aBautz

Before becoming a published author with Anatolian Press, Daniel Bautz grew up in a small one-stoplight town in rural Ohio. Daniel knew he wanted to be an artist. Taught to paint by his grandmother, Jeanette, and inheriting the artistic drawing gene from his grandfather, Peter, comic books scratched that itch for him. Daniel graduated from Lucas High School, where he attempted his first novel. It was a 50,000-word horror novel about his hometown.

He moved to Pittsburgh for art school. He became unenamored with the visual art world but followed his learned craft into the world of graphic design. Primarily putting up his pad, pencil, paints, and brushes for monitors, mice, and keyboards for 16 years, he toiled against the largely unsatisfying enterprise that is commercial graphic design. 

Behind the scenes during this time, he sought to create on his own. First, he wrote the treatment for a motion picture, a B-Rate Horror film full of all the tropes and cliches for low-budget horror, “Where No Roads Lead.” With his brother and a friend, they hashed out the script and looked into making the film themselves. They ended up writing another script and filming a completely different movie, a comedy called “Why My Grandpa Went to Hell.” It was a piece of crap, but the script was solid, and made a slight profit. The script written by his brother and edited by Daniel showed the written word for the first time more potent than the image.

Undaunted, however, by the artistic failings of the first film, Daniel, with his brother, Benjamin, unhatched a fantastic script for a never-filmed picture, “Preternatural.” Unlike the previous script, where Daniel did minor edits, the brothers worked hand in hand, collaborating on a very dark fiction. The film never happened due to the fracture of Realm Productions, LLC.

A few years later, the brothers dusted off the first script and, a couple of rewrites later began production on “Where No Roads Lead.” After months of practice, they filmed over a long weekend and produced another piece of crap. Although a more polished turd, still a turd. But the script was solid, the story was strong, and this is where Daniel realized movies were not in the cards for him. So they shelved the project.

In the middle of this, Daniel Bautz began hosting a podcast. His original plan to get audio clips for a documentary turned into a ten-year trip. The documentary never happened. The show, however, ran for eight years and had hundreds of episodes. Starting as a podcast and ending as a terrestrial late-night radio program “emanating out into the deep dark streets of Marysville, Ohio.”

It’s on this journey that Daniel found the engine that fulfilled the drive to create. The written word. His ability to draw and paint got him more accolades, so that was his pursuit, even though it never drove him. It was just a means to an end. The craft was not as important as having the end product. So his craft never grew beyond what was necessary.

So he began to write. On a whim, he just had a story he wanted to tell. Now, writing is his life. The writing is as important as the story to him. He reads about writing, writes about writing, and when he is not capable of either due to circumstance, he thinks about writing. And so he writes.

Follow Daniel Bautz from an unknown writer of words & teller of stories to a published author. After several years, Daniel accomplished finding a publisher, Anatolian Press. His debut novel, Life Is In The Blood, drops in 2023.