The Major League Debuts podcasting world tour

Hello again.

This has been a busy week for virtual book events for Major League Debuts. There have been three podcasts released (two of which were recorded earlier in the month, but that's the way show business rolls, I guess). There was also a new review released last night. So, let's get to it.

My favorite podcast to date was released this morning. This was done with LockedOn MLB Prospects, hosted by Lindsay Crosby. Lindsay clearly did his homework and had a lot of great questions. The only drawback is I was on camera for this one, and maybe that's not my strong suit. But at least I sound like I know what I'm talking about, and that's something.

Here are the links for the others:

The Show Before the Show, with Benjamin Hill of MiLB.com. Ben actually reviewed The Greatest Show on Dirt back when it came out in 2012. Really good guy, whose love for minor league baseball always comes through.

ML Sports Platter, with Mike Lindsley. Sound quality on this one is a little lacking, especially on my side, as it was recorded with me being on the phone.

And here's the new review:

The Sports Bookie, by Bob D'Angelo. Bob also reviewed The Greatest Show on Dirt back in the day. And I believe he did a review for Nine Bucks a Pound as well. He's a big baseball book guy.

The debut of Major League Debuts

I have news about a new release, but it might not be the new release you were expecting. This Is Who We Are Now is still waiting its turn. It was set aside in the fall for a more time-sensitive project. From September up to now all of my time, spare and otherwise, has been dedicated to the new one. It's called Major League Debuts, and it is out now. And unlike my previous releases, this is very much not a novel.

But there are stories. Three hundred and three of them, to be precise. Major League Debuts is a book about all of the players to debut in the big leagues in 2022. Which turned out to be a record 303 of them. The previous record, set way back in 2021, was 265. That would have been a little easier. Because for each of the 303, I wrote about their first game in the majors, what they did in 2022, and how they got there, with a detailed bio of their career, starting from high school in many cases. I subscribed to 40 newspapers to do the research. I didn't sleep a whole lot. But I got there, and I'm really happy with the way it came out.

Originally, in my head, this book would have been available closer to Jan. 1. Then again, originally it wasn't going to be this long. Or this insanely detailed. When I started in September, the writeups were 300-400 words per player. By the time I finished, it was a challenge to keep them under 1,000. I had to circle back to the guys at the start of the alphabet and beef them up to even things out a little.

The book came out to be 416 pages in paperback. It blows my mind more than a little that I wrote more than 400 pages worth of words in under five months. I honestly have never worked so hard on anything in my life. Novels are hard in a different way, but spread out over a much longer period of time, which makes it less intense, at least the way I write. I needed this book out before spring training started.

I made it.

And now, in some ways, comes the hard part. Selling it. That's no different than for all of my other books. Selling them is always harder than writing them. If you're interested in baseball, or know someone who is, the book is available in both paperback and ebook format.

Paperback - $17.95

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BT9CVZZG/

Ebook - $7.99

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BSWB4X51 
BN.com: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/major-league-debuts-james-bailey/1142978517
Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/major-league-debuts

And if baseball's not really your thing, stay tuned for updates on This Is Who We Are Now. It will soon be moving back to the front burner. 

Pretty in Pink scratches the ol' nostalgia itch

Thanks to Covid, I've wound up with a rare bit of time on my hands the past couple of days. I keep finding myself on the couch, remote in hand, wondering what to watch to kill off some time. Some nostalgic person on my Twitter timeline planted a seed Thursday afternoon with a post about the Pretty in Pink soundtrack.

I hadn't seen the movie since it came out back in 1986. I was a junior in high school, and there may or may not have been valid comparisons made between my hair and Duckie's. Certainly nothing intentional. Not my fault he had nice hair. I certainly didn't dress like him, and while I may not have been the most popular kid in school, I wasn't quite the outcast he was, either.

Beyond the hair, I can't say I recalled a lot about Duckie, the character. I vaguely remembered the plot, or at least the key points. The ending matched my memory, the rest of it fell into place well enough, though there were points I was waiting for things to happen that happened in other movies. Sixteen Candles, perhaps?

I'm on a minor 1980's nostalgia thing lately. I picked up Tell the Wolves I'm Home in part because it was set in 1987, the year I graduated. I was practically obligated to watch a Molly Ringwald movie. Consider the itch at least partially scratched.

