I've been a reader since 1999, when a teacher handed me Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and I stopped being bad at school. I skipped lunches to read. I went through Tolkien, Stephen King, Ender's Game, Michael Crichton, the Wheel of Time. Anything I could get to before the bell rang. A journalism teacher named Mr. Rens, who wasn't even my teacher, pulled me aside and crash-coursed me through his program in two weeks. He taught me to write. He passed too young.
Life happened after that. The Navy, college, marriage, family, and a career in video editing. But the reading never stopped. I have about a thousand books on Apple Books and seven hundred on Audible at this point. Multiple boxes of books in storage, books on shelves at home, all after a massive donation to a used book store when downsizing. I also found my old English, creative writing, and journalism notebooks from high school.

In 2012, I had a dream on a ship in the Arabian Gulf. I wrote the premise down in a note on my phone. That idea became a big project, a four-book dark fantasy series called Eternal: Ashen Chains that I'm still working on. But Lily's Library is the one that finished first. It's smaller, more contained, a single first-person voice in a quiet room. I wrote it during a stretch where I wasn't sure I had anything worth saying. That feeling is baked into the book. Caleb Marsh sits at a desk in a cold apartment and can't write. Then something gives him exactly what he wants, and the rest of the story is about what that costs.

I write most nights between 8:30 and midnight, after the house gets quiet. I have five books in various stages. I also make music and edit video, because apparently one creative obsession wasn't enough.

I live with my family and too many books.

Aaron Bacus is an author of dark literary fiction. His debut novel, Lily's Library, follows a blocked writer who begins dreaming of perfect stories and discovers the cost of taking them. It launches May 14, 2026. When he's not writing, Aaron is a husband, a father, and a creative who has spent his life making things across music, film, and the written word. Lily's Library is the first of several books in the pipeline, with more to come in late 2026 and in 2027.