I mentioned yesterday that I've renewed my driver's license. Last night I was taking something out of my wallet and realized that Nova Scotia seems to be making another effort to incorporate holograms into the film covering the license information. A few years ago they put one over the license number, which at the time was the only place your birthdaye showed, which made things frustrsting for security at bars in Dallas where they were under orders to ID everyone who came in, even those clearly over thirty.

The next version got rid of that.

This one? My picture is... okay, let's not belabour how bad it is, it's a driver's license photo, with all that it brings.

But over the photo is a hologram that flashes the words "Nova Scotia"--as well as pinky-purply flowers.

Yes, I now have a psychedelic driver's license. Awesome. If only I had a black light to go with it...

So last week I was angsting a little about my whole character-kidnapping thing and whether it made me a big freak. (Not that I had any plans to stop.) However, I am no longer one bit stressed about it, and that is because yesterday I got The Other Boleyn Girl out of the public library, and if Antonia Fraser's history The Wives Of Henry VIII has any basis whatsoever in fact, then Boleyn Girl is a wonderful exercise in character kidnapping, featuring a po-faced Mary Sue in the place of Mary Boleyn. I am quite sure the novel does extreme violence to the historical facts--compared to the Fraser book the novel reverses the birth order of the Boleyns, knocks eight to ten years off their ages, turns Mary's fling with Henry into something much longer-lasting and more significant that there's any reason to believe it was, and includes every scandal about Anne from the deformed "devil's child" of rumour to the ones about incest with her brother (all together now--"Ewwww!!!!") But you may remember that last week I commented that a character based on the real guy I was reading about would probably have to be a kid for readers to take to him? I can see why the novelist did the same here: the only way to sympathize with the characters she's created is if they're young and over their heads. (Cue execution joke here, I guess.)

The novel is well-written and fairly annoying, especially the chaste "whore," Mary, who is our narrator. I have the urge to mutter "come off it!" every two pages or so.

It definitely makes me feel better about creating actual fictitious characters from real historical figures.

And I'm still going to see the movie. I expect I'll roll my eyes a fair bit, but--Eric Bana! With his shirt off!

It would take more than a prissy Mary Sue to spoil that, I'll tell you!