Still working on getting the youngster back up to speed -- his barking cough is gone (thank God!), though the nose is running faster than a cheetah. We've been "bulbing" his nostrils like crazy the past few days and trying to slip him some Robitussin to keep those secretions to a minimum. Drew's definitely not a fan of the nose bulb. I mean, who would be?

Some interesting developments this weekend, like the little blurb I saw in today's Raleigh News & Observer, in a tiny section entitled New from North Carolina -- "The 15 stories in Raleigh writer Michael Jasper's debut collection, 'Gunning for the Buddha (Prime Books), run the gamut: from urban fantasy to horror, from humor to drama, from science fiction to alternate history. And they feature an arresting array of characters, including nihilistic time-travelers and surfing zombies. Jasper moves between genres, locales and timeframes to explore themes such as violence, loyalty, love, and redemption."

And to think I almost missed it, right underneath the review of the Jane Fonda memoir! Pretty cool.

Also, I spent yesterday morning re-reading my opening two sections of Dead Man's Rope, and was pleased to see that it wasn't half-bad at all. I enjoyed it so much I wrote the opening salvo in Part Three.

I may be password-protecting the older stuff and taking down the PDFs of those sections in a few weeks, so if you want to get caught up on the story thus far, check it out. I'm having fun doing it, so odds are you might enjoy it as well. If not, oh well. It's not like you had to pay for it or anything!

And that's about it here. I'm hoping to dive back into the baseball novel again, maybe today, but most of all I'm hoping to just sit down and read some more. The Tim Powers book I'm reading (The Skies Discrowned, his first) is a lot of fun, and has a real 1970s SF feel to it. Later!