Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene: A Prose Rendering

Covers, Illustrations, and Spines
almost 2 years ago – Thu, Apr 11, 2024 at 04:18:03 PM

It took two people and twenty-eight hours, but we replaced every footnote and re-formatted every instance of italics in Volume One. Hurrah! Today I emailed all three volumes to my editor for a final scan, and after that, we are off to final-final-final typesetting.

We got our ISBNs several months ago, so now I'm learning to register titles at the Library of Congress. Other than gleaning dates and cities for research papers, I've never paid much attention to copyright pages, but a lot goes into gathering all those bits and bobs of information that nobody ever reads! 

As I double-checked placement for every illustration, I had the opportunity to look through all of Justin's artwork again. I'll attach a teaser thumbnail screenshot so you can get excited. This is just for Book One, so you are seeing half of the art in Volume One--and there's also a color shot you can't see here. Basically, multiply this genius times six. Do you see why I'm so excited about what's about to happen next?

C.S. Lewis once said: "Beyond all doubt, it is best to have made one's first acquaintance with Spenser in a very large -- and preferably illustrated -- edition of The Faerie Queen, on a wet day, between the ages of twelve and sixteen." Twelve might actually be a bit too young for The Faerie Queene--especially in a prose version that's easier for young minds to understand. However, Lewis is my biggest hero, so his words have often driven me onward in this project, thinking about readers curled up on a rainy day with these books. 

Lewis was Irish, but he spent much of his life in England. This is important because Spenser wrote The Faerie Queene while working as an English government official in Ireland. He supported some ghastly policies and wrote a brief but terrible political statement that excused abuse of the Irish people. 

Watching Lewis interact with stories that inspired him so deeply, while remaining honest about Spenser's infractions, has provided wisdom and steadiness for me during a season in which political discourse in my own country often feels more rabid than reasonable. In fact, most of the time that I've been working through Spenser, I've worn an Irish coin given to me by a dear friend, dated 1946--three years before Lewis finished the first book of the Narnia series. 

It's been interesting thinking about this coin circulating in Ireland while Lewis scribbled away at his own tales in England, loving what was good about Spenser, hating what was bad about Spenser, gleaning inspiration from The Faerie Queene while keeping a nuanced view of the poet himself. I have a lot to learn from all that.

Last week I had my first opportunity to speak about The Faerie Queene post completion. I was supposed to talk for thirty-five minutes, which might have daunted me at one point in my life. Instead, I had to cut my talk in half, then cut it in half again. It's hard to share thoughts on something so vast in just a few minutes! However, it was also wonderful to talk to real humans who gave up on reading the original poem, and who are now excited about exploring it for the first time.

Finally, now that the text is out of my hands, I spent some time working on spine and cover design today. These images look a bit blurry and dull here because Kickstarter reduces image resolution, but the colors are rich and deep in their true state. My publisher noted that this gives a sense of looking through a portal into Faerie Land, and I love that thought.

Next week we will meet with our printer and start finalizing the particulars of paper color, weight, and texture. I'm ridiculously excited about that part of the process. No matter how long I'm in publishing, I'll never get over the fact that I get to be a part of making actual books that we can see, smell, flip through, and hold in our hands. It's like being a magician--except it's better.

That's all for now. We are so close!

Rebecca
 

A bit of bad news amidst the good news.
almost 2 years 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!)
about 2 years 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
about 2 years 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
about 2 years 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.