James Bailey's Blog, page 4

Kill your babies, kill your parents

Parents are hard to write. There are multiple reasons for this. First off, assuming your parents are alive, there's a good chance they will read your book. At the start, they may even be among the few who do. There's a good chance they'll be reading between the lines to see if you borrowed anything from them. Whether you did or not.

Beyond that, parents are often secondary characters. You're writing a story about Joe, or Sally, or Joe and Sally. Joe and/or Sally are the stars of the show. You develop the hell out of them. Joe likes peanut butter sandwiches and listens to Bach at work on his headphones to cancel out his moronic, lazy co-worker in the cube next door. Sally fosters homeless ferrets and bakes lemon bars for her elderly neighbor. She had her heart broken by a college sweetheart who never quite seemed to look her straight in the eye. Joe doesn't look her straight in the eye, either, but it turns out he's got a glass one, which endears her even more to him because she has a soft heart for anyone with any claim for an underdog story.

And Sally's mom calls her too often and wants her to visit, but Sally doesn't want to because her mom always pesters her about grandbabies and smokes Marlboro Lights at the table and its bad for Sally's asthma. And Joe never got along with his dad all that well because his dad was the coach on his Little League team and got pissed off because he struck out too much and dropped a pop fly in the playoffs. Sally's mom and Joe's dad are easy to dislike because they never put much effort into truly understanding their kids.

And they're easy for readers to dislike because they're essentially cartoon characters.

But do readers dislike them because they're unlikable or because they're cliched?



I had to kill them all.

Milo Tanner is one of my favorite characters I've ever written. Del's recast father had a back story worthy of his own novel. He had a unique job and a reason for acquiring it. He had an outlook so much more positive than he could have settled for. He loved Del's mom even though she didn't love him back quite as much. And she just wanted, deep down, to have a good time. But not at a cost of hurting anyone else. She was fun to write, too. Del's new wife wasn't necessarily fun, but she was real and my main problem with her was Del hurt her feelings and because my sympathies lay mainly with Del, I felt guilty about that.

They made the book. As in they made it work. For me, anyway. Maybe I'm biased, but to me, reading back through my own works, Nine Bucks a Pound, despite its horseshit sales, is the best book I've written to this point. Nothing against my others. I love them all. Again, maybe I'm biased. They all have their strengths. But Nine Bucks is my favorite, and that's largely due to the supporting cast. Hell, if I could be anyone in any of my books, I'd probably pick Milo Tanner. I'm not nice enough, though. I couldn't pull it off. But goddam if I wouldn't love sitting up on that bridge all day long watching the boats go by.

I'm maybe two-thirds of the way through a first draft of what I hope will be novel #6. A long, long way to go until it ever sees the light of day, but it's taking shape. Judging by my typical process, it will see significant (and I mean major) rewrites somewhere between drafts one and three. Some characters won't survive the process.

I already know who two of them are. Henry's mom and dad suck. They are cliched cliches. They deserve to be killed off. It's not their fault. It's mine.

I'm not sure I was in love with them at any point since I started writing last summer. In fact, I've never liked them. At first maybe I fooled myself into thinking they needed to be unlikable. But now I've put my finger on it.

Their major fault is you already know them. You've met them in a hundred other books. You haven't liked them in many of those, either. I was reintroduced this week when I started reading The Floating Feldmans. And not to pick on the Feldmans, because I've encountered them in a number of other books. But I didn't happen to be writing them at the same time, so it didn't hit me as hard then. But when you're writing a flat, unlikable bitch of a mom while reading a book starring a flat, unlikable bitch of a mom it kind of jumps out at you. When you're writing a workaholic dad straight out of central casting while reading a book starring one pretty much like him, well, it's hard to miss the signs.

This all hit me last night right before bed. Which made sleep a challenge. Or more of a challenge than it usually is, and it's not usually as straightforward and simple as it should be. So I lay there tossing, thinking about Henry's mom and Henry's dad and how cold I was and how much my neck hurt and how I forgot to take my melatonin, which is probably why I was so wide awake in the first place.

