Here's a review of Dead Reign at the Green Man Review. I like it because it's written by someone who didn't read the first two books, and I'm always interested to see how well I succeeded in making a particular volume stand alone -- the verdict seems to be that I did a pretty good job there!

The cold/flu/whatever I'd felt lurking landed on me over the weekend, and it's been a couple of lousy nights sleeping pretty much sitting up on a ramp of pillows just to allow me to breathe. I stayed home from work yesterday, but I'm doing better today -- no fever, no sore throat, just congestion and body aches, and they're comparatively mild. Everything's sort of tinged with gray and I have no appetite whatsoever, but I think I'm on the mend.

It's my day off -- you know, on purpose this time -- and I got my freelancing done a little while ago. The baby's napping. I suppose I should return to work on my Walrus story, but I'm afraid it might be too much concept and not enough story. I've been reading Lewis Carroll stuff to the baby at bedtime, and noticed that his poems "Jabberwocky" and "The Hunting of the Snark" are explicitly set in the same universe, which got me to thinking that maybe all his poems could be seen to share a universe, which means that a pair of vicious amoral con artists like the Walrus and the Carpenter could try to pull a scam on the surprisingly spry Old Father William, possibly involving a counterfeit vorpal sword, a broken-down beamish boy in search of new conquests, and a snark that's a boojum, you see... It'll be cool if I can pull it off in such a way that it makes sense even to people who haven't read Carroll, but it might not work. It's an interesting challenge though.

I suppose when the baby wakes we'll make for a park -- he's got a runny nose but otherwise seems energetic as usual, and it's sunny out, if a bit cold -- though we won't take a long walk like we usually do. I'm a bit stir-crazy and cabin feverish, but I don't want to make myself sicker by being too ambitious.