The first review of Flytrap #6 (order early and often! We're shipping 'em out this week!) has been published, by Midori Snyder, at the Endicott Studio Blog. Read it here!

We're back from Indiana. It was a looong week, with some very fun moments, although I think I'm more tired now than I was before I went on vacation! Fortunately, I have today to relax before going back to the day job tomorrow. Which is good, because we need a day to do laundry and clean up cat-shredded paper towels and generally set our house in order.

High points of the trip include our whirlwind two days in Chicago, where we lunched with the ever-lovely Mary Anne (who later let us sleep over in her palatial TV room!). We also visited Heather's favorite uncle, and the next day did a crazy insane whirl through the King Tut exhibit at the Field Museum (cool, but I wanted more!) and the Art Institute (which was great, except a lot of the Cornell boxes weren't there; on the bright side, that's because they're now part of a touring exhibit that will be in San Francisco in a year). Chicago was cold as Hecate's breastplate, y'all. But I like the city. I'd never been to Chicago before (at least, not as an adult -- I may've been there when I was a kid, but I can't quite remember).

Back in Indiana we dressed up for Halloween, and ate good food, and visited lots of Heather's friends, who are cool people, mostly writer- and theater-folk (I get along well with such folk). The high point for me was visiting C.R. Schiefer's vast sculpture garden. C.R. is my mother-in-law's boyfriend, and he's a hell of an artist. There's some truly awesome stuff in his garden. We took a zillion photos and hope to publish some in Flytrap #7, assuming they come out well. I have some sense now of how a modern stone sculptor works, and you know what that means -- I'll probably write about such a character at some point. I promise not to do another damn retelling of Pygmalion & Galatea.

I also read Naomi Novik's Temeraire sequels, Throne of Jade and Black Powder War. Those books are super-fun, and make great airplane reading. I also read Mary Roach's Spook, which I enjoyed very much, though perhaps not as much as her previous book Stiff. (I only read Spook because our connecting flight home was cancelled and we had to hang around the airport for hours waiting for the next flight, and it was the least-objectionable book I hadn't read in the airport bookshop). I wrote a little, though not as much as I usually do in a week. Ah, well. What's the point of a vacation if you can't slack off a bit?

And now, for your viewing pleasure, a YouTube video by my brother Wayne, featuring an epic battle to the tune of "Eye of the Tiger."