Weddings & Funerals.

I'm sorry you missed me last week but I was busy, crying. Weddings, funerals and John Wayne. I'm rather late in getting this newsletter over to you. This happens from time to time and when it does, I always feel I owe, both you and myself, an explanation because I made a promise to the two of us a few years back that this email would arrive, weekly. I missed last week's by a day because one of my best friends, Alexandra, asked me to be an usher at her wedding. I wasn't the only usher. There were four of us: myself, John, Brian and Robbie. (The four of us, along with the bride, have been best friends for as long as I can remember.) The prettiest moment of the day, for me at least, was standing outside the doors of this wedding venue, staring at Alexandra in white. Here's a glimpse of what I saw... She's radiant. She's gorgeous. She's a living, breathing chandelier. The four of us can't take our eyes off of her. Our eyes are turning to glass. It's silent outside the room. You can hear muffled music, barely, sounding from within. Then, silence as the song changes. We hear a light tap on the door, signaling to us that it's time for the doors to be closed no longer. We open them. Slowly at first and then all at once. Alexandra steps through with her father and the world stands as she makes her way down the aisle. The wedding took place in Southern Indiana, where I was born and my father was born and my grandfather was born. The day before the wedding I took my grandfather out to breakfast. (Or, at least that was the plan –– when the bill arrived he wouldn't let me pay.) Before I helped him into the passenger seat of my 89 range rover, a feat like climbing Mount Everest ever since his stroke, I took the above photograph of him. John Wayne was my late grandmother's Jesus and this poster hung on her bathroom wall for as long as I knew her. He won't let me have it. These two moments were a beautiful contrast this past weekend. Spending moments with two people who mean the absolute world to me. One, a man, in the twilight of his years, making his way off the stage. Another, a woman, her life just getting started, with her John Wayne. And, I suppose I'm just feeling extraordinarily lucky today. To be here. To write it all down. Young, old or somewhere in between, love on your people, today. Yours, [Cole Schafer](. [That photograph first appeared here.]( *How you can support this newsletter* This here newsletter kills off more dough than a baker and more time than a trip to the BMV. If you ever read something in here that changes your life or your year or your day, you can say thank you by picking up... [Snow Cones]( my copywriting guide, which will teach you how to write words that sell like a Florida Snow Cone Vendor on the hottest of the year. [$100k]( my freelance guide, which will teach you how I built a six-figure freelance business and how with the right amount of grit, luck and skill, you can too. [One Minute, Please?]( my book of poetry and prose, that has sold well over 500 copies and has made grown men who usually just get emotional over sport's documentaries, cry. [Quarantine Dreams]( my other just as good but lesser-known book of poetry and prose, that is completely digital and is "pay what you want" which means you can get it for free if you're short on dough. [Chasing Hemingway]( a shorter way more emotional version of Sticky Notes, that only goes out to a small group of paying subscribers each week. [Moscow Mule]( which is literally just you buying me a Moscow Mule, because I work really fucking hard and sometimes I need a fucking drink. [Or, just Tweet me.]( How the Don Draper of popular fiction has sold 300 million covers globally. In addition to Sticky Notes, I run another weekly newsletter called [Stranger Than Fiction]( where I write stories about bat shit crazy marketing ideas that have made brands an assload of money. If you're interested, you can subscribe (for free!) at the black button down below... *Past Cole is typing now* I’ve never read a James Patterson book. I have no desire to. Where writing is concerned, he stands for everything that I stand against. In many ways… I despise him. But, at the same time, I'm strangely fascinated by him. Patterson has a writing process that feels less like that of a writer and more like something akin to a “writer’s room”. He doesn’t write alone. One might argue he hasn’t written alone since his early works of fiction, back when he wrote on the side of his “day job” as the CEO & Creative Director of J. Walter Thompson’s North American Branch (a wildly impressive position for those unfamiliar with agency-level advertising). After walking away from advertising in the mid-90s and going all-in on writing and publishing mainstream fiction, today he works with a couple dozen credited ghostwriters –– [and you know how I feel about ghostwriters]( –– where collectively they churn out dozens of books every single year. Patterson writes rough outlines of his books in 80-100 pages, punches them full of action and then hands them off to one of his many ghostwriters that “flesh them out” into full-blown novels. He then releases them through a publishing house called “Little, Brown” –– which has always sounded to me like [Ernest Hemingway]( tersely describing cat shit –– where he leads an in-house creative team on advertising each one of these books. Does this, to you, sound anything like Don Draper –– if Don Draper, suddenly, fell in love with books? That or Henry Ford? When [Vanity Fair did a piece on Patterson]( back in 2014 dubbing him “The Henry Ford of Books”, they claimed that 1 in every 25 books sold the year prior in the United States were one of Patterson’s and that, collectively, he and his associates had written 130+ books that have sold 300,000,000+ copies globally. When you see these numbers, you realize the comparison to Ford isn’t all that far-fetched. He is Henry Ford. He just moves covers instead of hoods. I’m not sure why I dislike Patterson so. I’m not sure if it’s because his selling-out has been rewarded with a tremendous amount of success. Or, if it’s because I’m beginning to recognize that writers like myself, writers writing all of their own material, writers refusing to sell out, will never reach these same levels of success. Perhaps, it’s both. Or, perhaps I’m scared to death that with me being so involved in advertising at such a young age, there is a road where I could end up like him, in some small way... maybe we despise those we fear we could become. ['STFU' stands for Stranger Than Fiction University.]( 17 heart-throbbing lines from Nora Ephron's Heartburn. I measure my feelings towards a novel in the number of “sittings” it takes me to read it. Generally, when I get through a manuscript in 2-3 sittings, it means it swept me off my feet. [City of Thieves]( by David Benioff was this way, as was Hemingway’s [A Moveable Feast](. I picked each of them up and it felt like I was dancing with a beautiful woman whose hand I could not let go of. So, I held on and before I knew it, the party was over. I read Nora Ephron’s Heartburn in 1-2 sittings and I felt sad when it was over. Below, you will find my favorite memories. Like any novel, you must read Heartburn cover to cover to experience its magic to the fullest. However, if you simply don’t have the time, down below (on the other side of the black button) I’ve curated a dozen or so of my favorite lines from the manuscript. [Pass me the Alka-Seltzer.]( You need to read this monstrously long, gorgeous sentence in Denis Johnson's Train Dreams. I was first introduced to novelist, poet and short-story writer, Denis Johnson, by a writer and a friend of mine named [Ben Cake](. My reading of Johnson began with Jesus’ Son. The book itself is a bit of an anomaly, it was written in a sprint in order [to pay off the IRS]( and would ironically go on to become what many consider his greatest work. I’ve since, more recently, picked up another one of his books, a novella called Train Dreams. It follows a fictional character named Robert Grainier who works as a day laborer in America’s West back when the locomotive was changing the nation. Much of Grainier’s living is made from logging. It’s gritty, back-breaking, murderous work that Johnson describes beautifully, as the narrator, with the following sentence… *Johnson is typing now* “Cut off from anything else that might trouble them, the gang, numbering sometimes more than forty and never fewer than thirty-five men, fought the forest from sunrise until suppertime, felling and bucking the giant spruce into pieces of a barely manageable size, accomplishing labors, Granier sometimes thought, tantamount to the pyramids, changing the face of the mountainsides, talking little, shouting their communications, living with the sticky fell of pitch in their beards, sweat washing the dust off their long johns and caking it in the creases of their necks and joints, the odor of pitch so thick it abraded their throats and stung their eyes, and even overlaid the stink of beasts and manure.” [Now that's a fucking sentence.]( P.S. 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