Poor Nika is feeling very ill today. It started off yesterday evening, and now she is curled up on the couch being very sweet and sad. Steph had to go in for a course today, so I'm working at home so Nika isn't alone (she's really not well enough to be left at the moment). Hopefully she's going to be better by tomorrow, though.

Yesterday, she was fine. Here's a short video of her in the woods yesterday (avi file; 1.24 MB). If you don't have broadband, it's a bit large. (I'm sure the file could be compressed quite a bit, but we don't have any video editing software, so it is what it is.)

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The weekend was beautiful, as was the end of last week, sunny, warm, with a light, cooling breeze. We got out to the woods for walks every day and just bathed in the sunlight slipping through the spring leaves. It makes such an incredible difference to the way you feel when the weather is that nice. Today it's a bit showery, but not really that bad.

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I've been doing one last pass through of The Sleepers, based on Steph's comments, before sending it out for its critiques. At the beginning of the weekend, I went back to the novel I began and then put aside just before I wrote The Sleepers, and the difference between them is both gratifying and irritating. Gratifying because I can tell I got a lot better between the two, and irritating because it means that the other novel, which I meant to be my next project, is going to need a big rewrite on the opening section.

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I haven't been doing the things I should have been doing. I am supposed to be writing a review of Holly Phillip's In the Palace of Repose for Tangent Online, but every time I settle down to do it, I seem to get sick again. This week I'm going to get it done, no matter what. In the meantime, though, I can say that I've enjoyed the first four stories. Check it out.