Popping in on the Classics.

This blog's been pretty inactive lately, but I guess it's just because I've been extremely busy with school work--and the like.

We're currently reading A Tale of Two Cities in English, which a lot of people find boring, and stupid, and annoying. I'm not one of those people. I actually find it interesting, and I'm actually reading ahead (which is pretty bad on my part, since reading ahead had almost always resulted in bad things happening to my grade). But the thing is, I don't understand it very well.

I mean, I do. Because if I didn't, then I wouldn't be saying it's pretty decent. But it takes me awhile to get past one page, especially one page without much dialogue, and I've found myself rereading paragraphs and lines just to figure out what Dickens is trying to say. This is probably just because it's a Classic, and was written decades ago. But one of my friends told me that, as a writer, not being able to understand a Classic made her feel kind of...suckish. Does this mean I've been reading way too many YA novels? Does this mean I should expand my range of reading, and start picking out all the other Classics? Does this mean my overall writing knowledge sucks?

Hopefully not.

---

On my own writing, I've progressed to my 8th draft. Yesh :P Draft 8 means going through all my revision notes and visiting all those revision-based web pages to get a good feel on how to, well, revise my novel. I can't believe I'm saying this, but: this is going to be so much fun.

And I also present you this article I found on Let The Words Flow: Overused YA Themes . You can find another similar article in The Writer. Pretty interesting.

- E