Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 754

Not religious. Not spiritual.

The advanced review copies of SOMETHING MISSING have begun to pop up on eBay (thank goodness for Google Alerts). Even though the ARC seal on the book clearly states that the review copy is not for sale, apparently not everyone agrees.

Even so, the eBay seller indicates in their description of the book that:

This listing is for a softcover book titled "Something Missing" by Matthew Dicks. This softcover advance reading copy says not for resale on it.

It’s nice of the seller to acknowledge the ru

Morrison victorious

For those of you who didn’t follow the Tournament of Books that I had referenced previously, Toni Morrison’s A MERCY beat out Tom Piazza’s CITY OF REFUGE for the win.

While in college, I took a class that centered on the work of Toni Morrison and South African writer Nadine Gordimer, and as a result, I had to read every one of Morrison’s books up until that time, which included all of her novels save LOVE (published in 2003) and this most recent one.

I like Morrison’s work a lot. I don’t recomme

More from Vonnegut

Apologies, dear readers, for the lengthy departure.  But attempts to complete final revisions to MILO (now tentatively titled UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO), combined with the need to complete report cards for my students and a Border's Book of the Month Club questionnaire kept me quite busy for the last two weeks. 

But with all of those projects firmly behind me, I have a plethora of subjects upon which to write. 

Allow me to begin with some great news. 

For the past four years, I have been reading TIM

Fighting with my agent (sort of)

I’ve spent the last week working on revising my second book using notes from my agent, Taryn, who, by the way, recently launched her own literary agency.

It took my all of two seconds to decide to stick with Taryn. While be forever grateful to Sandy Dykstra and her agency for signing me on, it was Taryn who plucked my manuscript from the slush pile and became its biggest fan. Ever since she read my query letter and the first three chapters of SOMETHING MISSING, she has been an amazing partner, c

Source material

I was speaking to a friend who said that his head is full of stories but he lacks the chops to get them down on paper, lamenting his lack of writing skill. He wondered aloud if someone would be willing to write them down for him and craft them into books, at which point his wife said, “You’re not a writer. You’re just source material.”

She was right. While I wouldn’t want to ghost write his books, I’d be happy to steal anything he might have and use it in a book.

I’m always advising my students

Dream sequences

Here’s a pet peeve of mine:

Dream sequences in books, film or television.

I can’t stand it when I must suffer through a character’s dream, particularly when it occurs in a novel. Though many writers seem to employ this tactic, I cannot imagine why. It strikes me as a lazy, less-than-subtle means of opening up a character’s mind to the reader. It almost always fails to advance the plot in any meaningful way and serves only to fill pages with material that should have been presented in a more clev

Tournament of Books

The fifth annual Tournament of Books began a couple weeks ago, pitting the sixteen best novels of the year against one another in order to determine a champion. The first round match-ups were thus: 2666 vs. Steer Toward Rock Netherland vs. A Partisan’s Daughter The White Tiger vs. Harry, Revisited Unaccustomed Earth vs. City of Refuge Shadow Country vs. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks The Northern Clemency vs. The Lazarus Project A Mercy vs. The Dart League King Home vs

Lies

A recent survey of British readers found that a "George Orwell’s 1984 tops the list of books that people pretend they have read, in a survey carried out for World Book Day 2009. Of the 65% who claimed to have read a book which in truth they haven’t, 42% admit to having said they had read modern classic 1984."

Those who lied have claimed to have read:

1. 1984 by George Orwell (42%)
2. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (31%)
3. Ulysses by James Joyce (25%)
4. The Bible (24%)
5. Madame Bovary by Gustave F

Acknowledgements page

Jonathan Black wrote a piece in the American Spectator about the Acknowledgements page (or pages) in novels, declaring that “The Acknowledgments page cannot make a bad book better, but it can ruin a good one.”

How utterly ridiculous.

First off, if Black truly believes that an Acknowledgements page can ruin a good book, why would he ever read one? It’s not like the acknowledgements are essential to the story. Just skip the page or two and preserve the sanctity and potential greatness of the boo

Trade paper

The decision has been made to publish SOMETHING MISSING as a trade paperback original rather than as a hardback. Doubleday’s marketing department believes that the book will do better in trade paper. My agent explained it to me this way:

The price point would be lower (paperbacks sell for about $14 while hardbacks sell for $22). This means more people can afford to buy the book, which is particularly important in today’s economy.

Advanced orders from bookstores like Barnes and Noble would more t