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About Trudy W. Schuett
She calls herself "A NewRenaissance woman living in the AZ desert," because she says, "I'm interested in everything from archaeology to Zen, and how do you hang a label on that?" In her lifetime, Trudy W. Schuett has been a banquet chef, taxicab dispatcher, and government employee. She's been a volunteer coordinator, public speaker-not to mention a wife and mother. She's a dancer, a healer, but above all, a writer. Born in Detroit, she spent the first 36 years of her life there, first living in the suburb of Livonia with her parents and three older brothers, and later moving to the city itself with her husband Paul after their son, Sean, was born.
She remembers the first years in the city fondly. "When Sean was two, we spent the whole summer outside. Most of the neighbors had kids, and we'd pass the days on each other's front porches, and everybody kept an eye on everybody else's kids. It was a real community. Our block was home, and it was a safe, good place to be," she says. "Somebody was always baking cookies, and we'd get out the chalk and let the kids draw on the sidewalk from one end of the block to the other. Sometimes I'd take the kids to the park, and we'd hug trees while getting a science lesson as well." To pass the long Michigan winters, she put an ad in the London Sunday Times and eventually corresponded with 20 British and American pen pals. "It was hard, because all I had was a Sears manual typewriter then. I was a terrible typist, and I didn't know I could write! I thought everybody could write, and there wasn't anything unusual about it."
As the manual typewriter became an electric became a computer, Schuett began writing in earnest. After her move to Yuma AZ in 1986 with her husband and son, mainly for the climate and wide-open spaces, she began writing publicity pieces for small, local charities as a volunteer and eventually magazine articles in the NewAge/paranormal field. "My first nationally published article was a piece in FATE magazine about our cat. They sent me $25, and it arrived two days before Christmas, a time when we really needed the money!"
"Just playing around," with a short story in October 1999, she mentioned the story to a friend, who insisted she promise to finish it and publish. No matter what. When her friend, Doris Barley, passed away suddenly a few days later, Schuett decided she had no choice but to follow up on her promise. The result was "Sweethearts and Monsters," which she refers to as 'a NewAge/' puter geek/romance/suspense.'
"It's supposed to be fluffy and fun, and I know Doris would've loved it!" A dog-eared hard copy of the book circulated among Schuett's son's friends for weeks. "The kids just loved this book, and there's only one guy in it under 30!"
"Friends to the End" came next, within two weeks, and it was also a project that "sort of designed itself," Schuett says. "I wanted to do a book where a woman was the bad guy, because you don't often see that in fiction. I'd had so much fun doing 'Sweethearts, ' and I was thinking I'd have fun again."
Her research online led her to the men's movement. She soon realized this was not another 'fun' project, as the realities of domestic violence against men became clear. "I cried so much during the time I was working on FTTE, I wasn't able to cry again for six months. Some days all I wanted to do was pack it all in and get a nice, stress-free job like air-traffic controller, which looked like paradise to me, then!"
A peaceful existence was not to be, because in april of 2001 came the DesertLight Journal, originally intended to keep her different online friends updated on the things each other were doing. It has since expanded into the only bi-weekly e-zine that covers the men' s movement worldwide, reaching 10,000 readers in 33 countries.. It was a natural next step that she should get together with Raymond Cuttill, in England and form a publishing house. "Books are about communication, an exchange of ideas. There are a lot of good ideas out there that don't fit with the current publisher's ideas of selling big, fat books where the men are jerks, the women are almost saints, and everybody is eternally 35."
Trudy W. Schuett's books