Category: articles
-
I Am SHER Locked
Well after reading what he did to my hero in the Houdini biography, I thought I’d never read nor watch a thing by Sir Aurthur Conan Doyle. Nevermind that House was based on Sherlock Holmes (House=Homes; Wilson=Watson; Vicadin=Opium). Nevermind that one of my top-ten actors played Holmes in a recent series (Robert Downey Jr.). Nevermind that I’m…
-
Sitting at the feet of : Big City Photos with Small Town Charm
Robb Neuenschwander provided for his family on an artist’s income carving wood. Celebrities like Richard Simmons and Demi Moore bought his art, but he never grew rich whittling. In that environment, Mark Neuenschwander grew up. “My dad did something I could never do. I’m incapable of hands-on art. [My wife] Autumn’s great with that stuff.” Mark never…
-
Concerning Criticism
One way we censor opinions in this culture is through our aversion to criticism. We dress up our true opinions more from fear of loosing friends and of being real than we are of being mean. We think that people won’t like us if we share our honest feelings–perhaps that’s why most fiction writers are…
-
Outtakes: My Alchemical Wedding
As promised last week, I’m putting up the best pictures from our wedding. Were I a photographer, it would frustrate me to take fantastic pictures only to watch a family order all the terrible ones. Here are Mark’s gems from our wedding:
-
Free Lance Friday!
Freelance isn’t free. Except for today. Today’s the day where all of you nervous people come out of hiding and send me work. Then I send it back completed, free of charge. You send me a story or paper, I edit. You send me a copywriting gig, I write. You send me a story that…
-

My Alchemical Wedding : Alchemy Symbols for a Wedding Planner
We crafted our wedding ceremony around alchemical imagery in order to change the audience from passive spectators into active participants in the drama unfolding onstage.
-
My Top 10 Movies of All Time… as of yesterday
Flickchart liberates and frustrates. It frees us if three movies are all five-star movies. We can discover the champ. However it presents two problems: (1) people like me don’t have time to rank ten-thousand times and so establish normalcy on their flickchart and (2) it seems every third movie I add to the list changes up…
-
Shadowfell by Juliet Mariller
I must be on a Fae kick or something because I started Midsummer Night’s Dream in the same week as Shadowfell, which comes out September 11th, 2012 for any interested parties. Maybe it had something to do with the current political situation and the over saturation of dystopian fiction, but I really liked this book. Sixteen-year-old Neryn…
-
Long Island & Antiquing
We Schauberts like New York City. By “like New York City” I don’t mean we went there once as senior love birds in high school. Other than our home towns (Salem, St. Louis, Joplin, Dearborn), we’ve probably stayed in New York more than any other city. Last summer we had the privilege of staying on…
-
Q & A
The following questions landed some people here this month. I will attempt to answer them to the best of my inability: Why does the Deathly Hallows logo look like the all seeing eye? Because it is one. I would highly recommend checking out John Granger’s work The Deathly Hallows Lectures What did Joseph Campbell say…
-
Write the Breakout Novel
Thanks to Ellie for another great rec to write the Breakout Novel. For one, Maass promises no short cut. Hard work pays. For another, he shifts the blame for bad book revenue from the editors, agents, publishers and publicists to where it should be–on the author. If your story does not sell, you have no…