Interview With Author Lancelot Schaubert
Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
Dozens, I don’t count.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
COLD BREWED —
Jett Cropper’s best friend dies from a bad coffee roast that had been laced with chicory. To find the new burnt Master Roaster behind this mess, Jett dives into the city’s underworld to bring back justice no matter the cost.
Told through both words and pictures, COLD BREWED takes place in a classic prohibition-era world where coffee is currency and third-wave coffeeshop lingo is drug slang.
Though filed among other graphic novels, this unique story uses silent film and film noir techniques. COLD BREWED favors classy black and white photographs over pencil sketches — a grittier grandson of the narrative form developed in Selznick’s books “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” and “Wonderstruck.”
Shot and produced in and around Joplin, Missouri, Cold Brewed reinvented the photo novel for the 21st Century and testifies to the art revival happening in the formerly tornado-devastated town.
____
“You get where you wonder how life got so whipless. Been there before, didn’t want to go back.
“Did anyway.
“It happens. You end up staring at your boots asking how they got so wet. How the water on them got so hard. Guess these days, there ain’t enough grinders like me left on the streets. Everything’s darker than it used to be – more burnt, less clean.
“Some new Master Roaster comes into town and tampers with the trade and everything ends up in the knock box and the water gets hard again and runs the drains over.
“And when there ain’t enough grinders like me who’re willing to crawl down in there, down into the sewers to filter it all back out, then all that hard water creeps up higher and higher till it spoils us all…”
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
In the sense that I write anywhere, see it as a job, and have a minimum word count, yes. I’m not fussy about it, I’m a workhorse who grew up poor and underprivileged, though there are certainly those in the world that had and have it worse than me. It’s not something I fuss about.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
Dostoevsky and anyone you’d find in the Harvard Classics, Britannica Great Books, Eastern Classics, Desert Fathers, or Prenicene, Nicene, Post-nicene fathers.
Huge influence from the inklings, but also with the kinds of writers who think like them, before and after. David Bentley Hart and NT Wright form a sort of philosophical core to my thinking.
I love Chesterton’s impressionism, hate his anti-semitism and unholy bloodlust. George MacDonald is as close as we get to a saint in fantasy writers.
Gobs of women like Dianne Duane and Juliet Marrilier and Kaaron Warren and LJ Cohen pour into my mind. I’m a fan of Langston Hughes, several Arab poets I heard live, all the romantic poets, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, lots and lots and lots of myths. All of the golden age science fiction writers, I could do this for forever. Weird little academic abstracts.
Also… why don’t we count song lyrics? The OH Hellos? Jon Batiste? Denison Witmer? Sufjan? All the old Irish ballads?
Anyways.
What are you working on now?
Six novels. One’s called Overmorrow that’s having issues. It’ll be out late 2025. I hope. It’s a portal fantasy, in a way, sort of a dark NYC Narnia.
A small town vampire fantasy with a dreamworld interplay.
A cyberpunk security state YA thriller.
A sequel to Bell Hammers as well as a prequel. The sequel is a white trash carpenter’s disco heist. The prequel is basically THE ROAD starring a little girl in midcentury America.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
Word of Mouth. I ask all of my readers to read their copies, sign their copies, and pass their copies on like a massive lending library. If you want to keep one, buy two and lend the other one out.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
Write either every day or enough weekly that’s its as good as if you wrote every day. Do the same with reading. Keep a commonplace journal, preferably in multiple places, to keep track of the quotes that make up your mind. With page citations. Play an instrument and fiddle with paint to keep the spirit of play. Understand basic ontology and virtue ethics. Study personal finance and business reinvestment. Learn a bit about personal reconciliation with mediators and do counseling as very least as often as you’d change the oil in your car. Understand grammar (how language works), logic (how to string thoughts together), and rhetoric (how to communicate your thoughts incarnate words to other people so they believe what you believe or at very least understand it). Have a spiritual director. Indulge in less and less dopamine addictions — particularly substance abuse and eating and sleep disorders. Keep submissions in the mail AND self-produce as an entrepreneur.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
It’ll only get better when you want it to, so say “mea culpa,” reform yourself, then reform the world. AND REFORM THE WORLD YOU MUST. But first, yourself. Too many students these days want to change the entire administration and system when they’re being forced to read a 4,000 page book. Maybe the administration isn’t the problem. Maybe you’re just lazy and don’t understand the purpose of learning and doing the hard thing.
Do the hard thing, grow up, then change the system. Both need changed, but it’s so so much easier to look within and change yourself first, if something needs changed.
CoDa anonymous starts similar to Alcoholics Anonymous: “We admitted we were powerless over others – that our lives had become unmanageable.” You can’t control other people, but you can advocate for systemic change. But first, yourself.
What are you reading now?
I’m in the middle of NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND by Dostoevsky, IN SEARCH OF WONDER by Damon Knight, a bunch of articles by Aristotle Papanikolaou, and some stories for our scifi critique group. Also gonna read YUMI AND THE NIGHT PAINTER by Sanderson soon.
What’s next for you as a writer?
More stories, more investment in the career, more music and multimedia production.
And building out a team to manage it all.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
There’s one book folks never use in this question, and it’s the correct answer for everyone:
— Country Wisdom and Know-How, Everything You Need to Know to Live Off the Land
1. The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien
2. The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
3. The Resurrection of the Son of God by Wright OR a copy of the Bible OR a copy of the Bible + desert fathers, depending on whether or not anthologies count. But if they do, it changes my first to answers to their entire ouvre
Author Websites and Profiles
Lancelot Schaubert Amazon Profile
Lancelot Schaubert’s Social Media Links
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