Somewhere in there I realized that Henry's mom and Henry's dad had to trade roles. And personalities. And if they did, they could each suddenly become real people with real reasons for acting the way they did. And Henry wouldn't need to hate them, he could just struggle to understand them, which is a lot easier to sympathize with as a reader. And will be a lot easier for me to sympathize with down the road when I read back through whatever this book develops into. And a lot easier for me to write, because if I like them they just might do more interesting stuff.

I'm just glad I've figured this all out now, two-thirds of the way through the first draft. Instead of eight months and another draft from now.

The last game on earth

Four weeks ago tonight I was at an Arizona State University basketball game. Well, the second half, anyway. I traveled to Arizona for my niece's wedding. She's a graduate student in Tucson. Stopped off for a few days first up in Tempe, where my nephew, by a different sister, attends ASU. I flew in Wednesday, more than mildly concerned by the news of the virus stretching across the globe. This was early March, a lifetime ago, and while it was enough to keep me staring at the ceiling at night as the trip approached, I went anyway.

Thursday morning I wandered around the ASU campus, hooked up with my nephew, and picked up my sister at the airport. We did lunch, met up with some of his schoolmates, who humored us olds, went to dinner, tossed back a few beverages as if the world weren't about to spin off its axis, and wandered over to the arena in time to watch ASU blow a lead to the Washington Huskies.

Friday morning we slept late, went for coffee, settled on a target for a Cactus League spring training game, and drove up to Scottsdale, where we found a Red Robin in an open-air shopping center that could have, by the names on the fronts of the stores, been anywhere in America. Ate lunch, drove a short distance to the line to get into the parking lot at Salt River Fields. Half an hour later we had the pleasure of paying $10 to park on a parched lawn. Fifteen minutes after that I had the pleasure of paying $240 for three tickets behind home plate. We wanted shade. They wanted half my liquid assets. We arrived in our seats in the bottom of the second and stayed until the end of the ninth, when the game ended, tied 6-6. There are no winners in spring training, just 12,000+ who lose a shit ton of cash watching two teams practice. At least I had the pleasure of seeing Ryan McMahon bomb one out to deep center.

Then again, if we'd known it was to be one of the very last games played all spring (all season?), maybe the price wouldn't have seen so exorbitant. We couldn't have known that then. Well, there were hints. We ignored them, went to the aquarium up the road, which was pretty incredible considering we were in the middle of the desert, then drove back to Tempe and went to dinner at a place that struck me as a hot spot for academics and out-of-town parents with just enough money to spend they won't miss the price of a fancy meal. El vino did flow, as David Brent might put it. It was a top night.

Saturday we made the nearly two-hour drive to Tuscon, which was nothing like I remembered it from when I drove the same stretch in 1990. There wasn't any traffic back then. Nothing like the pickup-truck brigade we endured the entire stretch this time around. Met my mom and oldest sister at their motel, drove to the bridal shower, hung out, then finally arrived at our Airbnb rental house in the hills. Beautiful house. Beautiful neighborhood. Which made it unlike most of the rest of Tucson we saw, which was ... not so nice.

Saturday night came the rehearsal dinner and a chance to catch up with family and meet new folks. And finally, Sunday morning, a chance to relax. The first of the entire trip. We had all morning and part of the afternoon to chill until it was time to get dressed up. The wedding was lovely, in a park in the desert (where else is there?). The reception could only have been more pleasant if the first thing on everyone's mind wasn't the impending pandemic.

But it was, and by Monday morning I wanted home so badly I was up before the sun. Watched it rise between the cacti beyond our backyard. Got to the airport plenty early, eager to go home, afraid to return and spread whatever it was I might have contracted. And that fear was driven deeper when I arrived at O'Hare for my connecting flight. Even more people in masks than there were on the way out. Fear on every face. The closest I'd ever been to Dystopia.

Until the day after, and the day after that. And the week after that, when there was no toilet paper in the grocery store and I tossed anything reasonable into my shopping cart. And the following Monday when my director ordered us all to work from home and not come back to the office. And the next two weeks, as I counted off the days of my incubation period, freaking out every time I coughed, or sniffled, or ached, or felt a temp even slightly over 98.6 that I had brought it home to risk my wife and son.

