Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene: A Prose Rendering

A bit of bad news amidst the good news.
8 months ago – Sun, Mar 24, 2024 at 01:36:03 PM

Well, team. Want to share in a defeat as well as the victories?

As we were winding down to the last few edits, the Microsoft Word file for Volume One corrupted. I didn't lose text, thankfully. I also have a billion backups. However, in the file with the most recent hours of changes, the formatting of all 532 notes disappeared. Those notes remain in the text, but they are now registering as a horizontal column of body text instead of as footnotes. Ugh.

I spent an hour with Microsoft Word tech support (with two different tech dudes), and after they told me to try everything I'd already tried, they said it was a document issue not an application issue. (Cough.) 

Bottom line--unless our typesetter is able to work a miracle, we will have to manually reenter all those footnotes. (The last document in which the formatting did not have this problem is too old for a compare docs function to work effectively.) 

Thankfully, this can be done through copy/paste and not rewriting. Still, copying and pasting 532 times without making any mistakes will be rough. My amazing editor has agreed to tackle the task while I'm touching up introductions for Volumes 2 and 3. She's brilliant and detailed, so if anyone can get this right, it's Dr. Lindsey Panxhi. However, I'm sure this won't be fun work, and I'm feeling a bit sick to have to admit that there's no easier solution.

I'm going to scoot because I've lost writing time trying to fix this over the past few days. But, this is the news from Lake Woebehere. I guess we could have expected a few monsters to appear on a quest like this. Hopefully this one won't take too long to slay.

Onward and upward!

Rebecca



 

A final call for additional Faerie Queene orders (Yes, we're THAT close!)
9 months ago – Wed, Mar 13, 2024 at 08:35:06 AM

I'm taking a quick break from the final round of artistic edits on Book Six, Canto Seven to send a brief update. 

We've noticed that many of you have ordered additional gear from our BackerKit store, even after the campaign has ended. Thank you for your enthusiasm!

Because of this, we have delayed in placing our own orders for items like Gloriana/Arthur mugs, crowns, shirts, swords, pins, cards, etc. However, we are now close enough to shipping that we need to finalize these item quantities. 

We plan to keep our standard book set on BackerKit long term, but the extra gear and the deluxe editions are probably one-time offerings. So, if any of you have been toying with adding these to your order, your final day to do so is March 31. And if you have friends who have been considering jumping in somehow, they only have about two weeks left to do it.

<Click here, if you need the link to order.>

No matter what you pledged, I hope that when you receive your goods, you will know how grateful I am for your support throughout this process. Looking back, it's hard to believe that I was so resistant to Kickstarter at the beginning of this endeavor. I had thought that this platform was just a way to raise money--I didn't know a campaign would collect visionaries to accompany our labor, cheering it to its completion. If you've ever been a part of a massive project like this, you already know how that sort of support means even more than the dollars spent. So, I hope you will use your gear knowing that you truly were a huge part of making this happen. I'm such a fan of you all!

Rebecca

P.S.  There are twelve cantos in each complete book, and Book Six is the last of the complete books! We are so close!



 

Spenser's way of seeing
9 months ago – Sun, Mar 03, 2024 at 01:37:00 PM

Volume Two is about to head to its final micro check before going to the typesetter. While I was polishing it off, I wondered if you might be interested in reading an excerpt from the Introduction to Books Three and Four. This section discusses a character who disappears mid-plot, but it lands in  some general advice about reading Spenser that could prove helpful to you, even as you start Book One.

RR

- - - 

In my favorite scene from the movie Patch Adams, an asylum patient named Arthur repeatedly holds up four fingers, asking others how many they see. 

Patch is baffled by this until he wins Arthur’s trust enough to gain some advice. Arthur says, “If you focus on the problem, you can't see the solution.”  He urges Patch to “look beyond the fingers,” where he eventually does find the answer to the riddle. I think a similar technique is helpful when engaging with Spenser’s writing. Sometimes you have to see beyond his words to find what’s inside of them. 

While passing into and out of the deepest layers of Faerie Land, I have often felt like I was caught in the movie Inception—invested in the mechanics of one dimension, then torn away from it, haunted, disoriented, stirred up. At times, I’ve been left wondering, “What is the reality here?" It's an old question that we tend to neglect in a modern era of flat, empirical certainties.

Kafka would not write The Metamorphosis for over three hundred years after Spenser’s poem was released. Should any of us wake up to a family member walking about as an insect, I suspect we would be asking many questions that Kafka never even attempted to answer in his story. And yet, what he did include in The Metamorphosis has plenty of power to accomplish its intended purpose. 

Spenser seems to write with a similar focus and freedom. One minute, he allows a character to pulse with emotional vigor and complexity, and the next, he takes us by the sleeve and shakes us, reminding us to not just look "at" but "through."  

. . .

FAERIE QUEENE PREORDER STORE CLOSING THIS WEEKEND
9 months ago – Fri, Mar 01, 2024 at 10:09:53 AM

We will be closing the BackerKit Faerie Queene pre-order store this Sunday, March 3, at midnight EST, so please, if you want to add any items to your pledged order, do so before then. As we prepare to send the books off for production, we need to finalize and order all of our stretch goal and Add-on items.

We continue to be in awe of the support our backers have shown. We are YOUR fans! Thank you for the continued encouragement, great feedback, and excitement.

Seeking an expert you might know?
9 months ago – Wed, Feb 28, 2024 at 07:41:41 AM

Spenser includes three extended sections of ancient British history in The Faerie Queene. If you are familiar with the classical convention "epic catalogue," you already have an idea of how these sections work.  

Although these histories are integrated into the stories Spenser tells, they also (for the most part) stand apart from critical action. So I italicized them, hoping this would allow readers to skim through these parts if desired.

I've reread these histories many times, and I've asked four knowledgeable editors to check my work. However, ancient British history is not my speciality, so I can't help but feel a lingering lack of confidence in these particular episodes as we prepare to go to print. 

Complicating matters--Spenser seems to confuse a few small details as he conveys his histories. So, I can't simply search standard history texts to unravel each claim he makes. I need to know what his discrepancies seem to be, double check his language to make sure he has missed something, and then make note of those errors in my text.

So, do you happen to know someone with a PhD in Greek/Roman/British history who also would be also willing to read through these three sections one last time before we deem them finished? Book II Canto x is by far the longest, if someone wants to get an idea of what would be involved here. There are also two shorter sections of history included in Book III. I can give editorial credit in the text, and I can also offer a lovely set of deluxe edition books, a t-shirt, a mug, and some other swag for their pains. :)

I think it's likely that most modern readers will quickly skim these sections instead of reading them in detail. And we have employed gifted experts already. But as we have checked this text over and over, we've all been surprised by what it is possible to overlook. 

I would love for these bits of text to have run every gauntlet possible so that when these renderings are used in classrooms, I can feel confident that young people are getting the best possible translation. So, if you know someone with these specific qualifications and a merciful and generous heart, I'd love to connect. :)

Thank you for considering this--and maybe even burning a banked favor on behalf of the cause.

Rebecca