I surrender!

After checking with about half the hotels in the Loch Lomond area (Luss, Balloch, Drymen, Arrochar, Tarbet...) and having no luck finding a single room, I gave up and booked a room at the Glasgow Airport Travelodge. Since I have to catch an international flight the next day at 11.45, I might as well be right near the airport. I'll do whatever fun stuff I can in the park on the way down and not have the hassle of having to deal with traffic getting into the city on a weekday morning. *sigh* Which means I just need to get Thursday night lodging nailed down. ( Other, unrelated stuff )

P. S.: Yay and Grrr!

I'm loving this weather. I spent some time in the hammock last night with a book and lots of candles, taking time out to gaze at the flickering light on the windchimes and the bottom of the upstairs deck. Then this morning I lay in bed with more candles and some incense and listened to the rain; it's divine. Tea and toast; the gentle drizzle of rain; cool breezes through my window. I'm thrilled!

Not so thrilled with Mercedes Lackey's "The Serpent's Shadow"; got it off a book sale for $1 and not sure I got my money's worth. I'm giving up about halfway through because I'm really bored and annyoed by writers who (1) rail against sterotypes while employing them (e.g., "men suck because none of them respect women" anyone see the irony there?) and (2) steal other people's characters.

Not borrow, steal. Laurie King got in trouble with the Dorothy Sayers estate for borrowing Lord Peter Wimsey and having him appear in a scene or two of one of her novels. So what does Lackey do? She has a "Lord Peter Almsley" character appear in her novel (a young, handsome, bolnd noblemen with a silly manner that covers a discerning mind, has a pet reformed burglar "bapatized in the Blood of the Lamb", and who was a famous cricketer at his Oxford college). Lackey's character is half words lifted right out of Sayers and half caricature--she doesn't have Sayers' (or King's) knack for actually creating or developing character. She's employed no imagination, simply stolen a character out of someone else's work, changed just enough detail that the action couldn't be prosecuted, and plumped him down, totally out of place, in a setting 20-30 years away from where he should be, presumably because she wants to be thought "cute" and because she hasn't the imagination to write her own characters (as the rest of the book demonstrates). By contrast, King can create her own characters quite well, borrowed Wimsey for perfectly sensible reasons that had to do with plot and character, inserted him breifly into a setting that was wholly in keeping with him as Sayers developed him, and was able to write a scene or two of dialogue that revealed more about him and used language that was consistent without simply duplicating. Ms. Lackey has lost a reader for good.