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My Favorite Morte d'Arthur (and Writing Update)

As the summer winds down and I'm getting ready to resume teaching, I'm also trying to squeeze in a bit more writing and revising!

Sir Kai's novella is continuing to expand. Every single plot beat is taking twice as many chapters to get through as I expected. At the moment, Kai is lurking in a hole, ready to ambush any powerful Faeries who emerge through a particular Faerie gate... because Reasons. He is also continuing to ignore the advice of his murderous sidekick, which--while very reasonable from his perspective--is going to cause him some Problems. I'm having way too much fun with this story!

Sir Guyon's book, which I first wrote and then revised lo these many years ago, is shaping up nicely in final revisions. Guyon has always been one of my favorite characters, and one of the easiest for me to write; so I'm not having to do much with his character arc other than make sure it's clear to the reader. Most revisions involve making sure that I've remembered to explain how the world of the Faerie Queen works, or checking that symbolic elements from Spenser's original are still coming through in my retelling.

Since Kai's story isn't in Spenser's Faerie Queene at all, I'm doing some reviewing of other Arthur-related material. One excellent resource is, of course, Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, first published around 1485. If you want to see what the original looked like, I recommend the Norton Critical Edition edited by Stephen Shepherd, which preserves Malory's English (scholars are apparently still fighting about whether it's Middle English or Early Modern English; I personally would say it's the latter), and also has all kind of fascinating appendices. I do love a good appendix, don't you? Appendices include a chronology of Arthurian literature, and excerpts from various obscure medieval tales of Arthur and friends, like the Prose Merlin. I first read this edition in high school and have been fascinated by it ever since. There are a lot of stories in Malory that don't make it into the young peoples' versions, I can tell you.

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