Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 750

Odd business combinations

I spent the evening at the Latchis Hotel in Brattleboro, Vermont, at a writing and booksellers’ conference. My publicist arranged the accommodations, so I was not familiar with the hotel when I arrived. It turns out that the Latchis, an art deco hotel according to its website, is actually a combination hotel and movie theater, and this unique redesign afforded some interesting architectural features.

For example, a square support beam, about two feet wide on each side, ran through my bathroom f

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies!

I don’t often recommend books sight unseen, but I saw this book on the NY Times bestseller list (trade paperback) and couldn’t resist immediately purchasing it. 

It’s published by Quirk Books, which also sounds right up my ally, and is described as “the classic story, retold with 'ultraviolent zombie mayhem.”

Awesome.

The fact that the book still retains Jane Austin as an author makes it even more fascinating to me. 

Drippy and syrupy and just plain inexplicable

Being a novelist and an English major, I truly believe that I love books just about as much as a person can, and while I hate to criticize the legitimacy of any written text, but could someone please explain to me who buys books like these:

Collection of ideas

I have a very important Word document saved on my desktop which contains ideas for blog posts, a long list of children’s book ideas, notes for a future memoir, a list of quotes that I might one day use in a book or blog post, a few inspirational emails sent to me through the years, revision ideas for MILO and my current manuscript, and a section entitled Book/Story/Research Ideas.

This is an odd collection of ideas for future novels (at least two that I am quite serious about), sociological exp

Best place to think

I can’t explain it, and it might sound a bit cliché, but I make more breakthroughs in my writing while in the shower than anyplace else.

Today’s shower yielded an entire restructuring of my current manuscript, a means by which the story will reveal itself in a more logical, ordered way. I’ve discovered plot twists, new characters and the ending to at least one story while in the shower. Perhaps it’s because the shower is the only place where I truly unplug from my podcasts, my audio book, conv

What type are you?

Rocket Bomber describes the 7 types of bookstore customer. 

I lean towards being an Independent (anytime I must stop my current audio book to interact with human beings annoys me) with strong Browser tendencies. 

And yes, even though an online store like Amazon is more convenient, I like book stores.  It’s the one place in the world that I enjoy browsing.

Guilt-free book club

My book club has been attempting to arrange a meeting time after a six-month hiatus during which time my daughter Clara was born. The following is a string of emails that were exchanged between us over the past two days as we attempted to organize a meeting. Our friends’ names have been changed in deference to their anonymity.

In order to follow the emails, you should note that our book club consists of three couples: Boris and Svetlana Leningrad, Sonny and Cher, and my wife, Elysha, and me.

Customer reviews of SOMETHING MISSING

Reviews of SOMETHING MISSING have begun to pop up on Amazon as part of their Vine Program.  Amazon describes this program thusly:   

Amazon Vine™ is a program that enables a select group of Amazon customers to post opinions about new and pre-release items to help their fellow customers make educated purchase decisions. Customers are invited to become Amazon Vine™ Voices based on the trust they have earned in the Amazon community for writing accurate and insightful reviews. Amazon provides Amaz

Twenty-car pile-up of ideas in my head

I’m not sure how or when I’ll use this in a story, but I am fascinated by the idea of slugging, a term used to describe a unique form of commuting found in Washington, DC, San Francisco, and Pittsburg and sometimes referred to as "Instant Carpooling" or "Casual Carpooling". It is the practice of forming ad hoc, informal, temporary carpools for purposes of commuting, essentially a variation of ride-share commuting and hitchhiking.

“The system of slugging is quite simple. A car needing additional

A word by any other name is not a word

The English language acquired its one millionth word today. 

Sort of. 

According to the Global Language Monitor, a website that uses a math formula to estimate how often words are created, the word Web 2.0 was added at 5:22 AM ET, making it the one millionth word in the English language. 

Need I point out that Web 2.0 isn’t an actual word but a phrase used to describe the social nature of the current iteration of the Internet? 

Or that the “word” Web 2.0 is about four years old?  Why has