Filed under Writing …

May 25 2012
5 Comments
censored opinions, creativity, Entertainment, music, poetry, production, The Last of the Tellers, Writing

The Last of the Tellers — One: The Invocation

for Doberman
and, as always, for Kiddo


I

“We must buy the water we drink;
our wood can be had only at a price…

We get our bread at the risk of our lives
because of the sword in the desert…

Our skin is hot as an oven,
feverish from hunger…

Young men toil at the millstones;
boys stagger under loads of wood.
The elders are gone from the city gate;
the young men have stopped their music.”

                                    – Jeremiah, 6th Century B.C.

One: The Invocation

Fill up my lungs this one last time to tell
of what we lost, of what weak life we choose
when we invest in ads despite my tale— Continue reading →

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May 21 2012
3 Comments
impulsive pastimes, lancelot's roundtable miscellany, life, The Writing Life, Writing

“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.”

Recent Work Miscellany

The following articles by yours truly will come out next month, this month or next year at this time:
  • “To Prevail or ‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Flak’” in Hollywood and Vine (article, May/June 2012)
  • “Poker in the Pokey” in Poker Pro (article, June 2012)*
  • “Stamping the Name” in Encounter (article, May 2012)
  • “Choices Make the Man” in Encounter (article, Spring, 2013)
  • “The List” in Encounter (article, Spring 2013)
  • “Remember My Death” in Encounter (article, Spring 2013)
  • for older stuff, see published works and projects under the Writer tab
*This was cowritten with another writer under the pseudonym Thom Schriver

Continue reading →

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May 18 2012
19 Comments
censored opinions, Writing

What’ll You Think of Next?

Hey gang,

Think of this like a love letter from me to you, only less romantic. I save the romance for Kiddo (ask her about the hope chest some time).

Every once in awhile, Continue reading →

May 16 2012
16 Comments
Classic Literature, creativity, Entertainment, Harvard Classics, literature, production, Writing

M.I.T. 4 Free

No, that’s not a typo. Thanks to Logan K. Stewart’s suggestion, I’m now going to take on M.I.T. at the same time as my Harvard Classics readings. Basically, there’s a list of classes:

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May 14 2012
6 Comments
Entertainment, gergia, impulsive pastimes, life, The Writing Life, Writing

On Being a Public Figure Before Peforming

This post is one of my unicorns.

What I mean is I have inched toward this post without warning of its approach for years. In Southern Illinois, as is the case in other parts of the world where they don’t junk cars but “let ‘em rust down,” high school morons hill hop. Hill hopping fits onto the roster of hick track and field, those games that need “don’t try this at home” stickers. Young sixteen-year old men (and women on the coasts) rev up their car engines and catapult over hilltops on country roads, daring other cars to meet them head-on. Thing is, not all other cars are chicken–some just play chicken. Another dozen teens will die this year meeting unseen cars while hopping hills.

Somewhere between hill hopping and unicorns lies this post. No one can catch a unicorn. Unicorns find you. No one expects to die hopping a hill in a Pontiac, but it happens. I’m blindsided by this post because for the last seven years, in the midst of all of my other writing, I have worked on my world of Gergia. No other novel existed–only Gergian books and notes and maps. If Rowling and Rothfuss can work on one series, win a writer’s contest and instantly publish a best seller, anyone can, right? That’s what I thought anyway, and so I pushed off all other projects — twenty novel ideas, dozens of short story ideas, screenplays, journalistic things — for THE SERIES.

The last few weeks, my writing slowed and stalled. I… Was… Crawling… Through… Sentences. It was block in the proper sense of the word–my discipline was trying to force words like water through a clogged toilet. I stalled at the 52,000th word. I would rework scenes, attack the story from another angle and stop at the same place. Another angle, more resistance. It was like trying to chop down a cherry tree with a brand new axe WHILE circling the tree like a foe from some spaghetti western. Only the tree was no bringer of cherries. It was this colossal inbred monster of its cedar mother and redwood father. My axe also turned out to be a cheap camp hatchet.

Something happened this weekend that changed all of that. This week I was armed with an axe and a maul…

Continue reading →

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May 11 2012
2 Comments
censored opinions, Storyssentials, The Writing Life, Writing

Storyssentials: Sentence

Brevity and depth–that’s what you can expect from this post if you reflect.

It would seem trivial to call “sentences” essential bits of story. Part of this comes from people who assume that writers toil for words. Photographers use photoshop, but they toil for photos. Graphic designers use illustrator, but they toil for graphics. Writers use words, but they toil for stories. The medium of a writer is story-essence, not words. Because of this, I ask one thing today: what do stories teach us about sentences and what can sentences teach us about stories?