Arizona was less than four weeks ago. Restaurants, games, shops, bars. A world away from where we are now. We venture out now only to stock up at the grocery store, as infrequently as possible. With gloves. I'd wear a mask if I had some handy.

Arizona is my before and after. All in one.

The Cactus League catching helium like a tooled-up rookie

Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding hit the literary scene like a solar eclipse in the spring of 2011, the rare baseball novel released with both a high six-figure bonus and the commensurate fanfare. Reviewers mostly gushed, and Henry Skrimshander took his place among the sport's fictional underdogs.

I was knee deep in baseball books at the time, polishing off my first novel, The Greatest Show on Dirt, while also reviewing books for both Baseball America and my own blog, Bailey's Baseball Book Reviews. I've always loved a good baseball novel, and I kept a vigilant lookout for them. The Art of Fielding was a hit in my scorebook, not that it needed my backing to push its way onto the bestseller lists. Several other fine baseball novels came out over the subsequent years, though none seemed to make more than a small ripple. I banged my drum for Joseph Schuster's The Might Have Been, Jeff Gillenkirk's Home, Away, and Philip Beard's Swing, among others. But you'll forgive casual baseball readers for missing them.

The Might Have Been and Swing made Spitball Magazine's short list for its annual Casey Award, the highest honor for a baseball book. That in itself is something of an achievement, as only two other novels have survived to the finalists stage (Spitball's top 10) since The Art of Fielding did in 2011. That's an average of about one every other year.

It will be interesting to see if Emily Nemens' The Cactus League finds its way onto the list this year. I'm not quite as plugged in to the baseball book world as I was several years ago, and I only became aware of it last month when I stumbled across a link on Twitter. All of a sudden, however, I can't miss it. I'm seeing references to it everywhere. Maybe this is just it catching helium as it neared its release date (Feb. 4, which was yesterday). The downside of not reviewing books these days is I actually have to pay cash money for them (though as an author, I can totally respect and appreciate that). So last night I ponied up my pesos and ordered The Cactus League.

I know little more than what you can read about the book on its Amazon page, and I'm kind of happy to stay at that level until it arrives. Sometimes the best way to avoid letting other opinions influence your own is to simply avoid them altogether. That said, I'll certainly be willing to share mine once I get through it.

I can already tell you this much: Readers are searching for it on Amazon. And I know this because I've added it and Nemens to the list of books and authors I'm targeting with ads for The Greatest Show on Dirt. For those unfamiliar with how these Amazon ads work, as an author you "bid" what you're willing to pay for your ad to appear as a sponsored product on other pages. It's a constant effort to gauge which books help drive traffic (and more importantly, sales) to yours. Amazon's statistical dashboard is almost fascinating enough to justify the investment. Over the past seven days, I've had 47 "clicks" based on various search terms. Half of those (24) have been searches on The Cactus League, Nemens' name, or some combination thereof.

Though it hasn't actually arrived yet, The Cactus League has stepped into the on-deck circle in my book pile. By the time the real-life Cactus League gets underway, I should have a better feeling of whether it has justified its hype as--to my sense at least--the biggest baseball fiction release in nine years.

Disney World the saddest place on earth to end a career

The end of the endYou sang your song
For much too long
The songs they're wrong
The bread has gone

--"Peanuts," The Police, 1978


We need to talk about Sting.

Not for his sake, but for ours. Well, mine. I shouldn't speak for you. Perhaps you've already come to terms with the end of his meaningful career. Or perhaps you always thought he was a tosser and this only proves your point. Again.

But I grew up on his music. Synchronicity made the Police the biggest band on the planet when I was in junior high. I remember wanting to go see them in the Tacoma Dome the week before I started high school. I remember being so jealous of all the kids showing up on the first day in their concert t-shirts. My sister bought me a Synchronicity t-shirt that Christmas and I wore it until the black faded to gray and the holes in it became too large and numerous to ignore.

And then the Police broke up, walking away at the top, and I was gutted. I finally got to see Sting in concert a few years later, at the State Fair in Syracuse. I saw him three times as a solo act, and when the Police did their reunion tour in 2008 my wife and I caught them in Buffalo. My only regret looking back on it was I didn't pay for floor seats. It was my one and only chance to catch my all-time favorite band, and I should have sprung for a closer vantage point.

