Spirit Insect

I don't have a spirit animal.
I have a spirit insect.

Abdullah the Butcher

I've had two stories published this year. This is one of them.

Cowboy Jamboree

Bluebonnet Time!

Good time to be in Texas, but it is always good to be in Texas.

Bluebonnets

Finish What You Have Started

I keep track of production by word count. I aim for 2K words or more a week. I also have a goal of one short story a month. In 2017 I wrote 15. In 2018 I wrote 12. So far, in 2019, I have not finished one SS. It is March. I'm getting antsy. Don't get me wrong, I'm being productive, I just haven't finished a SS. It is a special feeling, finishing a story. Accomplishment. I need my fix. I started a SS in January and it kept going, January, and going, February, and going. I finally wrote THE END today.
I'm not finished, mind you. Still a lot of polishing to do, but I got to THE END. The story is called 'The Year Walk' or 'Solstice Nights,' not sure yet. It clocks in at around 11,500 words, which technically makes it a novelette, not a SS. Don't care.
I got to the end.

Basic Economic Questions of Writing

Writing for the sake of writing is all well and good. Writing because you have stories to tell or purely for the sake of the craft is fine but if you want to pursue writing as a career, you must write with purpose and that purpose is to get paid.

With that in mind, writing, like all businesses must be carefully thought out. Professional writers have a business plan. They think about marketing, production and efficiency.
I’m not saying place business ahead of the craft, but take into consideration the business elements when thinking about the craft. Consider not just plot, character arc, and structure but also market, distribution and production. Who are you writing for if you want to get paid? Ultimately you are writing for readers but your first readers, unless you go straight to self publishing, are generally editors. What editors of magazines and journals and book publishing houses are looking for is a tricky proposition.

Start with the basic economic questions:

What are you producing?
This is the part where craft is king. What are your strengths as a writer? Think about length (short stories or novels) and genres. Most people write general fiction. General fiction or literary fiction is a crowded market, making it tough to break through and sell.

How are you producing?
How much time can you realistically spend writing. How productive do you think you will be in creating finished product to send out into the market?

For whom are you producing?
What is your market? Do you want an agent? Are you targeting a book deal or magazines? When you have fully explored the ‘what’ question, the ‘for whom’ question becomes more clear.

I will discuss this topic in more detail in coming weeks. Point I am making in this post is more writers need to seriously consider the business of writing.    

Moses and the Angry Filmmaker

Back in 2010 I had the good fortune to be co-director of the Fearless Film Festival. Fearless was a short lived short film festival associated with Main Street Arts Fest, one of the largest arts festivals in the country.

The featured speaker that year was a writer and filmmaker named Kelley Baker.

Kelley hails from Portland, Oregon and has been in the film business for many years. He is known as The Angry Filmmaker and has written the landmark book on the fine art of extreme low budget filmmaking, The Angry Filmmaker Survival Guide. 

Kelley tours the country showing his films and lecturing on filmmaking and for years traveled with his dog, Moses. We had booked Kelley and Moses in a nice downtown hotel that accepted dogs. I was looking forward to the festival, everything seemed ready.

Of course, everything was not ready. We received a call from Kelley the day before the festival kicked off and were told that the hotel had neglected to tinform us dogs were indeed welcome to stay at the hotel, as long as they were under 15 pounds. Moses was a black lab who’s head likely weighed more than 15 pounds.

Scrambling ensued. Calls were made. Did I mention the film festival coincided with Main Street Arts Festival? Not only were no hotels available that accommodated large dogs, no hotels were available.   

It was finally decided that Kelley would bunk with me for the weekend. It wasn’t ideal, I’m a bit of a private person, but the show must go on.

Friday afternoon Kelley’s big white van pulled into my driveway. Kelley got out, walked around and opened the side door and Moses slowly climbed out. Moses was a road dog and had racked up a lot of miles. The old boy had trouble getting around, Kelley had to help him up my front steps, but he was sweet, smart and adorable.

Friday evening at Fearless passed without fanfare. Good attendance and the programs were well received. We returned to my house and sat on the porch for hours, talking films and work.

Saturday was to be the marathon. The programs kicked off late morning and ran until almost midnight. Moses had to be cooped up all day inside my house. Kelley assured me Moses was used to being inside for great lengths of time and would be fine. 

