Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 725

Empires fall

If you're a history buff, or more importantly, if you are appreciate the way that media can convey a complex idea, this is for you.

If you are none of these things, you should be, so watch it anyway.

Visualizing empires decline from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.

A Thanksgiving offering

I honor of Thanksgiving, I offer a gift for all of you who look forward to football just as much as you do the turkey, and probably more.

If you are a serious football fan, this is a must-read essay by the sometimes annoying but more often brilliant Chuck Klosterman.  It comes from his new book, EATING THE DINOSAUR, which I just finished and loved. 

It's the kind of essay that football fans will bookmark and refer back to for years to come, and it is guaranteed to increase your grid-iron...

In need of a copyeditor. And a brain.

In suggesting that the shooting at Ford Hood be labeled a terrorist attack (and implying that the Obama administration was rejected the label for political reasons), former Bush press secretary Dana Perino said no terrorists attacked the US while President Bush was in office.

"We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term. I hope they're not looking at this politically. I do think that we owe it to the American people to call it what it is."

I realize that...

Music critics: A dying breed?

It occurs to me that the music critic is a relatively useless profession, providing the reader with meaningless information on a fairly regular basis.

Theatre and movie critics can help you to decide if you want to invest two or three hours of your life plus admission on a film or play.

Book critics can help you to decide if a book is worth an even more sizeable investment of time plus purchase price.

Food critics serve a similar function in the restaurant business.

But a music critic...

Write like Palin!

Slate is hosting a writing contest in which readers are asked to write like Sarah Palin. 

Brilliant. 

I wish I knew who at Slate should be credited with this idea.  The goal is to write a sentence that could be mistaken for one from her book.  The deadline is Wednesday. 

Slate defines the Palin style as "multiple references to local flora and fauna, heavy use of PSAT vocabulary, slightly defensive tone, difficult-to-parse meaning." 

They also provide an example of such a sentence. ...

internet

In reviewing the copyedits of UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO, I was saddened to learn that the word Internet still requires capitalization. 

Why? Can we please agree to stop the insanity!  

The internet is not a place like Tallahassee and Timbuktu.  It is a network of computers, no different than the telephone or electrical lines that crisscross our country.  Why is must still be capitalized is beyond my imagination.     

I dare someone to defend this ridiculous convention.

Waiting is the worst

My favorite literary agent in the whole world (and one of my favorite people in the world) is Taryn Fagerness. I am proud to call her my agent and my friend. She is a brilliant professional and my hero.

Hero? Heroine? I dunno. I think hero sounds better, but if she likes heroine, that would be fine, too.

Either way, despite my supreme adoration for Taryn and my assumption that all other literary agents pale in comparison, I recently discovered that there might be one or two other agents in...

Tackle football one more time. Please?

The previous week has been quite interesting in terms of my athletic accomplishments. 

Last Sunday, I played nine holes of golf and beat my friend, Jeff, for the first time.  Granted, he played poorly and I played well, but down two shots going into the final hole, I made par after hitting a wedge 90 yards and sticking it within five feet of the cup.  I made the shots when it counted, and it felt damn fine.   

One of my New Year's Resolutions was to beat either of my two most frequent...

New website up and running

My new author website debuts this morning at matthewdicks.com.  Everything that you might want to know about me and my books can be found there, including a link to this blog.  I am still in the process of filling out certain sections of the website, but it's already full of lots of information, including a peek at the cover to my next book, UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO.

For those of you who want to access my blog directly, the address is now matthewdicks.typepad.com. 

I hope hes right

Sometimes I worry that I might have entered the publishing world at the wrong time.  Falling book sales, an unsettled eBook market and the decline of the independent bookstore have caused massive upheavals in the industry.

Add to this experienced and respected authors like John Irving, who suggests that new novelists have a tough road and Phillip Roth, who has declared the novel to be dead, and I find myself a little worried.

Will there be anyone left to buy my books in twenty years? 

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