Note to self: A minor-league baseball game is not as interesting to an eighteen-month-old as it is to a thirty-six-year-old. As soon as we found our seats last night (WAY out in right field! With the sun in our eyes! And no Bleacher Bums in sight, alas), Drew was already doing the squirmy dance.

So we took turns entertaining him. Lizzie let him climb up and down the steps leading to our seats, while I took him to see Willie the Clown, who made him a balloon Tar Heel foot (this guy was GOOD -- you'd tell him what you wanted from a list of 30-40 options, and he'd just bang it out). We made it to the seventh-inning stretch, and I got to watch some decent baseball, though the Bulls were getting stomped on.

And I rolled out of bed around a quarter to six and got some great revising work done on the baseball novel. I must say, when I take the time to do it right, I really love revising. Making it all fit together, knowing what it is I want to do with the book -- that's an awesome feeling. Once I get this first chapter nailed down, I think the rest will just fall into place.

In any case, I really dig my first six pages of the book. Only 394 pages to go!

Here's a bit of some new stuff, from later in chapter one:

Something struck me then, a strange prickling feeling, like the sense that you've just said the wrong thing and killed a lively conversation. The way the kid at bat was clobbering the ball had made me suddenly break into a sweat. The ball could go anywhere. And Worrell and Boles were sitting not twenty feet from the batter, exposed outside the dugout.

I should get them to come inside, I remember thinking. Then I thought of Worrell's talk with me earlier, taking me to task for doing my own job, how he wanted to call me "boy." I didn't even look at him. I just watched Donaldson on the mound, nodding at No Small Foot, accepting the pitch: fastball.

Now, on to breakfast! The fun never ends... Later!