On to business: here is a great article that ran in the Washington Post this past weekend on M.T. Anderson, another young adult writer of quality. (At least, I think he is; I have not yet read his book.) He is the author of Octavian Nothing, an epic set in the Revolutionary War documenting the experience of a slave in very unusual but historically accurate circumstances. I noticed it in Borders a couple of days before the article ran, and now it's certainly on my list to read.I was particularly interested in what Anderson had to say about trying to absorb 18th-century sentence structure, as I have been wallowing in Chaucer lately in an attempt to clean out some modern cadences from my ears, for the purposes of my novel. More on that in a future post probably.
In other news, here is What I Did With My Summer (or Thanksgiving) Vacation:
- Read a lot of Chaucer (see above)
- Saw (twice) and loved (twice) the Twilight movie. Ate my words from months previous about how it looked imbecilic and came away with a hearty respect for Robert Pattinson (channeling James Dean and Max Schreck simultaneously?!), Catherine Hardwicke (making it beautiful), and the general power of not being too cynical for your own good.
- Finished a chapter! Yay! I successfully narrated a medieval journey without mentioning seedcakes once. Victory is mine.
- Actually did research for my novel, which felt very virtuous.
- Went to the library and checked out a whole pile of books I knew I wouldn't be able to finish but enjoyed myself anyway.
- Fretted about historical accuracy in fiction. (More to come on this issue.)
- Formed a resolution to read some E.T.A. Hoffman, after I finish the Canterbury Tales (ha!), The Faerie Queene (bigger ha!), and this random book I picked up at Borders about medievalists...
And, last of all, Coming Soon: Why History Is Just a Nuisance
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