Asher Black | Asher's Haunt | Lair of the Ashermost

Lair of the Ashermost

And Virtual Home of Asher Black®

Stories By Night

Asher is a fabulist living in Brooklyn. In daylight, he is a self-employed corporate storyteller, helping brands tell their stories and collaborating with corporate sales professionals to enact a narrative of abundance. When darkness falls, and even the long shadows are inevitably swallowed in black, he turns on the lights in Asher's Haunt™, shapes a fire on the hearth, and tells other stories—of pitiless men, and malice, and ordinary people who resist them. At various times, Asher is a maximist, raconteur, genre hacker, and literary performer.

"You're a bonfire, Asher."

"I write, because I dream while I'm awake — about things that have actually happened and things that need to. I write, because I can say things about the world that can't be heard another way, and because I need to be heard. And because I want to be loved, and no one can truly love a person if they don't know the truth that is in him. I write stories, because I can't stop telling them. They are the language I have for that truth." — Asher

Books in Progress

Manuscript in Editing
Asher wrote this book in 2022 and is currently revising/editing. It is intended to be the first in a series of hard-boiled action novels featuring recurring characters.

Hard Boiled Action and Detective Fiction

Currently Writing
In 2023, Asher started writing a coming-of-age tale set in rural Appalachia. This book is intended to be one of three books with a recurring main character.

Other Books
Asher has some 60 books planned in multiple genres. Whether he gets there or not before the great night takes him and he begins writing in the timeless vast, remains to be seen.

Podcasts

Business talk without the suits.™
For every "organization man," every "suit," there's an adventurer . . . We spend the most productive hours of the best years of our lives at work; it had better count for something. Here are two guys for whom business is their sport and work is a source of transcendent meaning.

We were born to wank.™
Music is strewn with polished rock heroes, clones who want to be some rock god instead of themselves, and know-it-alls who take themselves too seriously. This is a show of two guitar wankers who learn continually, grow constantly, and keep pursuing their own muse.

Contraband for the Soul™
Some stories are like a flask in the pocket—smuggled through life in our boots, held close to the chest, or concealed in some hollowed-out hymnal. We listen as to a bootleg album for the raw material—pure and unguarded, without contrivance or guile.

Powered by Spunk™
We tend to pull our punches—speaking with a cautious moderation that makes all conviction seem a posture. Here you won't find circuitous mincing about. Asher Black goes off like a rocket. Whether you like what you hear or disagree, it will at least be MANHEARTED.

Not Yet Launched
Those with the warrior gene exist in all times throughout history. They are genetically predisposed to a once vital role—protect and defend the tribe. They wake ready to do battle, dismissing any personal cost. However, when the tribe no longer needs defending, they often struggle to find their place, and many simply do not fit. Consequently, they sometimes adopt a hyper-aggressive narrative and posture that competes with the wonderful people they are capable of being.

Not Yet Launched
In 2012, Asher created the town of Danger Springs as a storytelling venue and a place (a construct) for getting to know various characters. A character might only be in town for a week on the way to another story, but he or she will remember having been to Danger Springs. This exists in written form, but is not yet a podcast.

A Brief Experiment
In 2013, Asher experimented with reading other people's short fiction aloud when colleague Nik Perring and co-author Caroline Smailes published Freaks—a collection of short stories, each of which feature a character with an unusual superpower.

A First Experiment
In the shortest month of 2010, Asher wanted to dip a toe into podcasting and do homage to Robert Heinlein, the at-once serious and tongue-in-cheek apostle of rational anarchism—the simultaneous resistance to all forms of control and realistic awareness of the inevitability of control in the context of man's recurring dream of it.

Literary Chops And Other Projects

EDITING & PUBLISHING — Asher cut his teeth (his chops) as a young man—writing for and editing a school magazine, publishing poetry and various broadsheets, and performing impromptu on radio and stage. He was Managing Editor of The Green Man Review (one of the earliest full-production digital publications) for several years in its heyday and, following that, publisher of the digital magazine MYTHOLOG, 'Literature of Mythic Proportions', which operated from 2002-2007.

NIGHTLY CHOPS™ — In Jazz, chops are any individual artist’s demonstration of purely technical skill as part of a main act, after the main acts are done, or in the informal jazz (jam) sessions in various clubs (“he’s showing his chops, tonight”). In Spring 2012, Asher launched a marathon project called Nightly Chops (30 stories in 30 days), focused not on technique but on translating deep-seated emotions into surface symbols, reaching and sustaining a critical mass of creative energy, and maintaining a consistent emotional rhythm. The resulting unedited drafts are the stories of Forest Park.

THE NEXT MARATHON — In 2014, Asher knocked out a novel for NANOWRIMO, the 'Boston Marathon for fiction writing'.

THE BLACK ACADEMY™ — The following year, Asher created a construct called the Black Academy of Story Telling, an aggressive virtual regimen of self-directed study of dramatic structure designed to prepare one to write novels. For his pivotal project, he began writing prototype novels, novellas, novelettes, and short stories to teach himself the craft. "I needed to put myself through school at an accelerated pace."

BUSINESS AS ART — In 2016, Asher began working professionally with commercial enterprises to tell their stories.

CONTINUOUS ART — In 2022, Asher began seriously writing novel-form work. In ten months, he completed a 124K word draft of a hard-boiled action novel, which he is now editing and, in 2023, he began a new work of literary fiction. Asher's musicianship and martial arts as well as a pair of writing coaches have also been instrumental in stoking the fire of his story craft.

This Way to Forest Park

Pull stories by Asher Black® from the trees of Forest Park.