Aaron Saylor's Blog

I finished the 2nd draft of a new book today. I want to tell you about it.

In a lot of ways, it’s the book I wanted to write a long time ago. If I’m being honest with myself, I don’t think I could have written it well until now. It’s a horror story, about a murderer in the same small town of Sewerville and Adventures in Terror. It has cosmic and philosophical elements but mostly I just meant it as a good story. I think it’s that.

I was inspired by the ice storm we had in January of 2025, when we were stuck at home on top of a hill, and I was looking out the window of my home office, towards the frozen farmland across the road. I wrote the first couple of chapters and let it sit for a while, but it stayed on my mind; I thought about the rest of the story until last fall, when it finally all fell into place. I sat down near the end of October to finish the job. When I did, something clicked and it poured out. It also seemed to unlock the writer’s block I’ve had for a while, and all of a sudden I’m neck deep in three other books that are burning to get out, just like it was for me a few years ago. Honestly, I haven’t felt that way for too long.

The book takes place in the past, but it’s not a nostalgia thing. It takes place in the past because it’s the first of what will be three books. This one is called Good Hunting, the first story in the arc, and takes place from 1994-1996 (and parts in 1975). It will be followed by Screw Driver, which jumps forward to the turn of the millennium. Then the third and final book in the story is called End Times and it jumps to 2020.

The next two books are completely mapped out and I’m ready to go. I’ll jump right into them as soon as I finish the final draft of Good Hunting. I’ll have plenty more to share along the way, but for now, that’s what’s up.

I’ll leave you with the picture at the bottom of this post. And I’ll talk to you soon. There’s a lot to talk about with this story – what it is, and how it came to be.

Soon.

I have returned.

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

I’m still here.

Just a bit of news…

Point Nine Publishing this week re- releases the e-books for 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 out now, 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.

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?”

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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.[image error]

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 Stephen 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.

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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.

So, as I mentioned, I have some news about the future of “Love in the Age of Trump.”

This has always been planned as a novella, a quick hitter for readers to burn through in one sitting. 40,000-50,000 words or so. A long novella or a really short novel, however you want to look at it. These shorter works seem to be a good fit for our current whiplash society, where it’s hard to hold a human being’s attention for very long before they get drawn away to the next shiny object. (I understand. I can be the same way, too.) And as a novella it was planned, a novella it will stay.

What’s changed is that this story has become a part of something larger: a collection of five interconnected science-fiction novellas, tentatively titled (you guessed it), The Five Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse. Actually, I will probably come up with a new title but that’s it for now.

These aren’t  really political stories. They aren’t about one issue or another and I’m not trying to sway any votes. Their origin lies more in the sublime absurdity of having Donald Trump in the White House. The stories are:

“The Orange Wars.” In the 1940s, alien beings create a superandroid indistinguishable from humans, then send him forward to the year 2016 to wreak havoc on the planet.

“Love in the Age of Trump.” You know, I’m thinking of calling this “F*ck Trump” when it publishes in the larger book. I really want to call it that when it publishes later this year but I doubt the Amazons and Barnes and Nobles of the world will let it pass.

“Conception Day.” A Civil War story. There’s actually a brief excerpt on the left side of this website’s home page. I’ve mentioned it before, and it was originally going to be the second book I finished this year (along with Sewerville: The Dark and Bloody Ground (lol)), but priorities have shifted around a but.

“This House Has No Basement.” In which President Trump ascends to a higher consciousness and makes contact with the same alien civilization that created him, only to learn his true reason for existence.

“Black River.” This incorporates and expands my previous story “The Dead on Black River,” and tells the story of the Earth left in Trump’s wake.

“Love in the Age of Trump” publishes at the end of this year, followed shortly thereafter by “Conception Day.” The other three stories should land in 2018, with the entire  Trumpocalypse omnibus coming right after.

I mentioned several months ago that I might publish two books this year. It looks like now there will only be one, but 2018 will be busy as hell. I’m looking forward to it.