Observations:

• James Spader is super rapey in this movie. I mean, I get he's supposed to be an over-the-top jerk, but there is nothing redeeming about him whatsoever. Yuck.
• You want to ask, "where are the parents?" at times. But given Andie's dad can barely feed himself breakfast and it's the 80's, it's not actually unrealistic. We used to have jobs after school and not come home until long after dinner. We were much more feral back then than most kids seem these days.
• Of course, by the time I was 18 the drinking age had been 21 for several years and it wasn't even realistic to try to get into a club like Cats. (Well, maybe if you looked older than I did, and had a reasonable fake ID.) That went up in 1984, two years before this movie came out, so not sure if that was an all-ages club or if they took some liberties there. Certainly kids had parties with plenty of beer, not that I went to those.
• Harry Dean Stanton ... ha, the second I saw him, Repo Man popped up on my "maybe next" list. He's surely a sad sack dad here. Perhaps not 100 percent convincing all the time, but he's hard to dislike.
• The soundtrack sure held up. "If You Leave," by OMD is the one I've heard the most over the years, but the title track is just as good. And I was today years old when I learned that the Psychedlic Furs first recorded it five years before the movie came out. It was on their 1981 album, Talk Talk Talk. Which I just bought as I started writing this so I could push that nostalgia needle all the way up to max.
• Holy cats, were the "richies" ever mean. Those girls, particularly, were quite bitchy. And Blaine, even for being the nice guy, was more than insensitive to bring Andie to that party. And then to bring her up to the Steff's room to get away? Really?
• I know they were just teenagers, and it was Andie's first time to really fall for someone, but to declare herself in love after one really crappy date? Did we think like that back when we were 17? Yeah, probably. How painfully naive.
• Annie Potts was so great as Iona. Weird, but so kind, and so okay being weird. And such a perfect boss/friend for Andie. I didn't remember her in this movie at all, and she was probably my favorite character.
• I hope Iona didn't want her old prom dress back. I thought it looked pretty nice as it was, but give Andie points for making something unique for herself. Still, think twice if she asks to borrow anything off you.
• I miss real record stores. I would have loved Trax. We used to ride our bikes eight miles down to the University District (Seattle) to spend the day searching for cool stuff at Tower Records, Cellophane Square, and probably half a dozen other shops I can't even remember the names of. And book stores. There were several used book stores we would check out regularly. We were nerdy enough to think that was cool, and I still think it was all these years later. So there.
• The Duckie vs Steff fight in the hall ... I kept thinking Duckie was going to get thrashed, but that was probably a draw. Steff talks better than he punches. Then again, Duckie had righteous indignation on his side.
• I know Andie isn't obligated to settle for Duckie just because he's so infatuated with her, but come on, how long are we supposed to believe her relationship with Blaine ran after the movie ended? No way they made it beyond the summer. Maybe they saved face when he left for his Ivy League school in the fall and parted friends.
• I paid $3.99 to watch that on Amazon Prime. I have no complaints.

Dystopia is scary enough without politics

A couple of weeks back, I finally got around to turning a birthday gift card into books. I came home with Fleishman Is In Trouble, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner; Anxious People, by Fredrik Backman; and Lights Out In Lincolnwood, by Geoff Rodkey. All three were table finds, books that caught my eye enough to pick up and read the back and maybe test drive the first few pages. The first two I'd heard of before. Lights Out was new to me. Turns out it was new to everyone, as it was only released earlier this month.

Having slowed to a crawl on the book I was reading (Major Pettigrew's Last Stand), I was open to starting something new. Lights Out leapt to the top of the pile and sucked me right in. The premise, a suburban family of four--dad, mom, two high schoolers--is going about their day in typical suburban fashion, when suddenly the power goes out. All the way out. Not just electricity, but cars, trains, airplanes. Everything stops in its place and/or falls from the sky.

Dan Altman, the dad, has to walk eight miles home from where his commuter train into NYC stopped. Chloe and Max drift away from school once their teachers realize the lights aren't about to flick back on. And Jen, the mom, hits the vodka, which is pretty much what she would have been doing anyway.

Over the course of four days, their upscale New Jersey suburb descends into chaos, as water service is cut to all homes. The Altmans survive on peanut butter and tuna fish, and the cookouts staged by their next-door neighbors, the Stankovics, who they don't actually like. Chloe falls in love, Max searches for a nicotine substitute, Jen drinks herself into oblivion, and Dan wonders why the newly formed town militia won't recruit him.

