizing the full potential of his 1-in-6-billion mind — without freaking out. The rocket-science math is a no-brainer, but is he made of the right stuff to manage the communication and cooperation of a team effort . . . without his best friend?

1. Who or what inspired you to write a novel and in-particular for the YA market as opposed to other age groups?

   As is the case with most writers, I wanted to write a book, but I really didn’t know how to, and I was at that point of my life where it was time to make good on the threat or move on. So, I read seven books on how to write a novel, and the storyline soon began to fall from the heavens. I told my son about it, and he said, “Hey, Dad, that sounds like a YA.” All of that happily coincided with my volunteer work mentoring young journalists.

2. What’s are the differences and similarities in writing a novel to you being a sportswriter?

   Writing sports for a newspaper involves relying on one’s wits whilst navigating a looming deadline. Conversely, as a novelist, I have the good fortune to live in my imagination as the clock remains safely at arm’s length.

And the similarities are there as well, certainly in executing the proper mechanics of grammar, usage and punctuation, but also in structuring a story that takes the reader on a journey that includes a moment of equilibrium, followed by a trigger, a quest, a series of critical choices, then a climax, potentially a reversal, and then finally a resolution.

3. What inspired your title – ‘There’s No Basketball on Mars’?

   Those were the first words I wrote when I began to draft the manuscript. I remember the moment. It was eery and humbling, like I was serving as typist for some kind of higher power trying to get my attention. The fun part was looking for the ideal opportunity to shoehorn those exact words into the story.

4. Interestingly, your character, Lawrence Tuckerman is autistic, how important is it that readers are now increasingly seeing a diverse range of characters within books?

   When I set out to write my first novel, I sat down for breakfast at a coffeeshop in Hollywood with a YA librarian I met through my daughter-in-law. Over flapjacks and Canadian bacon, I asked the librarian what publishers were looking for from new authors. Without hesitation, she said underrepresented characters. And in that moment, the intrepid, neurodivergent Sherman “Lawrence” Tuckerman was born.

Books that offer young readers a chance to explore diversity and inclusion are a true reflection where we’re headed as a society — and it is long overdue.

5. Lawrence is recruited for a top-secret mission that is going to take him realizing the full potential. How challenging do you think that is for both your character and people in general to discover and know what that full potential is?

   I threw a lot of challenges and obstacles at Lawrence in the book. I felt it was important for readers to experience the Sultan of Square Root learning and growing as the stakes rose to greater heights. I believe that discovering your true potential starts with gaining an understanding of what your true calling is — the reason why you’re on this earth.

Lawrence knew early on that he was born to be the mathematics flight specialist on NASA’s first-ever manned mission to the Red Planet. For most people, though, that sort of epiphany can be elusive. It often takes many years of the closed-eye process to discover it.

6. What would a stand-out moment of a basketball game be for you and what team do you support?

   For me, there’s nothing quite like a perfectly executed fast break, where all five players on offense are moving in total grace and harmony and awareness of what their teammates are doing as the play unfolds.

I support high school and community college basketball programs all over the Greater Los Angeles area. At the college level, my favorite teams are UCLA and the University of Kansas.

7. It is said that you are a lifelong opponent of the instant replay in sports. What made you come to this decision?

   To my way of thinking, there is intrinsic value in the human element’s potential to influence the outcome of athletic competition, inadvertently or otherwise. It’s another way of saying that we’re all perfect in our inherent imperfection. And I have it on good authority that James Naismith, who invented basketball on Dec. 21, 1891, would not have wanted future technology to replace a well-meaning person in a striped shirt and a whistle around his neck.

8. You sit on the board of directors of CSUN’s Journalism Alumni Association serving as the organization’s director of scholarships, how did this come about and what, in brief, does that entail?

   I learned about the organization from the sports editor at the newspaper where I used to cover local high school sports. He and I are both CSUN graduates. The JAA board meets six times a year to brainstorm ways to support student journalists and raise money for academic scholarships.

9. What are you reading or writing just now?

   I’m currently drafting the sequel to There’s No Basketball on Mars. (Insider intel: Look for Lawrence to potentially travel to the moon in this one!)

10. Where can people find your work?

The Zeke Archer basketball trilogy and my follow-up Mars novel are available wherever books are sold in the solar system.
You can also find the books inside the Little Free Library that’s in the front yard of my home in the suburbs of Los Angeles.