Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 738

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

A question of origin

When Darth Vader is chasing Luke Skywalker down the trench of the Death Star in Star Wars: A New Hope, he notes that "the Force is strong with this one."

Shouldn't he be more alarmed with this observation? Less than twenty years earlier, Vader slaughtered every Jedi youngling in the Jedi Temple, effectively wiping out any future Jedi. When he encounters a pilot who is strong with the Force, doesn't he have to wonder why this guy even exists?

These are the things that I dream about at night.

Subtitles be gone!

Robert McCrum of the The Guardian recently called for a cease and desist on the use of subtitles in books. He cited a newly published biography of William Golding, which includes the admittedly odd and somewhat limiting subtitle: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies.

I'd hate to think that a biography of me would be subtitled: The man who wrote Something Missing. Sure, it's true, but doesn't this subtitle imply that I didn't do much else?

McCrum also cites the use of forgotten subtitles in...