Books!

My husband came home from work today with four boxes stuffed with books. Apparently the school librarian received a large donation of books and simply couldn't deal with all of them, so she was giving them away. A generous helping of fantasy, science fiction, alternate history, and some other, less interesting genres. ;P My husband plans on keeping a lot of them in his classroom, assuming he keeps his current teaching job next year, but still, we're going to need a bigger bookshelf.

Among the books was Dianna Wynne Jones's Tough Guide to Fantasyland, a marvelous antidote to the clichés of fantasy novels. But I suffered a great embarrassment upon reading the entry for "female mercenary." It described with alarming accuracy a character in my novels. It was as if the author just plucked the description straight from my brain, backstory and all. And here I was, thinking myself so original just because I had a female who wasn't the main character's love interest. Ah, well. Sometimes conventions exist for a reason, right? I'm not going to go back and try to change her (I already submitted the first novel; it's too late!) because I think she's interesting and moderately three-dimensional and such, but it was a bit of a blow to my confidence in my creativity and originality.

Still, Tough Guide to Fantasyland is hilarious. :)