I’ve got a new novella available tomorrow. Paperback only, just like the old days. None of that newfangled e-book crap on this one.
Tell your friends.
Love you.
Aaron
Whoa.
I’m still here.
New covers!
Just a bit of news…
Point Nine Publishing this week re- releases the e-books for Love in the Age of Trump, Adventures in Terror and Sewerville, with brand spankin’ new covers! I dig these a lot. See for yourself:
With Love in the Age of Trump just released, it looks like a race between Pulse Pounder and Sewerville Book II: The Dark and Bloody Ground to see which book releases next. Hopefully one of them by the end of the year. Watch this space.
Finally finished!
So Love in the Age of Trump is finished now. It started off being about one thing and ended up being about another. Seems like most things go that way, huh?
Here’s the last excerpt I’ll share with you – the last words I just typed in this first draft, though not actually the last words of the story.
It’ll be out in February.
*
“And what would they do after they were finished with the president? Go back to Columbus? Return to their normal lives, in their normal house, on their normal street, next to the neighbors they had actually never met, whose names they didn’t even know? Would they slip back into the heavy dullness of daily work at the dairy farm and the seafood restaurant, droning for forty hours a week or even longer when the boss required? They would. Yes, they would.
And their life at home – would it be the same, too? Watching Trump on television, ripping each other, forgetting to take out the garbage, drinking Diet Mountain Dews, as Paulina laughed and called him fat ten times every day? Would it all be the same? Sure it would.”
It WOULD be the same. What other options did they really have?”
Libraries are our friends
I went to an event today at the Powell County (KY) public library with folks like Monica Smallwood Mynk, Dena Rogers, Chris Chaney, and Rebecca Hicks (who was live via satellite), among many others. Thank you to the library and organizers!
I hadn’t been there in about 20 years, but when I was growing up, it was one of the Important places. I hung out there a lot. I was reminded this week of when I was around 8 years old, and checked out a stack of paperback novels that I thought were action westerns, but actually turned out to be trashy, filthy romance novels about a lady sheriff and the men she, uh, “loved.” I don’t think my mom was too proud of that when she found out what I was reading. (I’m not sure what the librarian thought.)
Of course, I read a lot of other books from that library. Hundreds and hundreds. Certainly, books I never would have had an opportunity to otherwise read, about topics and worlds I might never have known. Today was a good reminder of what libraries can mean to our society, especially in places like Powell County where books and reading and learning just aren’t as accessible as they should be for far too many homes.
When you drive up to the Powell County library, you see that right next door, behind chain-link and razor wire, there’s a big, nice, new county jail. The jail is important, and needed (sadly, needed all too much these days), but libraries are important, too. We need to support them. If we don’t support them, they won’t seem as necessary, and they’ll fall into ruin, and then sooner or later we’ll look up and they’ll be gone.
Don’t let that happen. Support your public and school libraries.
Anyway, here’s a picture of my books in a case at the library in my hometown. I assume they are usually on the actual bookshelf.
Adventures in Terror…
I was just flipping through some of my documents folders and came across the mock-Fangoria cover I did for a section that got cut out of Adventures in Terror: Mostly the 1980s, and ended up being re-worked and published in Apex Magazine.
I love this cover – one of my favorites. And I still love Adventures in Terror; it’s a better book than Sewerville, in my not-objective opinion, and I wish more people bought it. But alas, more people did not buy it, which is why the sequel to Sewerville will come out a lot sooner than the sequel to Adventures in Terror.
Maybe I had too much of myself in it, I don’t know. Sometimes as a writer, you can get too close to things. Or, maybe I just didn’t know how to sell it. It could probably use a better title, one that better evokes the spirit of the book, which is much more Steven Spielberg-Stranger Things–Something Wicked This Way Comes than it is horror. It’s not scary. It wasn’t meant to be scary. It was meant to be a book about growing up in the hills with ghosts, and it’s just that. I’m glad.
Hello?
It’s been a while since I posted anything, but fear not. I write on.
In the meantime, highly recommended: Stranger Things season 2, Thor: Ragnarok, It (if you haven’t seen it yet), Dark Nights: Metal. Not recommended: The Walking Dead, which seems to be out of gas right now.
Later.
Logan
This isn’t book related, but still something you need to know: go watch Logan as soon as possible. It’s big time. I won’t say anything else… but it’s big time. Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, and Dafne Keene are spectacular.
A lot of huge movies coming out this year (Kong: Skull Island is up next) but I’m hard-pressed to believe anything will top what we saw in the theater yesterday. Maybe Fox can finally learn something and make better X-Men and Fantastic Four movies. There have been a few good X-Men films already but there also have been some really terrible ones. Hope lives, for now.
For starters.
“A dog will look at the ground when he’s done you wrong. A snake will look you in the eye.”
I can’t remember where I heard that saying — it wasn’t that long ago, I’m pretty sure — but at any rate, these are the first words of Sewerville: The Dark and Bloody Ground, and they ought to tell you something about where the story’s headed.
And, the first chapter is about a former U.S. Senator. That ought to tell you something, too.
So there you go.
Forgot to mention…
One small thing. Sewerville II. I forgot to mention this earlier, but I changed the name. It’s now called The Dark and Bloody Ground, or if you want to be completely accurate, it’s now called Sewerville II: The Dark and Bloody Ground. I like the “II”; it makes it sound like a movie. And everybody knows the 2nd movie is always tough on the good guys — see Empire Strikes Back, Godfather II, Captain America: Winter Soldier, Wrath of Khan, etc..
If you’ve never heard, “the dark and bloody ground” is the mythical translation of the Indian name Kentucke. While that now appears to be a bit of a, shall we say, historical embellishment, it’s nonetheless fitting for Kentucky in the late 1700s, and in some ways, Kentucky of the 21st century. Certainly the Kentucky of Sewerville.
Go Cats.
by Aaron Saylor - conjurer of words and spirits. 