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In the six hundred year since it was fought the battle of Agincourt has become an exceptionally famous one, which has generated a huge and enduring cultural legacy. Everybody thinks they know what the battle was about but is the Agincourt of popular image the real Agincourt, or is our idea of the battle simply taken from Shakespeare's famous depiction of it?

The post “The Created Agincourt in Literature” extract from Agincourt appeared first on OUPblog.

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Q: What shouts "Goth" more than a scary graveyard statue of an angel?

A: A statue of an angel with a deliciously nerdy reference... ; D
(Most goths I know are uber-nerds as well, so the two go hand in hand, naturally....)

The last time I posted on ABBA, I was commiting myself to a stint of whistling the devil's tunes. After extensive faffing about, I am able to report that I have indeed got stuck in. I've been up to my elbows in blood ... well, maybe not, but at least I've been making my characters unhappy and tipping the balance of their world pretty relentlessly askew. It's a big book I'm working on - 70-80,000 words - and so the threads that I'm pulling tighter need to be followed through quite a lot of cloth. It's the kind of work where you need to hold the long picture in your mind while still focusing on the pattern right in front of your eyes. It's the sort of thing I usually need to go away to do, but because it's a re-write instead of a first draft I'm managing to poke away even in the midst of family life. (Which at the moment includes being woken at 5 every morning by the birds getting on with THEIR family life.)

But because writers, like people, rarely get to do one thing at a time, I'm also doing a lot of thinking about short stories. Even short-short stories. It has become the Spring of the Writing Workshop. (I've blithered a bit about this on my blog already - The Long and the Short of It.) So I've been gathering up stimulating, playful writing exercises for producing pieces of short stories or complete short stories - and re-discovering, in the process, just how much fun you can have when you're NOT writing Lords of the Rings.

I rediscover the joys of writing short on a regular basis, and forget completely in-between. (The brain has finite storage capacity, as we know. Though sometimes we forget.) Before writing this post, I was trying to figure out WHY writing short stories is so satisfying. Maybe it's because it is so much more easily completed. Maybe it's because we really can polish every word to the shininess of a shiny thing. Maybe it's because the ideas that need short stories to express them have a tidy, attainable, holdable quality that long works don't. (Not so sure about that one.)

Help me out here. Why ARE short stories so - here I pause to look in my thesaurus for another word for "satisfying" and am given "cheering, convincing, cool, filling, fulfilling, gratifying, persuasive, pleasing, pleasurable, satisfactory" - all those things to write?

Meantime, back to being mean time ...

P.S. At first I had trouble finding images on Google for this blog's title. Then I realised I'd made a slight spelling mistake. I'd put an "i" instead of a "u" in the second word ...

Joan Lennon's website
Joan Lennon's blog

I must be having my 15 minutes of fame today. First, the 7-imps jules and eisha posted an interview with me today. On top of that, my review of Song of the Sparrow is posted on the Cybils site today!

Even before my day of fame, it's been a great week. Monday was my birthday, and for my birthday present to myself, I finally reached my goal of losing 50 pounds!

They don't get much better than this!

I apologize that it's been so long since I've posted a review. I have several books lined up waiting to review, but I've been bogged down in Cybils organizational stuff and haven't had time. I promise to post some soon. I need to get back to it!