:: long story short ::

1. After my hiatus, I am returning to blogging with renewed purpose: helping artists thrive and helping non-artists recover their imaginations. All over the site, you’ll find opportunities to sign up for the bi-monthly encouragement mailing list, which is different than blog posts. Take advantage of that.
2. This site will work as an author’s site complete with free stories and articles (wander around to find them). I will house both my copywriting portfolio and my editing portfolio elsewhere. The current layout is here to stay for a long, long time (turns out I needed side bars badly).
3. I’m super excited for this next season and will walk you through the site layout soon.

:: short story long ::

I had lost my way.

Those of you who kept following in spite of the chaos from this last year have seen me cycle through like half a dozen blog themes, rotate pages in and out, post-delete-revise-repost entries and all of the rest. In addition, I started to host my portfolio on this site – a portfolio that was really two portfolios, editing and copywriting. Was this a poetry blog? Was this an author blog? Was this a site for interviews? Was this candy straight from Wonka?

Yes. Yes it was.

Oh, and that tiny detail:

What on earth happened to the whole reflection shtick that gave birth to the blog in the first place?

I needed to apply one of my tools – content audits – to my own site. Problem: I was in the middle of a move to New York City. So I pulled almost a thousand posts into draft mode – first in small chunks, and then in one massive, six-hundred post exodus. I bid my time (bided my time?), expecting to return in a year or five.

Then I realized I suddenly had unplugged from a rather large outlet. And I started getting cabin fever. I paced long enough to blaze new trails on our apartment’s wooden floor. I stayed up until two in the morning with my mind awhirl like a pinwheel on a propeller hat (think: Lewis Carrol). The time to reevaluate this site would come sooner rather than later.

Much, much sooner.

And suddenly I’m excited about blogging for the first time in a very long time. I’m not dreading it at all – which is how it should be with anything we attempt. Find the things that make you come alive and do those, because the world doesn’t need bad people to be good. The world needs dead people to come alive.

So, down to business: what’s the new goal?

I’ll start with a bit of Coleridge:

“An author has three points to settle: to what sort his work belongs, for what description of readers it is intended, and the specific end, or object, which it is to answer.”

Before I launch into those three points, you need to know: this theme is the theme that will remain on the site for a very long time. I’ll walk you around in a couple of days (you’re gonna like what I’ve done with the place, I promise), but it’s stable, I promise. Even if something flashy comes up. Even if I get a truckload of money (I won’t, but hypothetically if I did) and can suddenly afford a tricked-out site from some awesome team like the one at Black Negative. This site layout will be my digital home for a long time. My editing portfolio will remain on LinkedIn. My copywriting portfolio is now on cargo collective.

:: three points to settle ::

To what sort does this work belong?

An author’s site and blog, finally. I’ve shied from this for one reason and one reason only: I was terrified of the people who thought I was freeloading off of my wife for years when, in reality, it was my wife who originally suggested I stop work to build a writing business. The seed for the idea came from my friend Jared Whitt who told me to pick up a craft that would work in tandem with my non-profit work in case funding waned. It took time and pain, but I have long since built a business and made money from my writing.

In spite of my successful venture, the fear remained: does the writing that I do for pleasure hold value even if I can’t sell it? I’ve told my clients that theirs does, but am I an exception? Well no, I’m not: it holds value and should be given away as freely as Doctorow gives his away. “The problem these days isn’t piracy, but obscurity,” as he says.

There was another double-edged fear: what if the literary crowd, whom I love and from whom have learned much, hates me for being a Christian? And what if the Christian crowd, whom I love and with whom have experienced miracles, can’t understand why I write rougher stories about real people who aren’t dressed in their Sunday best? I hate Christian bookstores but I refuse to hate myself, a Christian.

Etcetera, etcetera ad nauseum.

Worse still: what if my designer friends make fun of me for becoming a content machine? For having a site that isn’t “super clean” and “super simple” and the rest?

