7 a.m. on a Monday morning, and I've already edited a good ten or twelve pages of the baseball novel (it's hard to tell exactly, because I jump around a lot, adding stuff here and there as I find holes to fill as well as words and sentences that need pruning or chopping -- sounds like I'm gardening here, eh?).

I got up around 4:15 to give Drew a bottle, which he sucked down, then promptly spit up a third of it on his his sleeper and my shirt sleeve. Nice one! He was still hungry, so I took the easy way out and passed him off to Lizzie and got to work. After I changed my shirt and his sleeper, that is...

I have to tell you, having a sharp first reader for a novel is a must-have. I've only sent off the opening chapters of this novel to a couple people -- fellow writers Paul Martens and Greg van Eekhout -- and their honest, insightful, and priceless feedback (which of course felt brutal, mean, and completely wrong when I first read it!) has helped me make these first chapters shine. I also got great feedback from the novel workshop I went to last year, but Paul and Greg's input was on a more detailed, sentence-by-sentence level. I owe them both a couple beers and a couple dozen chicken wings. Thanks, guys!

It's hard for me to see the forest for the trees with my own work sometimes. Personally, I get irritated when I hear authors bemoaning their own fiction -- "Oh god, this is awful" or "I suck as a writer, look at this crap!" I'm sort of the opposite, I guess. I have too high an opinion of my own words! I need to be knocked down a peg or two before I can start revising. I guess it's just my optimistic nature. Luckily, I have pretty thick skin. (After a harsh critique I'll just cry for a little bit...)

Speaking of loving my own stuff too much, I have a feeling the following line, which I wrote this morning, may have to get chopped from the final draft, simply because I like it WAY too much: "Phil spoke the silent language of baseball, with an occasional detour into the vernacular of flatulence, and not much more."

Ah, sophistication. You know, you can always get me to laugh at fart jokes. Later!