When we returned to my house shortly before midnight, I walked up the porch, opened the door and, without describing what I actually saw, knew immediately that Moses had passed on.

I froze. I did not know what to do. To be honest the next few minutes are a blur. I felt awkward and somehow, at least indirectly, responsible. Kelley felt worse, of course. He had lost his best friend and traveling companion. We muddled through.

Kelley is one of those rare people you are fortunate enough to meet in life who instantly feels like you have known forever. He is a good and hyper creative man. Over the ensuing years I have picked his mind about filmmaking, writing and the struggle of being an independent artist.

His new book is entitled, Road Dog. You guessed it, the book is about his years on the road with Moses. It is funny, informative, honest and heartwarming.

Kelley is on the road again and will be in the Fort Worth and Dallas this October. Look for dates and more information in the coming weeks. In the mean time, order his books and films and make plans on meeting him when he rolls through Fort Worth and Dallas. You will not regret it. 

Here is the press release for the book: 

Road dog

Kelley Baker

Available March 2017

328 pages, Paperback

ISBN 9781540713520

$ 17.95 USD

“As Eat, Pray, Love is to love and spirituality Road Dog is to the raucous, independent, and contented life.”

      - William M. Akers, author, Your Screenplay Sucks!, Mrs. Ravenback's Way

“Often funny, sometimes touching and always entertaining, Kelley Baker’s Road Dog is a great read that will make you laugh a lot, cry a little and appreciate the important people (two legged or four) in your life more.”

                                        - Nic Brown, author, Werewolves, Zombies & Leprechauns: Tales From the        World of Werewolf For Hire.

A Man, His Dog and The Open Road. What Could Go Wrong?

With no distributor interested in his independent films, Kelley Baker, the Angry Filmmaker, ripped a page out of the punk rock handbook and went looking for his audience in a used minivan with his faithful 120 pound Chocolate Lab, Moses. Every fall and spring they traveled the country showing his films at art house theaters, film festivals, colleges, and biker bars.

Logging over two hundred thousand miles, they encountered a collection of Fellini-esque characters including two hyper-intellectual pro wrestlers in West Virginia, a lying Chicago hotel desk clerk who cost Kelley his home, civil rights workers knocking back rum at Hank Williams’ grave, and a way overzealous drug sniffing border patrol dog outside El Paso, Texas.

Kelley gave an audio workshop for employees of a porn channel, got yelled at in a haunted bar in Memphis, was asked to leave the Prayer Tower at Oral Roberts University, and drove twenty-four hundred miles in three days so he wouldn’t miss his daughter’s choir recital. Moses swam in two oceans, fifteen lakes, and enthusiastically marked thousands of spots from sea to shining sea.

At the end of it all they found a lot more than an audience.

                                            About the author

A graduate of USC’s film school, Kelley has a BA and an MFA in film production. He is an author, (Road Dog, The Angry Filmmaker Survival Guide: Part One & Part Two) and an Independent Filmmaker. He has written and directed three full‑length features (Birddog, The Gas Café, & Kicking Bird), eight short films, and quite a few documentaries. His films have aired on PBS, Canadian and Australian television, and have been shown at Film Festivals including London, Sydney, Annecy, Sao Paulo, Sundance, Chicago, and Edinburgh. He was the sound designer on six of Gus Van Sant's feature films including, My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting, and Finding Forrester, and Todd Haynes film, Far From Heaven.

To learn more about Kelley and his work we invite you to check out his website, www.angryfilmmaker.com, for more information.

Belonging

Writing is, in most cases, solitary work. It is easy to get stuck inside a bubble. However, if the goal is to publish, and most, if not all writing should be done with the goal of publishing, then a writer must exit the bubble, at some point, and seek an audience.

The first audience a writer seeks should be friendly, but critical. An important part of the writing process is feedback and in most instances, the best initial feedback is from other writers.

I have belonged to a critique group for a couple of years. These writers have provided me with essential feedback. This group has been an essential ingredient to my growth as a writer.  There have been, over time, six to eight other writers in the group, all strong writers with a good critical eye. I have learned from their feedback of my stories and from reading their work and watching their progress as writers. We push each other, encourage each other and find emotional support.

