Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 733
October 9, 2009
No neck
One of my less than pleasing attributes is the absence of a neck. My head literally sits atop my shoulders. I once had a conversation with a coworker that went like this:
Me: Yeah, Elysha and I are afraid that the baby might have a huge head and no neck, just like its dad. Poor little thing.
Coworker: Don't be silly. You have a neck.
Me: No, I really don't. Just this big head stuck on a pair of shoulders.
Coworker: Don't be ridiculous. Show me your neck.
Me: Huh?
October 7, 2009
Book of the Month
A friend of mine, a member of the Book of the Month Club, sent me the pages from last month's magazine that included SOMETHING MISSING. I'm in the middle of reading PRIDE AND PREGUDICE AND ZOMBIES, and though this may sound a little silly, I can't tell you how thrilling it is to see my book alongside a novel that I am enjoying so much.
Short story conundrum
In college, I wrote many short stories. Most are not well written, but I have a couple that are good and one that I like very much. I've been thinking about showing my favorite to my agent in hopes that she can help me get it placed in a magazine somewhere.
But I worry. It was written more than ten years ago and is nothing like the work I do today. I'm afraid that it might simply be dreadful.
As I debate the future of my short story and attempt to rouse the courage to send it to...
October 6, 2009
Busy!
I'm in the process of debating over the multiple careers of protagonist Wyatt Mason in THE CHICKEN SHACK. Wyatt is the owner of The Chicken Shack, but he is also a part-time English teacher at a local community college, an occasional freelance magazine writer, a member of the Town Council and the local vigilante. I've worried that this might seem like too much, and that Wyatt's life will come across as convoluted and unrealistic.
At the same time, I find myself justifying Wyatt's multitude...
Axis of evil in my baby book
With the birth of my daughter, I've recently spent some time flipping through my baby book.
It's been quite enlightening.
The best part about the baby book is that it is written by my mother, who passed away a couple years ago. There are no home movies or audio recordings of my mother, so these words, scrawled in a baby book more than thirty years ago, are the last that I have of her. Reading them makes me wonder what her life was like back then, when life seemed so full of hope and...
October 5, 2009
Sometimes a book can speak directly to your heart
Stephen King, in On Writing, writes:
If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second to least of your concerns. The least of all: polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered anyway.
Cursive writing: Expendable?
I haven't used cursive in years. Even my signature can hardly be called cursive. It's more of an indecipherable scrawl. Other than the years I spent instructing my students in cursive when I taught third grade, I have not found any use for this form of writing in my own life.
Perhaps it has something to do with being left-handed. Dragging my hand across a written page leaves my hand stained with ink.
I mention this because there's been some concern as of late that cursive is a...
October 4, 2009
Great speech. Lousy bedside manner.
The late William Safire drafted a speech for President Nixon to read in case the Apollo 11 Astronauts became stranded on the moon. It's a great speech.
Truly great.
But in Safire's directive to the President at the end of the speech, he wrote about widows-to-be and described a ceremony that was to take place "After the President's statement, at the point when NASA ends communication with the men."
Does this mean that NASA was planning on cutting off communication with Armstrong and Aldrin...
October 3, 2009
How does anyone keep with with this magazine?
The New Yorker offered me a 250% discount on a year's subscription, citing me as a "professional."
Having ideas for stories that I would like to publish in the magazine someday, and liking the sound of the word professional, I was unreasonably excited about this.
How can I resist such a deal?
Except now I will have to suffer from New Yorker guilt as the magazines pile up, week after week, only partially read.
October 2, 2009
Credit to the copyeditor
UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO has entered the copyediting stage of production, in which some clever editor with a keen understanding for the English language, an outstanding eye for detail and an unbiased red pen will read through my manuscript line by line, proposing changes here and there to eliminate redundancy, clarify ideas, streamline sentences and make me sound a hell of a lot better than I really am.
It's a reassuring process that allows me to sit back and wait for smart people to clean up any...
