Axis of Aaron (67 page)

“What’s next?” Aimee asked, following Ebon’s eyes to the dozen in-progress projects around the room.

Ebon looked at Aimee. He watched fresh snow settle to the sand beneath the gray sky beyond the window, brushing a bleak world that felt empty of all but the two of them. He watched the fire, where private memories burned, decently buried and finally at rest. And he gave Aimee the only answer he had to give.
 

“Tomorrow,” he said.

Author’s Note
 

Not a lot of people know this, but
Axis of Aaron
was born cover first.

Sean and I like to experiment and do crazy things with our art. If you doubt me, just look at the project we wrote immediately before
Axis
: a young adult steampunk novel called
The Dream Engine.
We wrote that book in thirty days, in front of a live audience, starting without any ideas whatsoever, as part of a project called
Fiction Unboxed.
People said we were so crazy, we needed drool cups.
Axis
, which ends up being plenty crazy, started like this:
 

Once upon a time, Sean discovered this great cover designer named Jason Gurley and became immediately excited about getting Gurley covers on all of our work. But Jason was already starting his slow retirement from cover work to focus on his writing, and the work he was taking comprised quite a long waiting list. You’d think that would deter a normal person, but it didn’t deter Sean. He just started finding another way.

“Look,” he told me, pointing excitedly at his MacBook’s screen when I came down for a week-long story session in Austin, Texas. “Jason has all these premade covers. We wouldn’t have to talk him into a commission, and we wouldn’t have to wait.
We can just grab a cover and start writing right now
.”
 

“But we don’t have a book that needs a cover,” I said.
 

“Of course not. We get the cover
first
,” Sean explained. “Then we write the book
second
.”

If you’ve noticed the oddity in this thinking already, you’re not alone. But I’ve got used to working with Sean, and I also know full well that after writing titles like the
Unicorn Western
and
Fat Vampire
series (both of which began as single-line jokes on our podcast, both of which ended at nearly a quarter-million words), I’m convinced that ideas aren’t the rare gems people think they are. We can start from a seed of nothing, then grow it into something. Why would a cover be any different?

So Sean sent me an email and said, “Pick three or four of your favorite covers from Jason’s site, and let me know which they are.” I did. Then, working together, we narrowed those finalists to a cover that showed a quaint town with something amiss: the image was doubled, reflected, and tilted so the beach line was at a vertiginous angle. It was awesome. Now all we needed was a book to go with it.

At the time, when he was doing cover work, Jason put fake titles on his pre-mades so that buyers — sensible buyers who
already had a book in need of a cover,
in a sane world — could see what the typography would look like and where the words would go. And on our pick, the fictional author was Leonard Ammas. And the title?
Axis of the World
.
 

 
We immediately began calling the project
Axis
, because that’s how we’d asked Jason for the cover: “Yes, yes, give us the
Axis
cover. The one by Leonard Ammas. That’s the one we want.” And on our podcast, we started talking about the project (keeping under wraps our stated goal of writing something that was “literary as fuck”), and called it Axis. The book showed up on the production schedule as Axis, and when Sean began brainstorming the idea, he called it Axis. We both grew used to the idea, even though we had no idea what the book would be about, what its characters would be like, or what might happen. Used to uncertainty, we soldiered on.
 

Sean wrote what he calls “story beats” for Axis, starting with the idea of exploring a town by the ocean where, like our cover art, something isn’t quite right. What’s up? What’s down? Which direction is right or left, east or west? The cover didn’t know, so our characters — and, for a while, our
reader
— wouldn’t know either. Art informed life informed art. And when Sean was done, having built those story beats day by day for over a month, he handed them to me. We had thirty days or so before we had to begin the aforementioned
Fiction Unboxed
project, and given our production rate, that was easily time for me to blast through 120,000 words. It was more than enough, but still my first reaction was, “No.”
 

“No?” said Sean.
 

“I can’t write this now,” I told him. “I’d have to rush it.”
 

“There’s plenty of time,” he insisted. “And if you have to move quickly at the end to make the deadline, you move quickly.”
 

But I dug in my heels. No.
No
. No, no, no! I couldn’t write it before
Unboxed
. I
wouldn’t
. I’d have to write it later — after the similarly untitled, similarly improv, similarly drool-cup-crazy origin story that became
The Dream Engine
. Because I’d already read his beats, and I’d got a feel for what might happen in
Axis
. Sean’s outlines always change dramatically as I discover the story during the first draft, so I didn’t know what exactly
would
happen, but I was sure of one thing:
whatever it was would break my heart
.
 

