Day 36 of the 365 Days of Blogging

The author, Dane F. Baylis

But I Digress!

 

No, that's not the prompt for the day. That one has to do with your new releases since January or if you haven't...So on and so on and I have things out for consideration and I'm not into self-publication (I beat my ego into a corner ages ago and any time it looks like it might move I show it the club), I'm not a publisher or agent or any myriad of other persons involved in "releases". What I am is a WRITER.

 

The capitalization isn't meant to be the Internet equivalent of yelling, it is simply a statement of who I am and what I'm doing. I believe being a writer is large and bold. I don't chase genres nor do I concern myself with which one the stories I concoct may fall into. I don't write with my audience in mind or a market demographic either. Well, truth be told that last assertion wasn't entirely truthful, I write for a very limited audience. Me!

 

I believe that if you really give your soul to this craft and practice it with a mind toward constant improvement then an audience will eventually find you, not the other way around. I know what makes for good writing because I know good reading when I'm enjoying it. This has nothing to do with any particularly popular subject or style. It might be slice of life vignette, techno-thriller, horror, crime/mystery, literary fiction, salacious erotica (Let's not discuss what constitutes bad erotica, just look at any listing of new "releases" - there's that word again - and you'll be bombarded with all the saccarhin plain vanilla you can stand!). It could pay passing acknowledgement to a particular formula, or style, or philosophy but what it really has that the others lack is that ability to bring you inside the world on the page and communicate to YOU! Not just your mind or even your imagination, but your gut feelings, your emotions.

 

That is WRITING and what I hope, in some small way, I am gaining an iota of skill at. How will I, or you, know if I've done it? Well, the truth is we may never know. We may be long gone to dust an decay and someone will wrap fish with these pages they find squirreled away in that place they bought through an estate sale. Or, just maybe, on a back shelf in a library somewhere (or more likely in some obscure data base) there will be a tome with my byline and the imprint of a publisher who took a chance. And that friends, will be enough.

 

Always looking for short fiction to1200 words, poetry to 25 lines, and carefully crafted essays for the Your Work/Your Page. E-mail then to dbaylis805@gmail.com or submit then through comment window below. I haven't had anything submitted that way yet so I'm not real sure how it might look when it arrives. Good luck! Follow or subscribe using gadgets for those functions on the far right of the page. The more the merrier (It helps with the search engine ratings too). Comments, critiques, or questions are always welcome and I respond in as timely a manner as I'm capable of.

 

As always...live, love, write.

 

 

Dane F. Baylis

Sharing the space.

The author, Dane F. Baylis

For Your Consideration

 

I've been in conversation for the last couple of days with a young man from Halifax, Nova Scotia by the name of Jeremy A. Benson. Jeremy is the owner of a fairly impressive web site. There is a real wealth of information there for writers and poets of all levels and an opportunity to see some of your own work showcased (lets face it bubala, exposure is exposure, especially if your a poet.)

 

Jeremy has also consented to having an original composition of his posted on the Your Work, Your Love page of this blog. So go on up to the tool bar and give his poem, "Wisened Lark" a read. Definitely not time wasted.

 

Now that we've broken the ice on that page I'll be looking forward to submissions from other aspiring, budding, or established writers and poets. I'm accepting submissions of short fiction to 1200 words, poetry to 25 lines, and carefully crafted essays. Send them through the email to dbaylis805@gmail.com or you can pate them into the submission box below.

 

As always, your comments, critiques, and questions are very welcome. You can find gadgets for following this blog or subscribing on the right side of the page.

 

Remember...live, love, write.

 

Dane F. Baylis

 



Day 35 of the 365 Days of Blogging

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

Just A Word Before I Go.

The author, Dane F. Baylis

Where Did That Come From!

Don't you love it! Your walking through the house, turning off lights, yawning and scratching your butt and - BAM! - the correction for the last scene in the outline hits you like a fish bat! You know there's absolutely no alternative here. This is precisely what you spent so much time rooting around in the trash at the bottom of your creative dumpster trying to find just a couple of hours ago. Only then it was, "No, way dude! The muse has left the building!"