So maybe it's fair to say his career ended in a meaningful way for me a long time ago. I was fine letting him live in my memory as he was. I bought his 2003 memoir, Broken Music, on discount a couple of years after it came out. Didn't love it, but it was okay. Yeah, I could probably have done without the bit about his first experiments with masturbation, but it wasn't such a complete wankfest as to tarnish my impression of him.

Then came the story about him playing the Moscow wedding of a Russian oligarch's daughter in 2016. I wondered how badly he needed money, and how he could stomach performing as a mercenary for a Russian oil tycoon.

Maybe, in light of having hired himself out for wedding gigs, lip-synching Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic on a Disney Christmas special Thanksgiving night alongside pal Shaggy isn't actually a new low. But it's one thing to read about someone trotting off to Moscow to cash a (hopefully huge) paycheck. It's another to see him metaphorically flushing his career down the toilet in front of your own tryptophan-glazed eyes.

A 2003 story in Billboard magazine included this 1986 quote from Sting about walking away from the Police at the band's zenith: "Even though logic would say, 'Are you out of your mind? You're in the biggest band in the world—-just bite the bullet and make some money.' But there continued to be some instinct, against logic, against good advice, [that] told me I should quit."

Somewhere along the way, that bullet started looking tasty enough to bite again. He's making some money. Sadly, the instinct to know when to quit has failed him.

Reading comprehension, reviews, and jerks

There's an unwritten (but much written about) rule for authors when it comes to reviews. You cannot respond to negative reviews. Authors are supposed to have thick skin. Authors shouldn't put their work out for the masses to judge if they can't handle the criticism that will inevitably come. Even books that have a large number of positive reviews will also attract some 1-star hit jobs. We're just supposed to rise above and tune them out.

For starters, it's unprofessional to try to argue with readers. If someone thinks your book sucks, leaving a comment on their review telling them they're a bozo isn't likely to change their mind. Nothing will be gained, and there's a chance you just might unleash the dogs of the internet, who will savage you with many more terrible reviews, just because.

So I won't respond to the moronic review that was left for The First World Problems of Jason Van Otterloo on Amazon this week. Not on Amazon anyway. But I will vent here, in the relative obscurity of my own site. Here, among friends and spiders and bots (yeah, I see you Russians in my traffic stats).

Here, in its entirety, is the review that was written.



"Is this all nothing but emails?" Um, yes. That is why it says this in the summary of the book:




So maybe if you hate stories told through emails, don't buy a story told entirely through emails.

As for the "what a waste" portion of the review ... you may recall that I ran a free promo for First World Problems last month. Not to go too Janet Livermore on it, but my expectations weren't exactly met. I didn't get anywhere near the downloads I was hoping for. I had 900 in four days, which is pretty crappy. It did generate a few sales of Dispatches from a Tourist Trap, which I assume means there were a handful of people who enjoyed the first book enough to move onto the second. But there wasn't exactly a spike in sales of either book. Which makes me 99.9 percent sure that this reviewer got the book for free. So "what a waste," eh? They wasted none of their own money on it, and if they hate books written as emails, it should have been obvious by the first page--second if they're slow--so how much time could they have wasted figuring that out?

This reminds me of a 1-star review left for my first novel, The Greatest Show on Dirt.




That book is indeed a story about people who work in a baseball stadium. I'm not sure if I could have made that any clearer in the summary.




So, again, if that's not what someone was looking for, why buy the book? Apparently his reading comprehension is as poor as his grammar.

The most incredible part of that one is this same guy left a review for my other baseball book, Nine Bucks a Pound.


So many questions. Why did he buy a second one of my books if he hated the first so much? Why would he review a book he only started? Is it personal? Should I know this guy? Did he open the phone book and plant his finger on my name? Does he hate cans?





Reviews can be tremendously helpful for authors. (I'll pause here while you go to Amazon and write a few for some of your recent favorites.) Even negative ones can be useful if they provide honest, constructive criticism. But these, all they do is give authors something to vent about on their blog. Considering how dry I run sometimes on blog topics, maybe I should consider they've done me a favor.

