Romance of the Middle Ages

Yesterday I visited the Romance of the Middle Ages exhibition at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. It uses manuscripts, printed books and art to explore the story of the romance from the Middle Ages to the present day. Exhibits range from a most incredibly illustrated copy of Le Roman de la Rose to a pen-and-ink drawing of a knight and lady by Edward Burne-Jones, a hand written page by Tolkien and a letter from the BBC to the Monty Python team regarding The Holy Grail.

There are many elements that I could write about here but the overwhelming feeling I came away with was my love for the physical book. This is beautifully illustrated (no pun intended) by an exhibit named A Shared Book. It a version of the poem Arthur and Merlin and is inscribed ‘This is Robert Jones his booke recorde of Steven Jones and of Robert Webbe and of Misteris Caterne Jones and of many mo good people in the parishe of Tolpudle’. I love the idea of it being passed around the village to be read and surviving to this day.

More on the exhibition can be found at http://medievalromance.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/romance-home

Plodding

I haven’t blogged for a while. The main reason is that I am going through a phase loosely titled ‘heads down and get on with it.’ The writing process is a little like a job at the moment. I sit down on my allocated study days, review my milestones and then keep writing. It’s a bit lonely sitting here in the office most days and self motivation cannot be underestimated. Don’t get me wrong, I am enjoying it but I just want to get to the end of the first draft so that I can go back and start having fun with it. I’ve now reached 80% of the novel although I expect that the estimated total word count will increase. There was a brief moment of panic a few weeks ago when I found a basic error when reading my research notes which rendered part of my novel plan useless. However, due to the joys of the excel spreadsheet I was able to move everything around and it’s actually much better.
Hopefully, by the summer I will have completed the draft. I will also be allowing myself out of the house to attend a couple of conferences.