Three key parts of a sentence follow:

  1. Subject
  2. Verb
  3. Ending

That sounds stupid, but hang with me. We’re building off of what we assume. By “ending” I don’t mean “object.” I mean what word ends your statement? Sentences are microcosms of story. Your understanding of how they work reflects your story-consciousness. The most important part of the story is the subject, or the protagonist. The second most important part of the story is the verbage, the escalation of conflict, what the subject chooses to do. The third is the climax and resolution. What goal is the protagonist working toward? Do they succeed? Continue reading →

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May 04 2012
2 Comments
censored opinions, Entertainment, humor, Writing

An Open Letter to Adolescents (or Adolescence)

To any adolescent it may concern:

When you grow up, your old friends will do different things.

One will go to prison. Another will get married and have twelve babies. A third will join a group of anarchists in Seattle only to quit the group later. Another will become a career politician who accepts bribes from banks that will beg him or her to kick people like your anarchist friend out of groups like the one in Seattle. This bribery is, in the end, pointless seeing as how your anarchist friend already quit. Your corrupt politician friend doesn’t care. He has money. Money becomes disproportionately important when you grow up.

By “disproportionate” I mean that an average penny occupies .03 cubic millimeters of space in the universe whereas an average newborn baby occupies 336 cubic inches of space in the universe. Also, the baby can think. Regardless of how much more space, time and imagination his or her baby takes, regardless of how his or her baby will tell jokes and make more babies when it grows up, regardless of how it is metaphysically impossible to make more pennies by rubbing his or her pennies together, your friend who grows up to become a corrupt politician will still care more about his or her pennies than his or her babies.

As said prior, your anarchist friend will quit. Continue reading →

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May 02 2012
4 Comments
book review, fantastic points of ignorance, literature, production, Writing

Gunslinger and Good News

The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.

With that, King opens his seven-part Dark Tower series–an undertaking he originally hoped would create “the largest work of popular fiction in history.” I’m unsure as to what I expected with this one, but I received something else. Perhaps I looked for Tolkien or Lewis or McCaffrey or Herbert or Rothfuss or Martin or something.

I should have known better…

You regulars know my fascination with King’s nonfiction articles, criticism, On Writing and now Danse Macabre. Halfway through Danse Macabre, I realized that I had yet to read any of King’s fiction. Even though I consider screenplays to qualify as “literature” (Maximum Overdrive, 1408, The Shining, Firestarter, The Green Mile, Shawshank, etc) – Shame. On. Me.

The bleak environment of this first world did what he set out to do–it demonstrated the sheer size of the universe. In scope alone, this series already feels epic and the mere concept of gunslingers, of an order of fighters who work their way up to earning guns, fits Americana. We are not a people of samurai, ninjas or knights. We’re a nation of cowboys, indians and pirates. Gunslingers fit our soul. Continue reading →

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Apr 30 2012
2 Comments
Entertainment, humor, impulsive pastimes, Writing

Tomorrow, I Work for Free

Well I scribed postscripts on every post between the ninth and now to remind all of you people in need of writing, editing and story that I work for zero dollars tomorrow, May first. Since this is a rare thing, since so few people truly grasp the gravity and abstraction inherent in this sweeter-than-sweet concept of “zero dollars,” a concept other people in America refer to as “free,” I decided to draw an educational picture of zero dollars.

Continue reading →

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Apr 27 2012
19 Comments
censored opinions, creativity, Entertainment, Writing

Quitting Facebook

 

Monday April 30th (my birthday) I’ll be deleting my Facebook account. I do this now and again when I need to lazer-focus on my work, but this hiatus might last longer than a month. I might even stay off of Facebook forever. If you want to keep in touch, subscribe here to lanceschaubert.org, follow me on most sites @lanceschaubert or be really freaking hip and join my growing list of pen pals.

Here’s seven reasons why:

  1. The Facebook Sonnet by Sherman Alexie speaks truer than I would like. I’m unsure if it’s healthy to unmend the present by putting everyone I’ve ever known from everywhere in the same room. If this were real life and that happened and there were some battle axes lying around, they’d send in the National Guard before the night was over. Continue reading →
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Apr 25 2012
2 Comments
book review, Cities, Entertainment, gergia, gilded age, history, literature, movie review, New York City, Writing

Of Gangs and Pickpockets

In my Storyssentials post on Research, I talked about how a storyteller must assign himself homework. Mine involves a decent amount of gilded age reading (and viewing). Some might assume I want to write steampunk. Though this coming series employs some steamy elements, I wouldn’t classify it that way. For one, few use steam. For another, I focus more on that period in American history and the issues that arose for us as a people, issues we still wrestle through today. Some of the things I’ve shared in the past were homework like the Houdini biography. Recently, I finished the film The Gangs of New York and the book A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York.

Gangs brutalized and soiled what few glimmering pictures I had left of Nineteenth-Century New York City. Had I not just finished Tale, I would have thought the violence and prostitution a bit overdone—the thing of Hollywood sensationalism where we glorify violence and devalue sex. Unfortunately, the movie treated Five Points mercy, glimpsing the crest of the iceberg of gilded age government corruption. Boss Tweed, as Gangs hints, ushered in the peak of corruption in New York City, brutalizing the poor with his police forces and gangs. I guess it’s really not that different from today’s brutality, only with shootings and stabbings and lynchings poured over the top like tar.

