Ah, this is the life. Hanging out and talking about history and occupational therapy and writing with my lovely wife, getting some good writing done, running some errands, chilling out, and finishing up the youngster's room. I love me some weekends!

Elizabeth had some great ideas about my protagonist's character and history today as we were talking, and she gave me some reading homework from her occupational therapy classes, dudes like Charles Pierce, Henry James, John Dewey and some fella named Thoreau. Should be fun. Ought to help me get into the mindset of a 63-year-old black man who spent the first 10 years of his life as a slave before moving to the Midwest... I hope...

I'm also looking forward to reading Carter Beats the Devil, which I started reading earlier this year and then got stalled on. I want to see how other writers handle "historic fiction." How much detail must you add? How do you handle voice and dialog? How much research is needed?

But first I have novels by my fellow writers Jim and Greg to read first, which I'm hoping to dive into today and most of the day tomorrow.

I get to read as a reward for finishing up the first revising pass at my opening 3 chapters of the baseball novel this morning, as well as fixing up my very clunky synopsis. I hope to do more on that tomorrow morning. Very excited. MOST excited!

And it's only about 2:30. I love long weekends when we don't have a million things plan. We've got some odds and ends to do for Drew's room, then we'll probably kick back, read, and then watch a movie -- we've been hitting Netflix hard lately.

We watched "Purple Rain" last night (Lizzie had never seen it!) and tonight is "Reservoir Dogs" (another one she hasn't seen). We watched "Eternal Sunrise of a Spotless Mind" last week, which I thought was an excellent movie, great characters and visuals, and a tricky storytelling style that made me really focus, and even better, paid off in the end. It was a cool SF movie, actually, even if the SF (removing all memories of a person) was mostly hand-waving and impossible. I want all my memories, thanks, even the bad ones. They make the good memories stand out even more, and make them more significant. Good memories, like I'll have of today, I'm sure. Later!

More of the Work in Progress Meme:

The singing from the tin shacks would rise up like the voices of ghosts, sprinkled with the cracking sound of wooden bats and the slap of the ball into bare hands.

-- from The All Nations Team