This week had its ups and downs, but today's been a great day so far. I rolled out of bed at the Designated Unholy Hour (4:30 a.m.) and got some great work done on a story I've been meaning to work on for an anthology (whose deadline is, um, 3.5 days away!). I think I've found the hooks I needed for the story I'm telling, and now I have to finish it to find out how the sucker ends! Great fun, and some challenging stuff for me. I'm putting my baseball novel on a week-long hold until I get this story done.

After putting in some good words this morning, I found time to finally finish Wyrmhole by my buddy Jay Caselberg, and enjoyed it a lot, especially the mix of SF with a noir detective story. I just wish the title of the book hadn't given away so much... Ah well. It can't be helped, I guess.

After I finished the book, Drew woke up, so I snagged him out of his bassinet and held him while Lizzie slept in. We slouched in my big chair in the living room, chest to chest, and soon we both had fallen back to sleep. Not a bad way to start the day, I must say!

I met Drew and Lizzie for lunch today, then the little guy came to work to meet my co-workers and hang out. Everyone got to ooh and aah over him for nice half-hour or so, then he and Mom headed on home. Not a bad way to spend a Friday afternoon...

Something inspired me on the way to work today, and I jumped back into the novel blog! I really want to finish up this last chapter of part 2 before I dive back into the baseball novel, and just like that I came up with some nifty ideas and a flashback to get me back on track. I have very little idea where this storyline is going, but just like the other story I'm working on, I really want to find out.

And it's almost the weekend, y'all! We're chilling out tonight, then I'm hoping to work some more on my story tomorrow, then we're off to Chapel Hill for the reading and feeding at Internationalist Books at seven -- if you're in the area, please drop by! Then on Sunday we're back in Chapel Hill to hang out with our friends over breakfast and talk about babies. Very cool.

On Sunday I hope to dive into a novel by a fellow writer who's looking for some feedback. At some point I want to read the last research book about the Negro Leagues as research -- I need to steal some more details for my novel!

Some snippets from the two side works-in-progress, just because I wanna share:

• You were enticed to go there by the three men with the scheme for spinning hay into silk, and silk into gold. The clothes the three men wore were blindingly chartreuse, a wholly unconvincing shade of fabric that began to fall apart under each man's hairy, sweating armpits. And they reeked of canola oil the more the men perspired.
  (From Dead Man's Rope)
  
• He tried to cover his fear of the other land with bravado, but even singing along with his satellite couldn't drown out the memories of the "family-friendly" lynch mobs and the "one-man, one-woman" marriage terrorists.
  (From the horribly named "A Tale of Two Nations" -- yes, I'll change the title when I'm done!)

And now it's the weekend. Bonzai! Later!