So today I have a Guest Post from NYC author & producer Lancelot Schaubert, talking about his debut novel, Bell Hammers.
“The novels that stick with me stick with me because of beautiful moments, good characters, true themes, and the hilarious reality of life. And because I felt that way about the novels that stick with me, I wanted to write a novel that did those four things. I think you’ll find BELL HAMMERS does all four.”
1. Beautiful Moments. I tried my best to create moments in this novel you will encounter nowhere else. Nowhere else will you encounter the world’s largest hippo crapping all over a church lady dressed in bleach white Sunday clothes, only to get literally hosed off by her country club drunk husband. Nowhere else will you encounter small children trying to bring a small town online using barbed wire telephone lines. Nowhere else will you find six carpenters staging a sit-in because their forman won’t give them beer. There are some beautiful little trees and beautiful vistas involving meteor strikes and medieval sieges and castles in the small town of Bellhammer, Illinois.
2. Good Characters. Authors overthink characters too often. The thing that makes a good character good is, quite clearly, goodness. And I tried to highlight the goodness of my main character Remmy so that you fall in love with him forever. He takes great care of his neighbors, he sticks up to bullies, he loves his wife in an arm wrastling sort of way. Even when he’s weak or mischievous, you’ll find him strong in goodness and therefore BELL HAMMERS will stick with you long after you put it down.
3. True Themes. The lost father. The utopia of friends. The harmless prank. The big bad wolf. All of these show up in the story and create a third rail that gives deep and true meaning to the events of the plot of BELL HAMMERS.
4. Hilarious Reality. The sheer unfathomable givenness of things like hammers, cigarettes, poop, and music covers the pages of this novel. You’ll find yourself, when you’re done, wondering about the really real.
It’s a book about four generations of carpenters staging a siege of practical jokes upon a major oil company. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll be looking for volume two, guaranteed.
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Two excerpts of Lancelot Schaubert’s debut novel BELL HAMMERS sold to The New Haven Review (Yale’s Institute Library) and The Misty Review, while a third excerpt was selected as a finalist for the last Glimmer Train Fiction Open in history. He has also sold poetry, fiction, and nonfiction to TOR (MacMillan), The Anglican Theological Review, McSweeney’s, Poker Pro’s World Series Edition, The Poet’s Market, Writer’s Digest, and many similar markets.
Spark + Echo chose him for their 2019 artist in residency, commissioning him to write four short stories on top of the seven others he sold them.
He has published work in anthologies like Author in Progress, Harry Potter for Nerds, and Of Gods and Globes — the last of which he edited and featured stories by Juliet Marillier (whose story was nominated for an Aurealis award), Anne Greenwood Brown, Dr. Anthony Cirilla, LJ Cohen, FC Shultz, and Emily Munro. His work Cold Brewed reinvented the photonovel for the digital age and caught the attention of the Missouri Tourism Board who commissioned him to write and direct a second photonovel, The Joplin Undercurrent, in partnership with award-winning photographer, Mark Neuenschwander. He edits The Showbear Family Circus, which has some resources for writers over at http://lanceschaubert.org/resources/ and you can find him on Goodreads as well.
To preorder you can go to:
Milly Space 