FREE! isn't free, but sometimes it's worth paying for

There was a point in the early days of indie publishing when the FREE! book promo was one of the go-to gimmicks. Tales spread among the author blogs about huge sales tails that would follow a 3-4 day run on the Kindle free lists. These surges would more than pay for the advertising required to spread the word back in the glory days of free in 2010-11.

I released my first novel, The Greatest Show on Dirt , in February 2012. I ran a free promo on Amazon, gave away 5,124 copies in April of that year, and saw a modest sales bump when it returned to regular price. Maybe I missed the window on free, maybe my book wasn't quite the right genre to ride the wave. I wasn't sold on free, but I wasn't ready to completely write it off, either.

In July 2015, I dabbled with free again with my second novel, Nine Bucks a Pound , also a baseball-themed story. According to my records, which I have no reason to doubt, I didn't spend anything on advertising this time. I moved 1,147 units. I sold a handful at regular price afterward. Again I was left wondering whether there was more potential for this. Certainly advertising would have helped generate interest, but would it have meant more paid sales after? And how many free downloads would be required to result in a bona fide sales spike? I could only guess.

The last time I bothered with a free promo was March 2018, when I ran one for my third novel, Sorry I Wasn't What You Needed . This time I spent $78 on a total of three ads, and I saw 3,668 free downloads as a result. Sales spike? Not quite. Depends on your definition of spike. I was disappointed enough that I figured I wouldn't bother with free again.

Yet here I am, giving it one more try. This time I'm giving away The First World Problems of Jason Van Otterloo , my fourth novel, from Thursday (9/5) through Sunday (9/8). And I'll be honest, free is something of a desperate measure here. This book just hasn't seemed to catch on. It's received some decent reviews (and a couple of lame ones), but not enough overall.



This book needs an audience, and thus far I haven't been able to find it. So I'm willing to give the free Kindle thing another run. In my favor this time, this is the first of a series, with the second book, Dispatches from a Tourist Trap , also available (at regular price). Both are enrolled in KDP Select. If the promo generates much in the way of KDP reads, that could spill over into the second book and help get that one off the floor as well.

What are my expectations? I can't really say. And not because I'm being coy. I honestly don't know. I'd love to see somewhere between 5,000-10,000 downloads, at least a handful of nice reviews, some kind of sales tail once the promo ends, and enough KDP downloads to help recoup my expenses. Like Janet Livermore*, I may need to scale down my list of expectations over the coming days.

*Bonus points if you caught the Singles reference.

All booked up with books

I like books.

There, I said it. Yeah, crazy that someone who writes books would like to read them too, right?

Books seem to pile up in our house. Every bookshelf we have seems to have more books on it that it was meant to hold. When we moved in back in 2005, I bought two 6-foot tall unfinished pine book cases, stained them, and then filled them with books. When we finished off our basement, they moved down into the library. Yeah, we have a library. What of it?

I have two more bookshelves in my office, another smaller one in the library. A small one in my son's room, a fancy one with a glass door in our bedroom, and ... somehow we still have more books than shelf space.

For several years now I've been meaning to add another big shelf to the library, to eliminate the sideways lying books that block the ones that are properly shelved. It's actually tough to find a solid wood bookshelf these days that doesn't cost a fortune. The store where I bought most of the others is long out of business, and I can't find any others in the area that stock plain wood shelves. So I decided to make my own.

With a little help from my dad, who has all the tools not to mention all the wood-working skills in the family, I constructed something solid that will alleviate our overcrowding problem. At least for the moment. Check back in a year or two.

New books available in old-school format

Exciting news in the world of print books! The First World Problems of Jason Van Otterloo and Dispatches from a Tourist Trap were both released in paperback format today. So if you don't Kindle and want to read them, you can now order them on Amazon.

I held off on formatting First World Problems for print when I released it last fall, mainly because sales of my other books as paperbacks were so sluggish. But they've picked up quite a bit over the past four months, enough to motivate me to make all five of my books available as both ebooks and paperbacks.

I was also a little hesitant to deal with the conversion process, as I've struggled with formatting for print some in the past. But I have to say this time it was much easier than I'd feared. Maybe I'm learning a thing or two along the way.

Dispatches has been dispatched

Today's the big day for the new book. Dispatches from a Tourist Trap released today on Amazon for the Kindle. Yes!

