Scattered musings

• Sir Walter Scott has been completely dispatched (at least for a couple of weeks, at which point I'll go back and look at him again).  Final...er, more final...revisions to Book Two now in sight.
• I think my students in the Gothic course have become convinced that you can't have Gothic without people (usually women) swooning away.  Which reminds me that my mother once asked me to recommend Victorian novels without either marriages or swooning women.  This rather substantially reduced the available pool of novels.
• Midsemester break looms upon the horizon! And I'm doing...absolutely nothing besides writing-related endeavors, although I'll probably get back to shelving. 
• My mildly radioactive cat has returned.  Despite the impressive display of rage on her return trip from Ithaca (probably untranslatable by even the standards of Star Trek's Universal Translator device), she promptly went back to her old self once she entered the house.  Ironically, that's something of a problem: Vicki is very affectionate, but I have to limit physical contact for the next couple of weeks because, well, mildly radioactive cat.  I suspect my water bill is going to double, given all the hand-washing I have to do every time I pet her.
• I was a little startled to discover that googling for Lawrence Alma-Tadema turned up, among other things, Alma-Tadema fan fiction.