I’ve been writing some guest posts on other blogs around the Web in case you are interested in reading.
For the Water Street Books blog, I wrote a three part series on the realities of the book tour. On Saturday, I get to experience those realities first-hand again at Water Street books in Exeter, New Hampshire.
I also wrote a post on the Writers Read blog about the books that I am currently reading.
Enjoy!
Some of the entries in my recent “Write my author bio” contest were exceptionally well done but did not really qualify as true author bios in my mind. But they were ingenious and creative, nonetheless, and could certainly be utilized in other capacities, as part of promotional material for my book tour or blurbs in advertising and on other websites. They read like ad copy rather than an author bio, and they might just come in handy after all.
Two of my favorite in this category were written by Tom Reed-Swale, a friend and colleague who knows me well. I play golf frequently with Tom, work with him everyday, and he was a member of my bridal party when I was married four years ago.
The fact that he knows me so well makes these entries, and especially the first one, quite intriguing, since it’s so oddly contradictory and yet so uncannily accurate.
Congratulations, Tom, on a job very well done.
Matt is funny, opinionated, brash, self-deprecating, honest, thoughtful, questioning, competitive, confrontational, self-centered, trustworthy, inspirational, vindictive, and loyal. If you think he’s complicated character, just wait to you read his books.
Matthew Dicks has nearly died twice from bee stings, once in a car accident, and another time in an armed robbery at a McDonalds. With characters that are as hard to ignore as Matt is to kill, you will find that this author from Newington, Connecticut tells the kind of story that you don’t want to put down and can’t wait to read again.
After much deliberating and careful consideration for all ten entries in my “Write me a new author biography” contest, I have chosen a winner.
Doing so was not easy.
I genuinely liked every entry and loved a few of them. All of them surprised me with the level of detail and insight that they provided about me and my life.
A couple of the entries were outstanding but just not suitable for an author bio, but they could easily be used on promotional materials. I intend on sending these to my publicist as well.
And throughout the next few days, I will share some of my favorite entries with you.
Like I said, I liked them all but really loved a few in particular.
And so, without further adieu, the winner of the contest, written by Charles Wolgemuth:
MATTHEW DICKS, who is not one for long, crafted sentences, preferring the stylings of Vonnegut over those of Saramago, is an author whose works, to date, include the novels Something Missing, Unexpectedly Milo, and the as yet unpublished Chicken Shack; a successful blog (matthewdicks.com); and a number of Op Ed pieces, all of which, at some level or another, tend to examine the outcomes of the quirky and/or rebellious individual when forced up against staid society; however, to say that he is an author is an understatement, for this husband and father from Newington, CT, who has faced a number of near-death experiences, lived in his car, and been tried for a crime that he did not commit, is also an acclaimed elementary teacher who has received the Teacher of the Year Award, is the co-owner of a DJ business, and still wishes that he could beat some of his friends at golf.
I loved this piece for a number of reasons.
First, and most important, the piece possesses an air of self-deprecation that I think is critical to an author bio. While I cherish some of the compliments lauded upon me by other entries, Charles’ bio sticks to the facts and allows them to speak for themselves, absent any hyperbole. He hits the highpoints, leaving out the mundane and obvious, and states just enough to whet the appetite of the reader. And that last line, in which my struggles on the golf course is highlighted, demonstrates my willingness to share my flaws with the public.
Second, Charles effectively connotes my favorite author and my appreciation for his writing style by crafting the bio in the styling of Vonnegut’s antithesis: Jose Saramago. I have criticized Saramago;s lack of paragraphs and obscene sentence length many times, preferring the crisp, clean prose of someone like Vonnegut. And yet Charles manages to demonstrate the effectiveness of Saramago’s style while simultaneously expressing my distaste for it. Clever.
And sort of an inside baseball reference for those literarily inclined.
Lastly, I liked Charles analysis of the themes that I seem to return to in all my work, and in fairness, he was not the only person to center on the idea of the quirky or rebellious character battling the expectations of society, but he managed to capture this idea simply and effectively.
Bravo, Charles, on a job well done.
Naturally, my publicist and editor are on vacation this week, so I’ll have to wait until next week to see what they think.
I’d like to propose an end to the around-the-table photograph. They suck.
You go to a restaurant for a special occasion, engage in lively and engaging conversation, enjoy good food and drink, and then someone decides that “We need a picture!”
Sure. That’s fine. But not around the damn table.
Of all the places that we could take a group photograph, why do we ask people to crowd around one end of the table, bending at impossible angles in order to face the camera and squeeze into the shot, thus framing the entire photograph with a table that is strewn with the detritus of dinner?
Why not a photo outside the restaurant, so we could at least identify the location years later?
Or beside the lobster tank or hostess station or even the space between the two restroom doors?
Anywhere but these bizarrely-staged photos of twisted bodies, craning necks, half-empty wine glasses, the mangled remains of lobsters and chicken and the annoyed stares of people in the distance as they are blinded by the flash for a third time.
I call for an end to this insanity. Who is with me?
A very necessary addition to my well-received In twenty-five years… post: In twenty-five years…
… people will wonder what hallucinogenic, mind-reducing drug was added to the water supply to cause hordes of otherwise normal people to spend their precious, never-to-be-recovered time on Facebook games like Farmville.
I distrust flowery, ostentatious names, as well as any name that attempts to make something sound more cosmopolitan or international than it actually is. In this spirit of distrust, I questioned the authenticity of the Chilean sea bass a couple of nights ago at dinner.