General audience readers, friends, family and the like are great and serve a purpose, but it is not as valuable as belonging to a group of people that understand writing and the process.

Find a group, it is not always easy, you may have to join a few or even several to find the right fit.

Make it a priority, it will make you better.    

Napping and Other Writing Secrets

I have been given a ton of grief over the years from telling my children and significant other, “I’ll be working on the couch, so keep it quiet please.” To the untrained eye it appears I am napping, nodding off into Lala land, but to other writers, it is recognized as work, a necessary and important part of the writing process.

I sometimes think the subconscious is where the real work gets done. It is for me where the originality, if I have any, and uniqueness of my work emerges. Every artist I know has experienced ideas seemingly appearing out of the ether. Sometimes a line, melody, or idea just pops in their head as a gift from the gods. I say it isn’t a gift at all, but rather the fully formed work of the subconscious bubbling up to the conscious. Who knows how long they have been working down there, hours, days, weeks, months? Bottom line it is still a product of the artists mind, just on a deeper level. I think an artist’s real talent isn’t necessarily their ability to write, paint, sculpt or whatever their discipline, but rather their ability or openness to tap the subconscious.

A few months ago I was doing some editing on a legal brief for a lawyer friend of mind and came across the practice of soring a horse.

Soring Definition: 

Soring involves the intentional infliction of pain to a horse's legs or hooves in order to force the horse to perform an artificial, exaggerated gait. Caustic chemicals—blistering agents like mustard oil, diesel fuel and kerosene—are applied to the horse's limbs, causing extreme pain and suffering.

I was at first repulsed by the practice then fascinated. A day or two later I thought a super villain with skin like sandpaper would be interesting. The image of a big brute attacking people and rubbing them raw between the thighs or under the armpit would be repulsive and funny. So, I started writing. I had no plan, no characters, except the villain and no plot. I just started typing, almost reading as I went along. I knew it had to be noir, then it fell more into hardboiled pulp. I pulled some Fredric Brown off my shelf and reread some of his work. I researched hardboiled pulp slang.

The words just kept coming out. Characters developed and started doing things. I just followed along. My short stories usually run about 3,500 to 4.500 words but this story blew by that word count with no ending in sight. It actually began to get annoying. There are very few publications that accept stories longer than 4,500 words. Finally, the ending showed itself and I wrapped up The Soring at around 6,500 words. Even at that it felt truncated. I plan, at some point, on going back and letting it loose, maybe see if I can get a novella out of the idea.

My point is I didn’t really try and force a plot on the story, I just let my subconscious lead the way. As a teenager and into my early twenties I loved pulp science fiction and detective fiction. I had read tons and tons of the genre. Fredric Brown is an idol to me. The rhythm, pacing and style was still in my brain, just buried. When it was triggered and let loose it bubbled up and wanted, until I choked it off, to keep going for who knows how many more thousands of words.  

So, open yourself up, get to work and take a nap.

Here is an excerpt from “The Soring.”

     By 11pm the alley rats began to scurry behind the Major and the streets were completely empty. Only three people had entered the building on the Major’s watch. Two women and one man. They all had keys; no one had to be buzzed up and no one had exited. 

     The Major began to fidget. He had neglected to bring a flask or buy an extra bottle at the package store. Without a few pulls of whiskey the tremors would begin to set in soon.

     Sudden movement caught his eyes as the suspect walked in front of the left window shade. His gait was jerky and when only half in the frame he collapsed and fell. The Major stood straighter. The shades on both windows shook. Apparently the suspect was rolling violently on the floor, hitting the wall periodically. The subject was down, out of frame for a full fifteen seconds, then, a second figure, much larger than the suspect, rose from the floor and passed, unsteadily, by the right window shade. 

     “What the hell…” thought the Major. 

     This unexpected action brought the tremors on full force. The Major cursed. He knew the location of most every liquor store in LA but had no mental map of Compton. While he contemplated leaving his post in search of a bar or package store, the hulking figure passed, from right to left, by both window shades, a few seconds later the lights in the apartment went dark.

     The Major was now in a pickle. 

#

"The Soring" will be published in the new pulp magazine Crimson Streets in October or November.