Bedrest, Baseball and The Book
Just a quick update on my world, and showing off my new icon from Steph.

JZ's been on bedrest for the last couple weeks. Back at the beginning of August she started bleeding, we rushed to the hospital, spent the weekend there and now she's hanging out at home through the end of the month. She's fine and the baby's fine, but she's bored and restless. She watched Lonesome Dove and it just about wrecked her. She's at that point in the pregnancy where she's completely flooded with hormones and extremely emotionally labile. So I'm petting her a lot and feeding her spinach dip and other Trader Joe treats.

Emmett's tournament team, The Eagles, finished up the season by winning their last two tournaments. I was there for the Alameda tournament (around the corner from Maidengurl's house, incidentally) where Emmett was in a hitting slump. The Tassajara tournament was when Jacqueline and I were at the hospital, but I kept getting updates on the phone from his Mom. Emmett wound up having a walkoff triple in the semifinal, and hit another triple in the finals to knock in the tying runs during a huge comeback.

Counting his Triple-A end of season tournament with The Mets he's won three championshps this summer. That's three more than I ever won. It's interesting, I wasn't that keen on some of the kids on the tournament team last year, but the roster has been shuffled a bit and we've added two new boys who are both extremely good players and also very nice. Also, some of the more annoying kids have grown up a bit and are much easier to be around.

I have heard through the coaching grapevine that I will probably be approached to manage a team in Triple-A next year. So far I've only been a coach. We'll see how that goes.

I was stuck on the book for much of July. I knew what I wanted to write but I couldn't find the structure for the book. I wound up having a shower epiphany and it all started falling in place. (I do my best problem solving in the shower. I used to figure out all my database problems in the shower too.) I've been in a good groove with writing since then, and the other day I was parked at a cafe in the Mission and just did a riff page. Just tried to find the tone and the language I want and was very happy with the result.

I'm feeling very ambitious about the book. Reading Joyce and Flann O'Brien for the language. That Irish mix of lyricism and earthiness. I've been tempted to write a fake set of book club questions for the end of the book just for the Nabokov of it. Still thinking about doing an appendix similar to the one Charles Finney did for The Circus of Dr. Lao.

Kim's coming up at the end of August to talk to me about doing the CrimeBus, a tour which she spun off from her 1947 Project. She's thinking about franchising it in SF. I'm meeting with her and John Marr, the famous zine writer of Murder Can Be. This is one of the things I'm exploring as an alternative to going back to a day job.