Feeble Apologies

Thanks to everyone who has managed to keep traffic here relatively high during the last three days in which I fell silent, largely due to a nasty cold that knocked me for a loop. (For reasons passing understanding, I continued to show up for each shift at The Store, thus resulting in approximately two hundred fifty conversations in three days that started off with other concerned folk telling me, "Wow, you look awful." By the time I got home each day, the amount of brain power I had available with which to generate posts for Byzantium's Shores was, shall we say, extremely negligible. But I seem to have finally reached the final stage of my colds -- the "nasty cough that sounds terrible, but really does mean that I'm feeling better" phase -- so content should start to resemble the Content of Old in these parts.

Oh, and go read Chapter Two of the novel. Just in case you didn't see the post below this one. And if you missed Chapter One, it's there, too.