Highlighting the best independent publications in fiction and non-fiction. Your new favorite author is right here.

Aaron Safronoff

Aaron-Safronoff
Aaron Safronoff spent his first seventeen years in Traverse City, Michigan, where he attended high school and spent as much time swimming as possible during the short summers. Loving writing, but having no idea how to make a career out of his works, he signed up for a Computer Science major and attended Michigan Technological University.

After two and a half years of classes, he’d finished writing his first novella, Evening Breezes, and decided he was done with the tech life. He dropped out in ’97, and then moved into an Ann Arbor co-op with his closest friend, Jason. It was in 2001, after a series of academic pursuits including math education, biology, and chemistry, that he finally landed in San Francisco, California to attend Culinary School. It was only a month after he arrived that the towers fell and his brother with them. Later, he described the effect it had on him as the beginning of, “… the ten years I spent sleep walking.”

During those years, he wrote several short stories and plays, but with no consideration for an audience. He began writing Spire as well, but didn’t finish it until he woke up in 2011. He is adamant that the intervening years were not wasted, and that he met some of the most spectacular and influential people of his life during that time. He married an extraordinary woman named, Evangeline, and although they are divorced now, they are still great friends.

He worked at various levels in the videogames industry and became friends with some of the most wildly creative and intelligent individuals he’d ever met. But nevertheless, he kept himself at a distance, and didn’t properly engage his relationships or his work.

Today, Aaron is wide awake and motivated, passionate about writing, and excited to share his work. He won a Discovery Award for Science Fiction in the summer of 2012, for Spire, and has since published the sequel Fallen Spires as well as, Evening Breezes. His blogsite, WakingDreamBooks.com, is regularly updated with short stories, and he’s working on his fourth novel, Clay. He imagines himself returning to the games industry some day soon, but he will never stop writing.

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Sunborn Rising (Fantasy)

Sunborn Rising

“Sunborn Rising: Beneath the Fall is the best vivid fantasy YA book of the year.” –Entrada Publishing

On a distant world of forests floating on an ocean around a star,
a blight threatens to plunge all life into darkness.
But three friends seek the light.
Together, they will Fall and be lost.
And at the very Root of darkness, they will find themselves.
But will it be enough to help them find their way home?

The World of Cerulean

Light and water flow from the ocean into the roots of the Great Trees, up through the boughs, and out over the lush canopy. But the once vibrant treescape has grown dim over generations of arboreal life, and the creatures of the forest have forgotten the light.

Barra, a young, willful Listlespur, finds her late father’s hidden journal, and reads about the old world and the mysterious plague her father believed destroyed it. He wrote that he warned the Elders. He urged them to take action. Those were his last words.

Together with her two best friends, Barra will explore every bark, wood, and leaf of the Great Forest to relight her world and complete her father’s story, even if she has to travel beneath the Fall.

Amazon

Spire (Science-Fiction)

Spire_cover_New Size.indd

Joshua has the usual problems of a twenty-something in the not-too-distant future: he tried school–majored in chemistry, drugs for himself–an exploration, and drugs for others–that chemistry degree he was working on, and he still doesn’t know what he wants out of life. Unfortunately, Joshua also has a unique problem with the Collective, the organization that runs the world. He doesn’t know it, but they’re searching for someone that can survive a journey to the next stage of human evolution and he may be the one.

Luckily, Joshua has help on the inside. Eve is running interference with the Watchers and keeping his name off the list, and out of the Leader’s reach. But Joshua’s already been exposed, and it’s only a matter time before no one will be able to contain him.

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Fallen Spire (Science-Fiction)

Spire, the cyberpunk backstory leading to the apocalyptic collapse of the Collective. Fallen Spire begins in a changed world and is the next installment in the Spire universe dropping you into a post-apocalyptic chaos, void of technology, altered by the fall of the Spire, witnessing supernatural humans, demons and a dragon…

The Spire cracked, and from its wounds bled rotten souls, hordes of slavering monstrosities hungry to drown the world.
Joshua could stop them.

Only, he’s not sure he should.

A lone man descends the sundered Spire carrying the condemnation of all humankind in his heart.
He burns not from anger, but rather, from understanding: the harbinger comes only when called.

Deliah is here, and the reclamation of the wasted lives of humanity has begun.

Unless someone believes we’re worth saving.

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 Evening Breezes (Poetry)

evening breezesA young man is lost in grief after the death of his best friend. Evening Breezes tells the poetic story of his night of reconciliation. It is a journey through his past seen through the tears of his present.

The narrative is broken up into Objects and Reflections to help readers understand the frame of reference for each setting, and capture the potency of the memories and how strongly they are interwoven with the man’s sadness in the present.

The story uses vivid, and sometimes abstract imagery to carry the reader to the eponymous poem at the heart of the novella which characterizes the art of memory, aging, and love.

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