Aaron Saylor's Blog

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.

(Here’s the next chapter. I’ll have another post later tonight, concerning the unexpected future of this story.)

Five

When she returned to the bedroom, Paulina made an announcement.

“I have decided that we should go to Maga-city One and see President Trump,” she said.

 “When did you decide that?” Willy said. He didn’t bother looking at her. Instead, he stared out the window, at what had become a steady downpour.

“On the way home. I was thinking about it, and I decided. We should go to the capital One and see Trump. The president. You know.”

“Maga-city One.”

“Yes.”

“The President. Trump.”

“Yes.”

She stood there, halfway between the bathroom and the bed, with her hands on her hips. Waiting.

Willy nodded, thought about it. He couldn’t quite settle on why, but something felt out of sorts. Not that Paulina wanted to go see Trump – she loved her president, the same way everybody in America loved him – but she’d never suggested they should make the pilgrimage from Ohio to MC-1. Now she brings it up? And like she said, she had been thinking about it for a while. Maybe the day’s Resistance incursion had driven her to a renewed sense of urgency.

“Maga-city One is a hell of a long drive from here,” he said.

“Four hundred and twelve point seven miles from our door to the White House,” she said. “Precisely.”

Willy found his VR imager in its spot near the alarm clock on the night stand. When he punched in “M-C-1,” the imager projected into the air above them the bed a small, electric blue map of the eastern United States, with an American flag symbol on Columbus and a cartoon version of Trump’s face on Maga-city One. Then it drew a red line from one to the other, and flashed “412” in yellow block text.

“You did not believe me,” said Paulina, pointing at the numbers.

“Just checking,” said Willy.

He waved his hand through the VR map. A polite, nearly human female voice intoned, “Thank you, and good bye,” then the image disappeared back into the device.

“It is only a few hours’ drive,” Paulina said. “Even less if we take a hyper-shuttle. I checked the schedule and each of the next three days, an evening shuttle goes from Columbus to Baltimore to M-C One in an hour and half. For an extra five thousand credits, we could go direct and get there in thirty minutes.”

Willy laughed. “Oh-kay. Where are going to get five thousand –”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Paulina. “I have made some arrangements for us. We can take the hyper. It will be good. I have already decided.”

“We will take the hyper,” Willy repeated, incredulous that she had already though so far through such a bizarre plan. “It will be good? You have already made the arrangements.?”

“I made arrangements for the five thousand credits. I did not make the shuttle arrangements yet but I figured you could handle that.”

Willy nodded his head, still not believing what he was hearing. “I’ll handle it. Right. Sure. No problem. Should I even bother asking where you got those five thousand credits?”

“You can ask.”

“I thought I just did,” said Willy.

“You can I ask, but I am not telling.”

He laughed, a half-hearted and sardonic chuckle, and rolled his eyes.

“Think of it as a gift,” Paulina said, ignoring his doubting response. “I have the five thousand. It is my surprise for you. It is a good surprise, no?”

 “Most of the time, I can’t even get you take a trip to the theater,” he said.

She stepped forward and climbed into the bed, sitting cross-legged next to him, on top of the blankets., with her back against the head board.

“I’m sorry I called you mishka. I know how much you do not like that,” she said, tracing one thin finger lightly along the curve Willy’s bulky forearm.

Willy looked up at her and saw she was smiling.

Uh-oh.

He threw the sheets aside and sat up. “Okay, now I know there’s more to this than the five thousand credits and the hyper-shuttle and the trip to Maga-city One. Just go ahead and tell me.”

“What?”

“Just tell me.”

“Just tell you?”

“Something’s up. I can tell. All of a sudden, you’re being way too nice to me. You’re never this nice unless you need to tell me something and you don’t think I want to hear it.”

Paulina nodded her head, slow. She pursed her lips and held one hand tight on each knee, rocking back and forth with a motion that got faster with each move, as if she were filled with a powerful energy that was building towards a large, violent explosion.

“Okay, then. I will tell you,” she said.

She paused, as if considering whether to continue, then went ahead. “I have this idea. I thought about it on my own, I thought about it a lot. For most of the last few days. Then then after what happened today with that Resistance, I knew I should go ahead and tell you. And then we should go do it.”

“Do what?”

She looked away, towards the other wall, then back at him, though never making full eye contact.

“Just listen to my idea,” she said.

“I will, as soon as you get around to telling me,” said Willy.

“I think we should go to the White House and… visit… the President.”

“Visit him?” There must be more, he thought.

“Yes.”

“That’s it?”

“Not exactly.”

There must be more. Paulina was drawing this out way too much, playing too coy for this conversation to only be about a simple visit to Trump in Maga-city One. Millions of people visited him there every year and enough of them got a presidential handshake or a friendly wave of the hand for it be a rare event. Chances were, if you went to the White House, you saw the President. He made himself available to his public. That’s why they loved him, after all – because he loved them.

“I feel like you’re not telling me something here,” Willy said.

“I think we should go and ask Mr. Trump for sex with us,” said Paulina.

Willy laughed, not positive that he actually heard her correctly. “You want to ask Trump for sex? Like… sex? The bumpty bump? The dirty deed?”

‘Call it however you like,” she said in her frosty Russian accent. “It is what I want to do. It is what I decided that we should do.”

Willy nodded, but didn’t say anything. He leaned his head back, until the base of his skull came to rest against the top of the head board. What Paulina had proposed seemed so ridiculous, so impossible, so flat-out insane that he thought that surely she must be joking. She had to be joking.

What did she think they would do? Go to M-C One, walk right up to the White House, and ask President Trump if he wanted to for a little menage a trois? How would they do that? Just stroll up to the windows of the Oval Office, knock knock until Trump let them in? And how do you go about proposition the most powerful man in the world?

Hello, Mr. President. We love you. We came all the way from the great city of Columbus, Ohio. We were just wondering. Fancy a fuck?

“I will ask him,” said Paulina. “Don’t worry, you will not have to say anything.”

“How do you plan to do that, exactly?” said Willy. He felt his curiosity growing by the moment.

She told him.

It seemed absurd, sure, but the way Paulina described it, and the utter conviction with which she spoke, well, Willy had to admit that she made the whole thing seem, well… possible. As if it would be nothing at all to convince the President to leave the White House and his security detail behind, and scamper away to a cheap motel room for a roll through the hay with a four hundred pound unemployed man and his Russian-born girlfriend, both of whom were total strangers with nothing to offer except their undying love and perhaps an hour’s worth of slatternly passion.

Crazy.

Stupid.

Impossible.

Madness.

And yet, the way Pauline talked, she made Willy believe…

Five minutes after she finished laying out her plan for him, Willy Richmond booked a pair of seats on the East/Southeast hyper-shuttle direct to Maga-city One.

Three hours after that, in the sultry July midnight, they climbed aboard.