Blarrrrghh….

I have spent the past week sick. Not quite “sick as a dog” but perhaps “sick as a whale” or “sick as a llama.” Horribly stuffed up nose and mild fever for a day or two which gradually slid into somewhat stuffed up nose and sporadic cough. I am on the mend, and fortunately I have a job where I can do things like “editing the last script” while laid out in bed, but it’s been a generally unpleasant week of low energy, grim productivity, and NyQuil.

Nevertheless, Stuff Has Gotten Done. It has mostly gotten done in between long naps, but it has Gotten Done. Art edits and cover art for book 5 are done, script edits for book 6 have been sent back, and I am grimly thrashing out sample art for Platypus Files.  (Take it easy? What is this “take it easy” of which you speak?)

On the bright side, since the Oddbox on Steam ported all the Oddworld games to PC, I’ve been enjoying playing them.  I have kind of a weird relationship with some of the Oddworld games–the first time my marriage hit the rocks, I was playing Munch’s Oddssey (not, um, related to said rocks) and when we’d talked about our feelings and cried and so on until I couldn’t stand the thought of saying one more word about how I felt about ANYTHING, I’d pick up the controller and go pilot a fish in a wheelchair.  The next time my marriage hit the rocks, about four years later, I picked up the game and re-played the damn thing. (Also Jade Empire and Knights of the Old Republic. It was quite a long dissolution.) You’d think that this would give the games a weirdly negative connotation, but in fact I find Oddworld the video game equivalent of a comfort read–they’re extremely engaging, they occupy the brain thoroughly, even the bad guys are generally delightful, and they provide a certain degree of mental sanctuary. So it was lovely to have them finally available at a time when I was sick and really needed a comfort game. *

*And the recent patch fixed almost all the problems with Stranger’s Wrath. Munch’s Oddyssey is apparently still broken, but since apparently the guys who ported it abandoned all responsibility and it got dumped in the lap of the people who ported Stranger, with a nice note saying “Um, can you fix this?” they have all my sympathy and I am willing to wait.

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