June has arrived . . . .

[swan_tower]

Comments

[tltrent.livejournal.com]

Awesome. :)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

^_^

[sapphohestia.livejournal.com]

Woot!

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Behold the fruits of my obsessiveness.

[kendokamel.livejournal.com]

Woohoo!

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Eight days and counting . . . .

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Oh, that is awesome!

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Glad you like it. It's as realistic as I could make it, down to borrowing specific spellings from things Elizabeth wrote.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I thought I was getting that frisson of memory!

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I love knowing geeks. <g>

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

My study of the Court Hand is not the least bit academically rigorous, but I swear I stood there a solid hour when I was 20 and I first saw the holograph of Elizabeth's letter to Mary, in the British Museum. I not only had that thing memorized, but I can still see the shape of the letters, the upward slant that indicated Elizabeth was writing under extreme stress.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen the letter itself, but there was an image of it in one of the books I consulted while working on this. Being able to see her handwriting, and things like those upward-slanting lines, the slashes she put through the remaining space so no one could add a passage to her letter -- it turns her from an Important Historical Figure to a frightened young woman trying to survive.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

YES! It was that letter more than anything that turned my lifelong interest in history into a fascination.

[teleidoplex]

Wow. Now, *that* is an interesting observation about the benefits of studying original documents (or copies of them) rather than just the text. That's cool.

Love the letter, love the website. The intro is particularly cool.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Elizabeth's words to her sister communicate certain things; the shape of those words communicates another. I'm not exaggerating when I say you can see her fear in them. She was trying to avoid being thrown in the Tower, but all she bought was a delay of one day, because writing the letter took long enough that the tide was against them when she was done.

[sora-blue.livejournal.com]

YAY! I'm going to start spelling Kinge with that Elizabethan 'e' on the end.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Trying to write in this style does bad things to one's ability to spell.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

Now that is a thing. I love how their two signatures complement each other.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

It's one of the reasons I chose that entrant from the signature contest.

[gollumgollum.livejournal.com]

What does the word "sayd/layd/fayd" mean? I see later where it's "said/laid/faid" and i get where it says "laide" (by which i assume it means "lady") but i'm a bit confused by that one.

It's very very cool, though. Makes my head hurt a bit, but that makes it feel more real, rather than Fauxlizabethan.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I suspect you're just running afoul of the old alternate s. If the letter you're looking at looks like an f, but doesn't have a cross-bar, it's just an s, and therefore "sayd" is just another wacky spelling for "said."

Not only did they spell things differently, they felt no compulsion to be consistent within a single document.

[mirrorred-star.livejournal.com]

Much awesome. Though it took me a paragraph or so before I could figure out what nearly every word was. Consistent spelling may be less fun, but it is a bit more practical :)

[mirrorred-star.livejournal.com]

As in, I kinda prefer the system we have now. Not as in 'But you're spelling it all funny *whine* '

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Oh, absolutely. No argument here. But my publicist let me slip my leash on this one and go as hard-core Elizabethan as I was capable of, so, y'know . . . hell, at one point they were talking about seeing if they could cobble together a font out of Elizabeth's actual handwriting.

[mirrorred-star.livejournal.com]

Oh, that was definately hardcore.

[akashiver.livejournal.com]

Oooh! It gave me chills.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Yay!

[akashiver.livejournal.com]

Oooh! I wanted to let you know that MNC is out at Borders. I read the 1st part yesterday during the SuperStorm. Good stuff! I'll be back to pick up a copy on the weekend.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Time to go sign some more . . . .