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| The author, Dane F. Baylis |
YOU NEVER KNOW WHERE THAT CONTACT MIGHT LEAD YOU.
OR
STAYING IN TOUCH IS EASIER THAN REBUILDING A BURNED BRIDGE!
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First of all, I'm running a little late tonight because I took a day to get out of my office, out of town, and enjoy a little road trip up the Central California coast with the Editor-in-Wife. Between the day jobs, family, and a really intense period of writing a new piece and editing a couple of others, it was time for a little R and R. So up to Morro Bay and Cayucos where we visited an Art in the Park event in the former and a Peddler's Faire in the latter. Some good food, antique crawling, and gorgeous weather was a real change and a thorough delight.
In the meantime I received some good news. A while back I had submitted a piece to a publication that didn't pan out for reasons well outside of my control. The editor I had been in contact with has since moved to a larger, more prestigious house and assumed the lead in a new venture for that organization. I had done everything I could to let that person know that there were no hard feelings over the earlier turn of events (which were out of their control, too) and expressed an interest in the endeavor they had just undertaken. I was invited to submit if I felt I had anything that would work in that genre. So, as the Editor-in-Wife says, being as I'm a triple A personality, I got to work.
I have just completed a new short story I feel has promise and that should be a fit for this new venue. I got in touch with my contact and let that person know I might have a possible submission. I was informed that what I had was the perfect length and that they would be glad to read it.
Does that mean it's going to get published? Not necessarily. But it does mean I have made a good and useful connection in the game. Instead of having to go the route of submit and wonder if what I was sending in would even be seen by anyone of consequence, I was invited by the person in charge to forward my new work.
Moral to the story? We all go through disappointments out here. Over the near forty years I've spent at this, off and on, I've learned that it is better to just suck it up and try to find the advantage in the situation. Not every "maybe" is going to metamorphose into a "yes" and an author's contract. Sometimes you will get damned close only to watch the opportunity slip through your grasp at the last moment. If you have had cordial communications with someone in this period, don't screw it up by throwing a sack full of "god damn yous" around. This is a very fluid industry and people move about at lightning speed at times. The person you insult or piss off today in one place may very well be the very person who sees your work down the road in a new situation. Do you really want to chance being rejected on name recognition? After all, we're all human beings.
Just a helpful hint from your Uncle Dane.
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LIMITING UNCERTAINTIES
There’s supposed to be a dependable gravity. A natural
attraction through this passage of calendars. That keeps me from sliding
away…Swooping through canyons, halls, or windowless rooms. Flitting up and down
on the wings of a word borrowed for a moment from jealous ether, then spiraling
gone like bebop and into wholly (as complete) or holy (as if any of us truly
even then might comprehend such universes of falsehoods) or merely completely
and we would be liars irreverent in a blaspheming surge of creative litany.
This…Plunging ride on a word wave…should be put aside
to contemplate with atomic precision those imponderable realities of…How – and
– When, this foolish mind will hush, this heart will cool and fade. Perhaps,
but that depends on the sanctity tendered to each word. I have the acquaintance
of the first…Lying like a tiger along my path, the mystery of stripes and
dappled shadow, waiting for my back…Exposing the nape to sudden maw and
ceasing…
All this, glimpsed in the universe of a blood drop,
written as an inviolate description with all its proper measurement and
severity. So simple is ‘HOW’. The WHEN
left only as the steady tick, tock, ticking metronome to song and sonnet,
overture and requiem…The wax to bind feathers and send a rhyme flying across a
page - or a night - or a dream.
Knowing where the tiger hides, time becomes infernal,
a beater gone ahead to scare up the beast when it must come. Unlikely there will be gun, or bow, or spear to
offer chance to that moment of inevitable meeting, but move, I will, forward, I
will, with my life’s resolution, I will…and I will bare my throat…and sing my
way to nothing.
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Meanwhile...live, love, write. With some grace and aplomb!
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leave comments in the form below. I can be reached directly at dbaylis805@gmail.com .
You can also find links to some of the sites I visit from time to time on the
right. I'm also looking for submissions to the Your Work/Your Love page. Authors
retain all
rights.
Tomorrow,
Dane F. Baylis
Author.
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