(photo: Johnny Buzzerio)

Having spent the majority of the past year putting the pieces in place for more than a dozen science-fiction-based projects for his company To the Stars while at the same time being a doting father and loving husband, ex-Blink-182 co-founder and current Angels & Airwaves frontman Tom DeLonge has recently been pretty wiped out. And occasionally he’s spaced on important appointments.

This morning, he was supposed to drive a carpool for his 13-year-old daughter Ava Elizabeth and some of her friends, but he was so fatigued from working so hard, he overslept. “I had all these parents frantically calling me and I was gonna make all the kids late because I didn’t remember it was my day to drive,” he says the week of release of the new Angels & Airwaves EP, Of Nightmares. “I literally thought to myself, “What happened to the rock star guy that wanted to never work and that wanted to sit at home and do nothing?’ I was just tripping, going, ‘Everything that I think I want always makes me busy working my ass off as though I’ve never gotten anything in my life.”

DeLonge’s inability to stay still sparked his desire to constantly discover new avenues of creativity. And that, in turn, led to his departure from Blink-182. First, there was bad blood about a new Blink EP that was finished but never came out. Then DeLonge got busy with Angels & Airwaves and To the Stars, which has contracted to work with five authors on upcoming trilogies. The company already has released a short animated film and graphic novels for DeLonge’s priority project Poet Anderson and a full-length feature film called Love with two accompanying CDs of music, and the wheels are in motion for numerous other films and comics, many of which will be accompanied by an Angels & Airwaves EP and a line of promotional merchandise.

Related: Travis Barker Talks Moving Ahead With Blink and Beyond

When Blink-182 asked DeLonge to commit to a new album and tour, he said he was too busy with other projects that were already in motion, and couldn’t fully dedicate himself to the band. So Blink bassist and vocalist Mark Hoppus and drummer Travis Barker asked DeLonge to leave, and hired Alkaline Trio frontman Matt Skiba, who is currently recording with the band. DeLonge doesn’t want to discuss his dysfunctional relationship with his former bandmates. Yet he insists he’s not at war with Hoppus and Barker and shoots down rumors that Barker’s memoir Can I Say: Living Large, Cheating Death, and Drums, Drums, Drums, which comes out Oct. 20, was timed to compete with DeLonge’s first young adult novel, Poet Anderson: Of Nightmares, which he wrote with author Suzanne Young, and which comes out Oct. 6.

“Those guys in Blink-182 are like my brothers, and brothers have their issues,” DeLonge says. “Travis has been working on his book for a very long time. And knowing the publishing industry like I know it – because I am a publisher – it takes a long time to finish a book. So when you have a book and you want it to come out, you have to think a year in advance. Eight months ahead of its release date is the least amount of time when you can have a book done. And then you go to Barnes & Noble and say, ‘OK, we’re ready,’ and they say, ‘OK, we’ll put you schedule for eight more months from now.’ So there’s no spite there. Travis’s book is going to be great. He’s got a wonderful story.”

DeLonge and Young have a wonderful story as well. Poet Anderson: Of Nightmares tells the story of two non-conformist brothers who closely bond together after their parents die tragically in a plane crash. In addition to relying on one another for strength, they share the ability to communicate through their dreams. When one falls into a coma due to injuries sustained in a car accident, the other must navigate the two through a landscape of nightmares and return to the land of the living.

“I’ve always been labeled a dreamer myself, just in the sense that I’m a very imaginative person,” DeLonge says. “So the idea of creating not only in art, but in science and medicine, is exciting for me. I think the mind is capable of a lot. There was a book [by Robert Lanza and Bob Berman] called Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe that came out five years ago, which described everything in the universe as being probability, and it takes the human mind to make it into something tangible and physical. So the universe doesn’t exist unless there are humans or intelligent life to observe it.