It's a fun and fast read (even at 529 pages long), but it also sort of scared the hell out of me. I can see too many of my neighbors wanting to sign on for that militia. The cosplay soldiers who could finally feel free to roam the streets with their assault rifles and pretend to be the good guys. Rodkey notes that when he started writing the book he never imagined a pandemic and a disputed election would bring his dystopia so close to real life. But here we are, and the thought of having to line up for rations doled out by heavily armed jackwagons has me wondering how many cans of soup I can stack in my basement.

I don't tend to include politics in my fiction writing. For one, I spend way too much time thinking about stuff like that in real life. A novel should be a place to escape it. In fact, one of my first considerations these days when I contemplate a new story is when to set it. Because if you want to even pretend to be realistic, you almost have to avoid 2019-21. Maybe anything since 2016. I don't want to divide my characters up into Trump fans and sensible folk. I'd rather they populate a world in which he never came to power. Just because I can't live there anymore doesn't mean they shouldn't get the chance.

Lights Out In Lincolnwood never brings up any politician or cult leader by name. We might all be able to guess who Eddie Stankovic voted for, but Rodkey leaves that bit out. Dystopia is frightening enough without it.

Cyber dogs and time traveling dinosaurs

If you put a string in my son's back and programmed it to dictate his speech, the first three slots would be filled with lines about farts. (He's 11.) The fourth would be some variation on "school sucks." He does well, but he'd rather be doing something else, probably involving his Nintendo Switch, shooting street hockey balls out in the driveway, or watching YouTube. Or farting. Or farting while doing any of those other things.

We have a routine where I ask him about school, he provides almost nothing in response, then informs me school is over for the day and he doesn't want to talk about it. I've learned to ask the subtlest leading questions when he relaxes this rigid policy, and occasionally draw him out long enough for him to accidentally admit that not everything about school sucks. Sometimes it's even fun.

And then there are the days when he volunteers it without me even prodding a little. Like he did earlier this week about the story he was writing. And boy howdy did he spill the deets. (I'm informed no one says "deets." Minus 2 cred points.) It was fiction writing, and he was allowed to go nuts. And nuts he went.

Let's start with the title. The Time Traveling Dinosaur. I'm liking it already.

It opens in the year 20712, with a human (I think), named Septus, who lives in a holo-house with his cyber dog, Dramkos. There is a giant futuristic war taking place, and something has caused a photo booth to hurtle to the earth (I assume it's earth, not totally sure on that part). The photo booth turns out to be a time machine, which takes Septus and Dramkos to 2012, before glitching them to 1,000,000 B.C., where they encounter a hungry dinosaur. And fight pirates.

Never fear, everyone turns out friends in the end, though there is a bit of tension on the way.

He cranked out over 1,000 words on this time traveling tale in a single day. That part actually makes me a bit jealous. I don't have a lot of thousand-word days, and I've been at this a lot longer than he has.

He pounded out another story last spring, toward the end of last school year, about a planet where all the animals had super powers, and all the dogs in the neighborhood had to battle a particularly annoying squirrel. He was quite talkative about that one as well, which also warmed me cockles.

His stories remind me of some I wrote when I was a kid. I remember a series about a circus flea named George who was also some kind of secret agent. I'm thinking he might have been tight with James Bond, though I could be a little fuzzy on that part. There may be one or two of those that have survived time; I'll have to dig to see if I can confirm whether he had Double-0 status. There were also a couple about E.T. and Mr. T fighting intruders from another galaxy. Those were written on summer vacation while visiting my dad in Rochester, during the days when the local tourism board was pumping out ads featuring an alien named IRBIR, which was an acronym for I'd Rather Be In Rochester. My stories, not coincidentally, featured beings named IRBSE and IRNBH, which stood for I'd Rather Be Somewhere Else and I'd Rather Not Be Here, respectively. I wasn't much older than my son is now when I wrote those masterpieces.

My son's long-term plan is to write cartoons or comics. And he's actually pretty good at drawing, so he has a leg up on my stick-figure what-is-that ability. With his imagination, he's got some genuine raw materials to work with. Though it's not my place to suggest it. He's very much a kid who has to come up with the idea himself for it to be a good one. I can encourage, though, when he shares his stories and drawings with me.

At least until he outsells me. Because then he'll gloat. And even for a proud dad, that might get old in a hurry.

A belated goodbye

In the years before I released my first novel, I began reviewing books for Baseball America with an eye toward expanding my contact network. I interviewed a number of authors and stayed in touch with some of them afterward. Several were kind enough to provide back-cover quotes for The Greatest Show on Dirt when it was released in 2012.