Well I’m not a designer, a fundamentalist, a critic, or a homeless writer. I’m not a professional churchman or an MFA grad – I’m an unprofessional autodidact rather than formally trained. I’m not the geekiest blogger or a cultural icon – I can’t keep up with nerd culture and am rather obscure. I’m not a niche-based crafter or some cutesy mommy blogger.

But I am Lancelot Schaubert and I need to be me. (Don’t try this at home, kids). That means developing a place where my readers can gather and enjoy the company of one another: an author’s site complete with tons of free content that I’ve written and some that they can pay to see. I need to stop hiding my work in the anonymous corners of the internet and instead let it stand up buck naked on a platform in front of the world.

This is now that platform, thank God.

(I sound grateful to be naked. Huh – didn’t see that coming).

For whom?

Here’s the catch: I couldn’t just make a site where I blog about writing (gag), or about Christian subculture (double gag), or about literary subculture (triple gag and choke), or about copywriting (is that even a thing? copied copy?).

Neither did I want to give pedantic advice about editing because I’m not interested in teaching people how to make money editing. The best editors out there seldom write on the subject and when they do, it’s better than anything I have to say.

I needed a theme to drive this blog that was broad, but that would also focus enough to let us all drill down and drink deep.

Something that would move me and keep me going. Something loosely connected to my work as an author.

That’s when I ran face-first into it and it busted my beak.

See, I moved to New York in part to help this nonprofit create guilds of artists. Forefront helps out the kind of makers and performers that normally barricade themselves in hobbit holes and come out only once a year to try and see their own shadows. Guilds are also for people that need a creative break, whether a “lucky break” or a “Sabbath break” or something in between. These guilds work like one-part group therapy, one-part alcoholics anonymous, two-parts brainstorming session (somebody help me find a better word out there than brainstorming, please), three-parts collaboration, and one-part off-season cross training .

These are the people I’m interested in helping – people who have lost something magical and are desperate to find their way back: artists who have lost the art and non-artists who have tied their imaginations up with crappy plastic cuffs, shoved them into the basement of lost souls, and stuffed their ears to the whimpers.

Artists hope to find Neverland, but non-artists must unbind her.

For these, I blog.

To What End?

I did this in Joplin too, in part through the Joplin branch of the Limner’s Society, in part through meeting others involved with A.C.T. International, but mostly on my own over cups of coffee late at night while reclining on a blanket draped over our old roof with the estrellas in the firmament twinkling down. I’ve mailed copies of The Songwriter’s Market to more than one songwriter, I’ve escorted failing writers through the valley of the shadow, I’ve encouraged middle-aged women to give their passion a fair chance and I’ve been in groups that have rebuked all-too-successful artists for having forgotten their first love – those who let arrogance turn their gift into some dark netherworld god, wringing out all Sabbath and joy from the thing for the sake of their “brand” or “career.”

God help us.

So yeah, it made sense for me to suck it up and do that here too. For artists who’ve quit, who’ve never started, who’ve gotten themselves neck-deep in the mire of success; for allegedly “uncreative” types who design jumbo jets or who reorder budgets into plans for a debt-free lifestyle or who develop people so that they can thrive in a group; for jaded individuals that haven’t turned the ignition key on their imaginations in ages; for retirees who traded this world of wonder for cruise ships headed literally to nowhere and back; for people who do well at all of this but find it hard to love those who fail – for all of these and more, I’m creating space where we can help one another. I’m creating a bi-monthly email update that will encourage us all toward that end – toward awakening the song in all things and learning to sing along, so sign up for that. We’re broken, bruised, and we’ve forgotten the pleasure of singing that ancient music and painting that forgotten picture and telling that old, old story.

My name’s Lancelot and I struggle with these things too in a profound and troubling way. But that’s not who I am – I’m a brother of the one real human and a citizen of kingdom come.

And so, I’m making a little digital haven for any of us that want to try and remember how to cross the threshold back into the fairyland of our youth, even if it gives us a nosebleed and a massive headache and jetlag worse than some intercontinental flight. It’s been a long time, and it’ll be a dangerous trek, but we’ll find our way back. And when we do, we’ll hear:

Welcome home.

 photo from Blue Fox Willow

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