 

So you give the whole thing a heart felt , "Screw it!" and you go do something else. No use beating a dead horse, all that gets you is another fast food burger. But just as you're figuring you might get a good night's sleep and take another run at it tomorrow, and I do mean just one door away from your bedroom...ten lousy feet from unconsciousness...there's the solution in all its god damned glory! Do you fool yourself into believing that you'll remember it in the morning? Nope, you've been down that road before. Wait and you'll be head down/ass up in the mental dumpster all over again. So, instead, you sit your keester down and start typing again.

 

An hour and a half later it's on paper and you're starting to see double. The next time some smart ass comes up to you at a reading or workshop and says, "I could have written that." Go ahead and tell him, "Be my guest, please! Just leave it on the desk, I'll make revisions in the morning!"

 

Live, love, write.

 

 

Dane F. Baylis

Day 34 of the 365 Days of Blogging

The author, Dane F. Baylis

How Are My 2013 Marketing Goals Going?

 

Considering my marketing goals until mid-October 2012 consisted of some vague consideration of whether I really wanted to pick up the pen again? Here we are in the second month of 2013 and I've created a Facebook page, I'm on Google Plus in a few different communities, and I'm an irritating, if not thoroughly adorable, presence on this blog. I've got a flurry of submissions out, even more in the works and I'm always looking for the next avenue or contact. I've had tentative discussions with an editor and a publicist and...I think I should go lay down for a while!

 

How do you judge how your marketing goals are proceeding? You can assign targets, meet self-imposed deadlines, schmooze everyone you think might be of assistance in your endeavor. But in the end it comes down to that one fine point...What have you sold lately?

 

The short answer for that is, "Nothing lately.",  which my past experience tells me to regard with a curl of the lip and a heart felt, "So fucking what?" As the cliche goes, "This ain't my first rodeo." I have as many rejection slips as credits and bylines. A dear friend and mentor once told me, "If you stick with anything artistic for twenty or twenty-five years, someone will eventually call you a master of your medium. Then you better watch out because the hyenas will be waiting just past the fire's glow."

 

As I've just achieved the culmination of my sixth decade I may not have twenty or twenty-five years to hang out and wait. So instead of getting all, "Oh dear me! What SHALL I do," about it. I'll just do what I've always done. I'll write this stuff as damned well as I'm capable of and let someone else worry about accolades. Anyway, I'm more into the paychecks, reviews have to be lived up to or exceeded. What a pain that can be!

 

Dane Baylis Undeterred is accepting short fiction to 1200 words, poetry to 25 lines, and well conceived essays for the Your Work/Your Love page. I would appreciate anyone taking the time to sign up to follow or subscribe as it does help the search engine ratings (Gadgets to do so can be found on the right side of this page). Comments, critiques, and questions are always welcome and responded to with as much speed as I can muster.

 

Remember...live, love, write.

 

 

Dane F. Baylis 

Day 33 of the 365 Days of Blogging

The author, Dane F. Baylis

The Question For Tonight Is: How Are My 2013 Publishing Goals Going?

 

Well, where are we? Beginning of the second week in February and we're talking about publishing goals. I've got a bunch of stuff out, more coming down the pipe (various response times) and despite all the constant prattle about marketing, and e-books, and self-publishing, and platform - I don't really concern myself with the specifics of that side of the whole deal. When I first started back into this life and vocation I would have to say the changes in the landscape were overwhelming. However, one of the things age brings is, besides bad knees and deteriorating eye sight, PERSPECTIVE!

 

It just bowls me over the number of first timers that turn up in this or that forum and they want to know what genre they should target, or what the better route is; traditional publisher, self-publish, or hybrid? If Barnes and Noble is still sponsoring book signings or should they approach the indies? All of this before they've made it through their first drafts! Really?

