I almost overslept this morning, but our congested little guy's snorting work me around five a.m., and I rolled out of bed while his mom used that little blue ball thing to suck snot out of his nose before feeding him. Hopefully Drew's first cold will be gone today. He's not coughing, luckily, just a bit stuffed up. He gets a bit testy, let me tell you, not being able to breathe from his nose as easily as he usually does...

Once again, my buddy Paul sent me some excellent feedback yesterday on the next chunk of my baseball novel, so I spent the morning fixing up things, following most of his suggestions. It's alway embarrassing finding those dumb mistakes we make when we're drafting, isn't it? I have a tendency to repeat the same words a lot, in the same sentence or paragraph. That and throwing too many characters at the reader at once, without distinguishing them as well as I should.

An interesting comment from Paul was that he was starting to wonder just WHERE the novel was going. Hmmm... This novel is the most episodic thing I've done, so it's been a change of pace for me. I hope I'm not slowing things down too much.

I think it's when I start to rush, actually, with the writing side of things, that the reader's mind may wander. I want to hurry up and get to the next Big Scene without fleshing out the transitionary stuff. So I end up telling a bunch in a single paragraph when I should probably expand it all to a page or two. This is all fixable stuff, and fun to work on for me.

Okay, the youngster's getting grumpy, so I'm off! Later.