Here's the link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Q2DRWH4

Only $2.99. A bargain at twice that.

At one time last year I had hoped to release this book at the same time as The First World Problems of Jason Van Otterloo, the first book in the series. But then the reality of editing and rewriting hit and it became obvious that would only push everything back. I was also hoping that by releasing Book 1 in the fall, there would be a rabid corps of Jason Van Otterloo fans salivating for the second book by now. That hasn't quite happened. This series is more of a slow burner, I guess. We'll get there in time, but for now still building one sale at a time.

I'm in my last week of unemployment before starting my new job next Monday. I've been busy, busy, busy with book stuff over the past few weeks. The top priority was getting Dispatches ready to go, but there's been a lot more going on.

PaperbacksYes, I have finally gotten the formatting done to release both The First World Problems of Jason Van Otterloo and Dispatches from a Tourist Trap in print. I am in the process of getting the covers created. Once those are ready I'll just need to upload my files to Amazon, order proofs, make sure everything came out right, and release. I'm hoping to have them ready for public consumption by the middle of the month.

ReviewsIn addition to doing review copy giveaways on Library Thing and Booksprout, I had a very long, detailed review run on a site called The Irresponsible Reader. And I don't know if I really understand the name, because the guy who runs it seems quite responsible, as well as prolific in his reading. He had some nice things to say about The First World Problems of Jason Van Otterloo, and will also be reviewing Dispatches from a Tourist Trap soon.

An Author Q&AIn addition to reviews, The Irresponsible Reader also runs author Q&As. Mine was posted this morning. I've done a few of these in the past, but this one was great because he seemed like he put some serious thought into the questions, instead of simply sending the same handful of questions he asks everyone else.

So, plenty going on here. I keep thinking I'll wake up one day to a short to-do list and have time to lounge on the couch watching TV, but it keeps not happening. And we're down to three days of "vacation," so it's looking less and less likely. Oh, well.

Dispatches from a Tourist Trap now available for pre-order

At long last, I'm pleased to announce the second book in the Jason Van Otterloo Trilogy is available for pre-order on Amazon. It's called Dispatches from a Tourist Trap and will release in Kindle format officially next Tuesday.

What's it all about? Glad you asked. Here's the blurb:

Thanks to his parents' separation, Jason Van Otterloo is starting his sophomore year of high school three hours away from all his friends--including his new girlfriend, Sian. Tiny Icicle Flats is a quaint Bavarian-themed mountain village that has been trapped in time since long before his mother grew up there. That she was willing to return is all down to her new boyfriend--who also happens to be her new boss. And judging by all the makeup found in his bathroom cabinet, Jason's dad isn't wasting time waiting for her to return.

Jason begins a blog to share details of his new life with his old friends, but some news isn't meant for wide distribution. Fortunately, his sage-but-sarcastic best friend, Drew, is always just an email away. Would it be so wrong, Jason wonders, to ask a local girl named Leah to the Homecoming dance? "Just as a one-time date, nothing more, obviously." "Why are you asking me and not Sian?" Drew replies. "Wait, I think I know the answer." If only Jason would ever take his friend's advice, he might spend less time climbing out of the holes he digs for himself.

Pressed into afternoon and weekend duty at his grandpa's hardware store, Jason still finds time to join an after-school book club that specializes in controversial classics. When Leah's brother reports the book club to the school board, Jason and his fellow readers are forced underground--until they emerge again to enter a protest float in the Icicle Flats Christmas parade. The ensuing brouhaha makes for the most exciting holiday season Jason can remember. And for once, it's not his parents' arguing that takes center stage. With the new year comes a new scheme: If the local busybody brigade was upset by a few old books, pirate radio will surely blow their minds. Who ever said life in a small novelty town would be dull?

Told entirely through Jason's email exchanges and blog posts, Dispatches from a Tourist Trap picks up where The First World Problems of Jason Van Otterloo left off. Come and spend a little time in Icicle Flats--just don't forget to pack your lederhosen.

Well, there it is. Order your copy today for just $2.99. Or read it free if you're a Kindle Unlimited subscriber. And tell all your friends. Thanks!