I’d met Ebon Shale. Sean had given me a photo, a bio, a tragic story of a man who loses his wife in a car accident only to realize she’s been unfaithful. And I’d met Holly, the cheating wife — who, as I read her
bio
, I realized might not be as much of a pop-up boogeywoman as Ebon’s perspective would have us think. Even the character duality, looking back, had shades of the book’s final themes, casting doubts on “what’s real” and “what’s not” just as surely as “who’s right” versus “who’s wrong.” I could see Holly’s side of things … and I could see the arrested, stunted relationship Ebon had once with Aimee Frey, back in his teens. Aimee’s character sheet was topped with a photo of a young actress Sean would cast in her role if
Axis
were a movie. She was wearing a scarf, her blonde hair a mess. Her bio began with, “Aimee Frey is cast young on purpose, because it’s how Ebon sees her.” I was intrigued.
 

The beachside that shifts from old to young, from decaying to fresh to impossible architecture reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright.
 

The mysterious woman in red, whom Ebon pursues then loses, for reasons he doesn’t understand.
 

I met the characters. I visited the locations, including the carnival called Aaron’s Party. Even the descriptions of the Party’s varied appearances (active, abandoned, absent) tugged at my emotions.
 

The Aaron carousel was once a really big deal, but no one has cared about it for a long time. It was originally built and paid for by Aimee’s great-grandparents, when there was no one to go to, then admired for decades. When Ebon was a kid the Danger Wheel was fairly new, and people stopped caring about the carousel. Even before Aaron’s Party closed, the hand-carved horses were getting sold off, one by one.
 

 
I saw Ebon’s journey, as his own world doubled, as his own horizons tilted. Sean really had given me the bones of a world based on a random cover. I loved the world. I knew I only had one chance to get it right, because the book would have no sequels. I refused to rush, refused to shortchange it. The loss of time, along with the inevitable and uncaring forward march of time is one of my sore spots. If I was going to wallow in the spent innocence of use and the fragility of cherished pasts, I was going to give it all the time it insisted on taking.
 

When the world began to claim its identity, we began to ponder the book’s title. “How about
Axis?
” I said. Can we just call it
Axis of the World
? It felt right to stick with the title Jason had given it, in a way. Because although neither of us was named Leonard Ammas, the entire world really had been born from that single image. It was
our
axis — the thing around which the entire, fragile project rotated. In the end we changed it to be the axis of our town, called Aaron. But by then I was far into the draft, and even the title decision began to backwash into our story. The title promised an axis of the town of Aaron? Well then. My subconscious was all too happy to have that twist ready as I neared the manuscript’s end, making even our designer’s throwaway title instrumental in the final book.
 

When it was finished,
Axis of Aaron
was our most expensive project to date in terms of hours spent. We’d both poured way more time into the book than we’d intended to, and neither of us cared.
Axis
was a standalone novel — one we proudly declared to be literary as fuck after all — and had far less sales potential than just about anything else we’d written. But we didn’t care about any of that either.
 

All that mattered as we wrapped
Axis
was that we’d done it justice. That stupid, single, throwaway idea that had come out of nothing had blossomed into a fragile ecosystem of delicate things that neither of us wanted to step on and break.
 

We’d taken our time to make sure we’d handled this project reverently, with the respect and care it deserved.
 

And now we’re giving it to you, our dear reader.
 

Handle this story with care, if you would. Pieces of us, the authors, are scattered in shards throughout.

Want To Hear This Book Read By One of the Authors (Along With a Development Diary and Exclusive Behind the Scenes Video?)
 

If you’d like get Johnny’s
Axis of Aaron Development Diary
(all of his day-to-day notes while we wrote the story,
Axis Unboxed
(a video where Sean and Johnny discuss the production of
Axis
), and the book read by Sean, all for FREE, please click or visit the link below.
 

http://sterlingandstone.net/axis-review

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About the Authors

Johnny B. Truant
is an author, blogger, and podcaster who, like the Ramones, was long denied induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame despite having a large cult following. He makes his online home a
SterlingAndStone.net
and is the author of the
Fat Vampire
series, the
Unicorn Western
series, the political sci-fi thriller
The Beam
, and many more.

You can connect with Johnny on Twitter at
@JohnnyBTruant
, and you should totally send him an email at
[email protected]
if the mood strikes you.
 

Sean Platt
is speaker, author, and co-founder of the
Collective Inkwell
, home to breakout indie hits like
Yesterday’s Gone, WhiteSpace,
and the traditionally published titles,
 
Z 2134
and
Monstrous
co-authored with David W. Wright. Sean is also co-founder of genre hopping, reader loved Realm & Sands, with the spiritual epic
Unicorn Western
, future history of
The Beam
, and the revenge thriller,
Namaste.
Sean’s complete catalogue can be found here.
 

You can find Sean at
SterlingAndStone.net
, Follow him on Twitter at
@SeanPlatt
, or email him at
[email protected]
.
 

Johnny and Sean, along with David Wright (the excellent interviewer, and guy whose curmudgeony stance on western research inspired the
Unicorn Western
series) host two podcasts: the horror/comedy show
Better Off Undead
and the
Self Publishing Podcast
. Both podcasts are available on iTunes and the other podcast directories, as well as on Stitcher Radio, and both are for mature audiences only.