Because of my Blood Bowl loss last night, I was in high dudgeon and couldn’t sleep. I didn’t get off until 3:45, giving me three hours sleep today, a woefully inadequate preparation for the day.
On the positive side, I read Meddling Kids while I was wide awake, a really fun riff on Scooby Doo (if the masked villain hadn’t always been wearing a mask, but sometimes really was a Lovecraftian horror).
The bulk of it is set in a small town in Oregon (so close to where we live, for extra points) and there are some neat twists I won’t spoil. Lovecraftian horror is meant to end with everyone insane or dead; this has a happier ending, but there’s a lot of scares in mineshafts before that.
Because it’s partly a pastiche of Scooby Doo, there’s license to have daft things like mine cars, or rickety bridges over lava, but they weren’t too distracting, most of the time. The action sequences are very well written, without giving too much detail, and the feelings of regret when the gang revisit where they grew up as kids and see it’s collapsed is really well done.
It’s not quite Scooby Doo (there’s no Shaggy analogue – just a nerd, a tomboy, a bookworm and a jock, but I suppose the Mystery Machine only had four humans in it) but that’s fine – it doesn’t need to be some sort of woeful fanfic. And it’s eminently readable. Glad I picked this up in the book store last week.
I swam this evening and did only twelve laps, which is wonderful to say, as that once would have been seriously challenging. I did 8 of freestyle, a couple of backstroke and then tried breathing on my left rather than my right. Did better than expected, still need to improve.