 

Back up, take a breath and think this through. Granted, a lot of it is formulaic and  pretty much a knock off of something they've read a lot of, so they think...Hey, anybody can do this and make money at it! Which is a valid assumption the first half dozen or so times it gets done. Then the field gets so crowded that you're just another splash of color across a potential reader's field of vision unless you have done something to truly stand out.

 

That's where the serious questions and work come in. That's where craft, voice and style will set you apart from the herd. Too many young writers are taking to heart those blurbs that promise a novel in thirty, sixty or ninety days. Read a little closer (and develop that highly sensitive bullshit meter Hemingway recommended) that's a given time period to a FIRST draft! Unless you don't really want to be noticed, then be my guest, forge ahead with your marketing plan. Otherwise get ready for long nights and callouses on your finger tips because the rewrites are where the mastery lives.

 

I go through as many as eight to ten rewrites on SHORT stories (Yes the emphasis is intentional). Sometimes I get lucky and it comes together in four or five but that usually only applies to the ones that were rewritten more than once in my head before I approached the yellow pads. And yes, I still long hand things before I approach this god-damned machine! So, as far as publishing goals? I'll get there - Did it before I'll do it again - I have writing goals before everything else. That's the other thing that comes with age - a really severe case of the "SCREW IT's". This is the way I'm doing it.

 

Always on the lookout for reader's short fiction to 1200 words, poetry to 25 lines, and carefully crafted essays for the Your Work/Your Love page. You can sign on to follow or subscribe using gadgets you'll find on the right side of this page. Helps with the search engine ratings. Comments, critiques, or questions are always welcome and answered in as timely a manner as I can muster.

 

 

Remember to...live, love, write.

 

 

Dane F. Baylis

Day 32 of the 365 Days of Blogging

The author, Dane F. Baylis

Tell How I've Done On My New Years Resolutions.

To say you're looking at it would be an understatement. After spending a number of years (Yes, I said YEARS) in a state of suspended animation deeper than the one they were holding Walt Disney in I've re-emerged into the writing life. That started out as a simple thought of, "Guess I'll see what's going on in the writing world."

 

It has since evolved into this blog, a presence on Google + and taking part in several communities and the sometimes baffling conversations that occur there. Add to this a Facebook page and my daily word count goes through the roof just doing short comments. Then there was the desire to see about sending out some of the poetry that's been providing nesting material for silverfish and rodents.Truthfully, some of what I've seen on-line and in ebook form leads me to believe I've got better than even odds in that department.

 

Inevitably came the, "Damn the torpedoes Gridley, full speed ahead!" moment. As I've said in this blog any number of times, I've published some short fiction along the way and know I have a feel for characters and dialogue, so why not run some of that through the word processing program? Short stories are by nature...well...short. Kind of like long, dramatic synopses, right? After that what is the, if not logical then predictable, next step? Face it, anybody as unbalanced as I can be from moment to moment is going to naturally say, "You know, how hard can a novel be?" Do not even start, that was absurdly rhetorical, I'm a plotter and that is a doctoral thesis on the hard way in itself.

 

How have I done in my resolutions? One poetry manuscript and four short stories out for submission. One novel outline completed and character studies in the works. Four other short stories in different stages of development. New poetry - and journal entries - and a blog post daily. Oh, did I mention a day job at forty plus hours per week along with all the other minutiae of day to day living? Hell I should just have said I was going to lose another twenty pounds. But I haven't been that light since my sophomore year of high school!

 

As always, I'm looking for short fiction to 1200 words, poetry to 25 lines, and carefully crafted essays for the Your Work/Your Love page. No pay, just the glory of seeing it someplace else besides your notebook. Authors retain all rights. 

 

Please follow or subscribe to this blog, it helps in the search engine ratings. Gadgets for those functions are on the right side of the page. Comments, critiques, questions are always welcome. Use the form below.

 

 

Remember to...live, love, write.

 

 

Dane F. Baylis