How much do you want to know? Here’s the About the Author running in the book:

James Bailey worked for the Durham Bulls for three seasons, from 1990-92. He later spent six years covering minor league baseball for Baseball America magazine. He reviews books for Baseball America, and is an annual contributor to Lindy’s Fantasy Baseball magazine. He lives in Rochester, N.Y., with his wife Jill and son Grant.

That doesn’t really tell the whole story, though, does it? If you took the trouble to come to this site, maybe you want to know more. (Maybe you don’t, in which case, feel free to keep on moving.) Here goes …

I grew up in Seattle, spent nearly 10 years in North Carolina, and have lived in Rochester, N.Y., since 2001. Graduated from North Carolina State University in 1993. While in school I worked for the Bulls for three years and started at Baseball America as an intern. That blossomed into a full-time position when I graduated, and I worked for BA for six years total in two separate stints (three if you count the summer I spent filing photos and cutting clippings out of newspapers, back before the age of the internet).

In between BA tours of duty, I returned to Seattle for three years, where I temped (full-time for 2 1/2 years solid) at Microsoft and coached 13-year-olds in Little League for three seasons. Our second team finished second in the state, one win away from winning the tournament and qualifying for regionals in Montana. It was during these years that I began to write fiction, pumping out the first draft of a truly horrible novel, which I am embarrassed to read now.

I began working on The Greatest Show on Dirt in 2006. It morphed quite a bit through several major revisions since then, finally setting in its current state four years later. (My son was born in 2009, which did interrupt progress for a bit.)

I’m currently working on a second novel, yet unnamed. It is also about baseball, though it’s entirely different in every way from The Greatest Show on Dirt. I envision at least two rounds of revisions, based on my experiences with the first book. As the old saying goes, “writing is rewriting.” I actually kind of enjoy the revision stages, in some ways more than the first draft. So I have that to look forward to, while in the meantime enjoying the challenge of publishing the first book. It’s a good thing I can get by comfortably on six hours of sleep a night.