I had a glass of white wine with my dinner (mushroom burger, very tasty), and I feel ridiculously fuzzy now. I’m going to post nonetheless, dammit, because I’ve been meaning to ever since I came across this link in my RSS reader:
Knight v Snail, from the British Library medieval manuscripts blog. I think this quote from the post sums it all up:
one of our post-medieval colleagues noticed a painting of a knight engaging in combat with a snail. […] This struck him as odd, which struck the medievalists in the group as odd; surely everyone has seen this sort of thing before, right?
That, my friends, is medieval marginal art for ya. Knights versus snails is only a part of the awesomely weird shit going on in the borders of Serious Medieval Works. (See Got Medieval’s post on knights and snails, and check out his marginalia category for some amazing entertainment.)
Anyway, what does all this manuscript geekery have to do with writing? Currently, this: one of the stories I’m currently working on is inspired by medieval knight-v-snail marginalia. So, of course I had to link the BL blog post, since I think everyone should be educated on this intriguing phenomenon.
Sadly, I’ve been too busy and stressed out to work on the snail story for the past week or so – but this weekend will bring with it some free time for editing. Huzzah! I’d also like to get some poems submitted.
(I need to get back into the writing loop properly, but a chronic lack of sleep is gnawing at my energy resources rather too persistently to let writing happen. Thus, I will now finish off this blog post and go to bed early.)
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PS: If you haven’t donated to the Strange Horizons fund drive, there’s still five days to go! Help SH get another year of awesome stuff.
SH really is one of the most diverse I’ve come across – for instance, the current issue is an Indian/diaspora SF special! I haven’t had the chance to read the issue yet, but it looks really interesting.