Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 730

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? 

...

Hoping for disaster. Again.

I plan on watching Oprah with my wife this evening, a talk-show that I never normally watch.  Elysha recorded Oprah's interview with Sarah Palin, and I've been waiting to hear her speak about her new book, GOING ROGUE.

Just writing the title of the book makes me laugh.    

Admittedly, my desire to watch Sarah Palin speak in any capacity is akin to my desire to watch a NASCAR race:

I'm just waiting and hoping for the next spectacular crash and burn.

I can't help it. I want another Katie...

Happy to be alive

Yesterday I was interviewed by a reporter about SOMETHING MISSING and my life in general.  She was surprised to hear about the many things that I manage to squeeze into the day, and when she asked how I managed to do this, I told her that I sleep less than most and attempt to live my life like it is my very last day on Earth.

Considering my experience with near-death experiences, this is not an unreasonable position for me to assume.  As cliché as it may sound, I think I come damn close to...

Uniformity be damned!

I find the degree to which authors differ in their approaches to writing utterly amazing. 

Alexander Alter of the Wall Street Journal has collected remarks from a variety of leading authors pertaining to the way in which they approach the process of writing, and they could not be more diverse from one another. 

For example:

"Orhan Pamuk writes by hand, in graph-paper notebooks, filling a page with prose and leaving the adjacent page blank for revisions, which he inserts with...