Jeff Gillenkirk, who turned out to be a Rochester, NY, native who had relocated to California, became something of a regular correspondent over the years. Every so often we would exchange a flurry of emails discussing our latest projects, writing in general, baseball, politics, or family life. He had twenty years on me and enough wisdom to share that there were mentor-mentee aspects to our friendship. He provided feedback on Sorry I Wasn't What You Needed, and wasn't shy about telling me he didn't care much for my protagonist, C.J. Neubauer. Jeff called him a sociopath. I softened C.J. up a bit after that. He wasn't meant to be especially likeable, but he wasn't meant to be a sociopath, either.

We met up a couple of times for dinner when he returned to Rochester to visit family, hitting Hose 22 in Charlotte twice, once successfully, once less so. On his last visit we found out the hard way that Hose 22 doesn't serve dinner on Monday evenings. Or at least didn't back then. Which turns out to have been 2016. We went instead to a somewhat louder restaurant nearby, but still had a nice meal and even better conversation.

It doesn't seem possible it was five years ago. If you had asked me before last night I would have sworn it was three, maybe two. In my mind we would have done it again last summer if not for Covid-related travel restrictions. In my faulty memory we exchanged email only last year.

Now that I've finally hit the stage on the new book where I am about to reach out to my feedback crew, Jeff was solidly atop the list. In fact, I was considering asking if he'd be willing to tackle the job of editing it. Has he edited a novel before, I wondered. So I looked him up on LinkedIn. Nothing. And then I Googled him.

And the second hit was an obituary. A lovely story of a passionate and caring man who was involved in so many interesting projects, who passed away of a heart attack.

In November 2016.

We didn't exchange emails last year, or the year before. The last string I came across was from the month before he died. We talked about the baseball playoffs and the state of publishing. He attached two articles about publishing trends that he thought I would enjoy. And in my mind we've had other exchanges just like that over the past few years.

I've moved so many times over the years that I have friends in far-flung locations, clustered around the places I once called home. Friends who are there when I reach out, via email, text, or Twitter--or on the rarest occasions by phone. There have been catch-up visits here and there, where the friendship picks right back up where it last left off, as if it had only been months since we last saw each other instead of years. Distance and time doesn't impact these relationships.

Until they do. Until so much time has gone by that it's almost more of shock to learn that a friend has been gone for four and a half years than it is to find out that he's gone. I had no idea I should miss Jeff until I came across that obituary last night. He's been gone all this time, but he was never gone to me until now.

The namesake club expands by one

I'm closing in on a milestone that has been a long time coming. I'm a chapter and a half away from completing the first draft of my sixth novel. Wrapping up a first draft leaves me a long, long way from the finish line, but it's a major step. There will be second, third, fourth, and fifth drafts before this thing sees the light of day, but none of them would be possible without a first.

I'm a re-writer. Over the years, I've come to realize I enjoy the subsequent iterations more than the first, so getting the initial round out of the way is a big deal to me. I started working on this book in early July.

Of 2019.

That was six months before the world even heard of COVID-19, to put that in some perspective. It's been a slog. But I'm finally to the point when I can at least envision my next book hitting Amazon.

Or maybe it already has.

I was crawling through my Twitter timeline tonight when I came across a review by Larry Hoffer, who was kind enough to review Sorry I Wasn't What You Needed way back in 2015, of a new novel called The Flip Side. By James Bailey.

Wait, that's me. Isn't it?

Okay, I don't have the most unusual name on the planet. I'm no John Smith (that would be my neighbor), but I'm a heck of a lot closer than, say, Gary Shteyngart. According to the U.S. Census, Bailey is the 66th most common last name in the United States. Per the U.S. Social Security Administration, James is currently the sixth most popular name for a male baby in this country. That has ranged from No. 1 to No. 19 over the past 100 years, including a stretch of more than 60 years in the top 5.

James Baileys may not be quite a dime a dozen, but we're somewhere on that discount rack near the front of the Name Stop store.

This newcomer--and his bio says this is his first novel, and it was published just 10 days ago--is only one of many in the club to publish in a variety of genres. We've written fiction and non-fiction, memoirs, sci-fi, even chemistry textbooks. And if you want to expand the club to welcome Bailey James, well, we've also got some steamy-looking romance on tap.

So, welcome to the gang, Mr. Bailey. And seeing as your book is currently higher in the sales rankings, how about sharing a few readers with the rest of us?