Timothy Gilfoyle in Tale follows around historic George Appo–the son of an Irishwoman and a Chinaman–as he works his way from Donovan’s Lane onto a juvenile delinquent work-ship called “The Mercury.” From that floating death trap (or “floating Sodom” as the people called it back then), Appo hopped in and out of prisons like Sing-Sing, Clinton, Eastern, an insane asylum and less serious places like Blackwell’s Island—DiCaprio’s prison at the start of Gangs. In reality, Blackwell’s was a joke. Prisoners checked themselves in for better living conditions than what slums like Five Points offered and checked themselves out with nothing but a couple of chums and a rowboat. Continue reading →

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Apr 23 2012
2 Comments
Entertainment, impulsive pastimes, music, poetry

Oh My God

Since this is a platform first for my business, I try to keep spiritual/political/inflammatory things from here. I typically fail in an epic sort of way. However, as many of you saw on the sociable networkings this week, I — a soon to be twenty-five-year-old man — came down with THE SHINGLES. I capitalize it so it feels like crappy horror film from the forties.

I’ll spare you the details and the complaining.

INSTEAD

I’m posting lyrics from a song I discovered this weekend. Sharing it for four reasons.

  1. It refreshed my soul when I was down and if we can’t share what moves us, then what are we doing?
  2. The 20th Century Poetry post was well-received by some newcomers, and I think the last half of this song does some interesting things poetically as far as song lyrics go. The first half’s not that great, but it’s necessary to set up the end.
  3. Last year, I changed the subtitle of this blog to “Crossing Every Threshold.” Though you all will one day find out how that fits into my novels, I try to cross the lines people put up to divide one another. I’m not talking about petty edginess or rebellion. I just know all kinds of people and care about all kinds of things. Under that assumption, this is just one more threshold for us to walk across together. You might be surprised at what you find.
  4. I typically care little for this band, but for songs like this we have a song-lyric book market. I’ll save the band name till the end:

Continue reading →

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Apr 20 2012
7 Comments
censored opinions, creativity, literature, The Writing Life, Writing

A Secretary and a Rocking Chair

Hard chair, soft chair.

That’s the dichotomy my greatest rhetoric professor taught me. For a twenty-minute talk, spend ten hours of research in the hard chair and the soft chair’s for the ten hours of reflection on the relevance of your talk. Hard chairs discipline us to grind through the big books. Soft chairs encourage us to think like the people. He uses both when he writes oral manuscripts.

For me, I’ve isolated my work away from my office desk and dining room table to what’s called a secretary, this wall-mounted fold-out writing desk with shelves on top for incoming and outgoing letters. (I’m still hand writing to my pen pals for those of you who want to get in on it). At first, I used this striped, low-backed wooden chair with padded seating. Hard chair with a slight cushion. Good blend, I figured. My chiropractor disagrees… vehemently. So I set that one to the side to hold my satchel (something else my chiropractor hates. He seems to think I’ve got the spine of a retiree. What does he know?)

I fell into the rocking chair by accident. It was one of those days where you’re on a roll and need to make a quick change Nascar style. I switched out chairs and went back to work. Over time, I noticed more back support, but that’s not the only thing that came…

Hard chair and soft chair. Research chair and “so what?” chair. These are the chairs where we nurse and rock our kids to sleep. Soft chair. And yet these are the chairs of old men in old English wings who still tell the old stories to their students. Hard chair. In rockers fathers hold daughters as they cry. Soft chair.A rocker tested Benjamin Martin’s carpentry skills at the start of The Patriot. Hard chair. Continue reading →

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Apr 18 2012
19 Comments
book review, Entertainment, impulsive pastimes, literature, poetry

The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry

I used to be a poet. Of sorts. At least I used to think of myself in that way when I was young. Now as an adult I rarely find time for poetry, rarely make time to think high thoughts and enjoy language for its primary purpose: intimacy. We tend to favor language for persuasion and information, but those came long after its first purpose of raw communication. When people say “Did I use that right?” or “Is that even a word?” they’re worried about information or persuasion. Typically in those moments where we worry about the “right” word, communication was already achieved and the usagery of proper-fide grammatics matters little. Ironically poetry, one facet to the language of intimacy (a space shared with coos, sighs, moans and prayer), depends on “the right words in the right order.” At least to Coleridge…

That realization and a tip on poetry reading threw me back into the game. Now I’m reading again, but not to sound smart or to get information or to persuade some girl to date me. Now I read to find those garnets and emeralds in the riverbed of poetic thought that show the way to diamonds—those phrases, those thoughts that express what it means to be human.

I started with my American anthology, moved to my Major British Writers tomes for  Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the version of Faerie Queen edited by none other than Clive Staples Lewis. Eventually, however, I started to realize that other than the New Yorker and the Missouri Review, I’ve yet to read work by living poets who influence the craft. My poetic imagination (until this week) grew no older than 1967–the death of Langston Hughes. That was forty-five years ago. That discovery threw my poetic imagination into a mid-life crisis. Continue reading →

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