{"id":427,"date":"2016-04-21T09:52:53","date_gmt":"2016-04-21T08:52:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/?p=427"},"modified":"2016-04-21T09:52:53","modified_gmt":"2016-04-21T08:52:53","slug":"alphaday-11-season-xii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/alphaday-11-season-xii\/","title":{"rendered":"Alphaday 11 Season XII"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hi Alphas,<\/p>\n<p>Welcome to Alphaday 11. With only two more Alphadays left this season \u2013 three if you count this one \u2013 we now are heading towards the end of Season XII. So make the most of what\u2019s on offer today. There\u2019s plenty there for you to enjoy. The only missing item is the challenge brief. To compensate I\u2019ve contrived another little job for you to do instead. Last Alphaday I mentioned the very un-Alpha-like idea of a \u2018customer satisfaction survey\u2019. Call it what you like, but it is useful to hear what members think of the season. Critiquing is something writers know a bit about, and this is your chance to voice your opinions on Alpha strengths and weaknesses as you\u2019ve experienced them in the course of this season. I\u2019ve put together a document to explain it in more detail which I\u2019ll send out after this bulletin. I\u2019ll sum up your views next Alphaday, so, please, look at the \u2018survey\u2019 as another challenge brief and let me hear from you before the usual deadline. That would be very helpful!<\/p>\n<p>Back to today\u2019s agenda which has the following treats on offer:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>This bulletin from me<\/li>\n<li>The results of the phobia challenge from Stephen (which may or may not be delayed as Stephen warned us in a recent email)<\/li>\n<li>The collated entries for the humour challenge from CCG<\/li>\n<li>The Writers\u2019 Reads column from Morgen<\/li>\n<li>The Log as edited by Sally<\/li>\n<li>Season XII questionnaire<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Not so lean a feast after all, is it now?<\/p>\n<p>There is a bit of a dearth of other interesting news. I suppose you\u2019re all enjoying the abundance of Shakespearean events to celebrate the 400<sup>th<\/sup> anniversary of his death. Mugs and things, I suppose? Or seeing the plays performed live at a theatre near you?<\/p>\n<p>The other literary giant to die on the same day as Shakespeare turns out to be Cervantes, the writer of <em>Don Quixote <\/em>which is considered the prototype of the novel genre. And that, surely, is an enormous claim to fame?<\/p>\n<p>Sir Walter Scott very clumsily and inadequately tried to bring the Norse Sagas to the attention of the rest of Europe. The translations of more recent Norse specialists, Magnus Magnusson in particular, have made this wonderful literary treasure accessible to anyone who\u2019s interested. The sagas were, for the most part, written in the 13<sup>th<\/sup> century. Many of them are written in a genre that\u2019s immediately recognisable as the novel form, while <em>Don Quixote <\/em>is more picaresque or episodic.<\/p>\n<p>Iceland is still keeping its distance from the rest of Europe (an indefinable entity at this moment in time), culturally, politically and financially. So we\u2019ll celebrate Shakespeare and Cervantes. But those sagas deserve to be recognised as the earliest novels to be written in Europe.<\/p>\n<p>Christine<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hi Alphas, Welcome to Alphaday 11. With only two more Alphadays left this season \u2013 three if you count this one \u2013 we now are heading towards the end of Season XII&#8230;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[20],"class_list":["post-427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alphaday-bulletins","tag-alphaday-bulletins-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=427"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alphawriters.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}