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| The author, Dane F. Baylis |
Talk About My Daily Writing Routine
As I've mentioned before I have a forty hour a week plus day job. With that in mind, my days normally start between 4:30 and 4:45 AM. This gives me time to pack a lunch and snacks for the day, have my breakfast, shower and shave, and take a look at my notebooks. I keep multiples of these, novel outline and notes, character development for novel, novel subplots, short fiction notes, short fiction first drafts, poetry notes and journal. Sometimes I'm just scanning, looking at the last entries or tracking where and how I want to accomplish changes.
I will normally pack these into a backpack with my food and a thermos of coffee and throw a leg over the Harley and I'm off to work. During the day, at breaks and during downtime when I'm waiting on someone or something for a job, I'll pull out my notes and do some work. I am highly language aware so a lot of what I am striving for is individuality and clarity. If I'm working fiction I'm trying to find a way for the characters to tell the story and the action to fill in gaps. Much of this also involves deciding what to leave out. I have the greatest respect for my readers being able to visualize and extrapolate, they don't need me to hold their hands and treat them like children.
The workday closes out at 3:30 and I take it back to my studio/office. There I commit what I'm satisfied with to the drafts and files on the computer. I also make hard copies of everything! I've had one disaster and that was enough. Reconstructing that much material is impossible and even with notes as extensive as mine I had a hard time recapturing everything in the form it had taken in it's last evolution.
Then there's the blogging which, as time goes by, I am really starting to get a lot of satisfaction from. The chance to reach out to my visitors and other writers is always time spent productively. The suggestions and occasional appreciation is good for the ego and the opportunity to help someone just coming up or struggling with something I've wrestled with is always rewarding. I have learned more in those types of sessions over the years than I ever did elsewhere.
Sometime between 9:30 and 10:00 PM my wife will come by and kiss me and remind me I still have a job to go to in the morning. I try to find a convenient place to wrap things up, shut off the computer and close the notes. The evening's toilet precedes a half hour or so of reading and I usually turn off the light about the second time I drop the book on the cat.
Weekends are more of the same, but I try to intersperse this with field trips to recharge mind and body. Even so, my musette bag full of notebooks, a sketch pad, pens, pencils and another bag with my camera go just about everywhere with me in my "off" time. There you have it. Yes, it is obsessive, but then I've been called a type triple A personality on several occasions.
As always, looking for short fiction to 1200 words, poetry to 25 lines, and carefully thought out essays for the Your Work/Your Love page. (Submit them through comment box below or e-mail them to me at dbaylis805@gmail.com. Love to have you sign on to follow this blog or subscribe to it via e-mail or rss. It goes a long way towards boosting the search engine ratings. Gadgets for all of that are on the right side of the page. As always comments, critiques, and questions are more than welcome. I will reply in as timely a manner as possible.
In the meantime remember...live, love, write.
Dane F. Baylis
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