“That name sounds like total marketing to me. How can a sea bass even hail from Chili? What if it is caught off the coast of Peru, or Ecuador, or even Argentina? Does that make it an entirely different species of fish?”
Turns out I was right.
First off, the Chilean sea bass isn’t even a bass. It’s a Patagonian tooth fish.
Second, it does not necessarily hail from Chili. Patagonian tooth fish are found throughout much of the southern hemisphere and are caught by fishermen off the coast of almost every South American nation.
But if you’re unwilling to question things, it’s easy to sell you on the wonders of the Chilean sea bass. It’s got a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?
So what if it isn’t a bass and probably doesn’t originate from Chilean waters?
It’s a little harder, however, to get you excited over the Patagonian tooth fish. But that's what I'll be ordering in the future.
I can't wait to see the look in the waiter's eyes, right before Elysha knocks me upside the head for being such an ass.
I found an amazing review of UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO online today, courtesy of my Google Alert. One of my favorite paragraphs reads:
“Why I LOVE this book (and author): Matthew Dicks’ and his characters’ thoughts about the world are unique, refreshing and, often times, incredibly funny. His main characters are both borderline fantastical and achingly real. They do strange things, but one can’t help but see oneself in their strangeness and their humanness. When you read UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO you will feel eerily compelled to pop the pressure seal on jelly jars, and you will believe in Milo’s journey. The situations his characters find themselves in never fail to be outrageous, but also so perfect, and the opening scene of MILO is a great example.”
But then I read the next couple sentences and my heart sank.
“Matthew is an elementary school teacher and a wedding DJ, I found him in the ‘slush pile,’ and sold SOMETHING MISSING for six-figures. It’s one of those author dream stories, and it couldn’t have happened to a better man…or a better writer.”
“Oh,” I thought. “My agent wrote this.”
Don’t get me wrong. It’s great to know how much your agent adores your work, but this is like a compliment from your sister.
Your agent is supposed to love your work.
A stranger gushing so eloquently about me and my book Would’ve been an entirely different thing.
I am sitting here, listening to my wedding guest complain about the quality of the broadcast of the Hartford Saint Patrick’s Parade today. Though I am refraining from commenting, I want to shout, “It was a parade! If you wanted to see the damn thing, get your ass curbside!”
We’re talking about a local television station broadcasting a local parade once a year to about twelve people, five of whom live in my friend’s home. I can’t imagine that Channel Irrelevant has an enormous budget set aside for this telecast, nor can I imagine that advertisers pay a great deal to have their products featured during the airing of this parade.
If you don’t like the way that the channel broadcasts the news or the weather, then complain. This is what the station is supposed to do. But televising parades? You’re lucky that they are even airing it at all.
And don’t get me started on the lunacy of watching a parade on television. What’s next?
Checking out Vermont’s fall foliage or visiting the Grand Canyon via channel 2?
There are certain events and locales that were meant to be seen live.
Parades are one of them.
A couple weeks ago, my friend gave birth to a baby daughter. A couple hours after the delivery, my wife and I sent the happy couple a bouquet of flowers.
While on the phone with the gift shop manager, I asked if there was an item in the store that was so ugly or strange that it rarely sold. Almost instantly, she answered by describing a bizarre, creepy, headless jewelry holder that she claimed had never been purchased during her three years of employment at the shop.
“Perfect!” I said. “I’d like you to send that up as well. It will be for their daughter.”
It would have been easy to send up a teddy bear or a pair of booties, but I like to try to be memorable in all that I do. Some may find a gift like this to be strange or unnecessary, but when presented with the opportunity to do something different, I usually jump at the chance. Ten years from now, the teddy bear or the booties would have been all but forgotten, but an unexpected, out-of-place, downright ugly gift will surely be remembered. It will become a fixture in the story that they will one day tell their daughter about her first day of life.
I was also hoping that it would be their daughter’s first gift ever, therefore making it almost impossible to throw away and thus increasing the probability that it will stick around for a long time.
It was.
And remarkably, it was even more bizarre than I had imagined. When I visited them earlier this week, I found the creepy looking thing sitting on their coffee table.
Yikes.
If you’re a history buff, or more importantly, if you are appreciate the way that media can convey a complex idea, this is for you.
If you are none of these things, you should be, so watch it anyway.
Visualizing empires decline from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.
I can’t recommend WNYC’s RadioLab podcast enough. Fascinating, science-based stories that are brilliantly produced. I have recommended this podcast to many friends, and every one, without exception, has thanked me later for it.
However, if you can only listen to one RadioLab story for your entire life (a tragedy, indeed), find twenty minutes and click on this story about Stu Rasmussen of Silverton Oregon. It’s just terrific, and the ending is fantastic.
It might even make you cry, though naturally, it did not do so for me.
Have you ever seen a flag better than that of the Benin Empire?
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.
Just a reminder of upcoming appearances for anyone interested:
On Monday, September 21, I will be at the Westport, CT public library with author Margot Berwin to discuss our debut novels.
On Tuesday, September 29, I will be appearing at the Berlin-Peck Memorial Library to read and discuss SOMETHING MISSING.
Hope to see you there!
I am always surprised to find myself sitting in a meeting, a presentation, or any other instance in which someone is speaking to an audience and the speaker chooses not to be interesting, amusing, thought-provoking, or just plain different. Whether you’re discussing a change in company policy, talking about your latest novel, training a team on a new piece of software, or introducing the keynote speaker, why not attempt to be original and memorable? Take advantage of the opportunity to do something or say something that people will remember. Whenever I have the opportunity to speak to an audience, large or small, I try to find a way to make my time in the spotlight, however dim it may be, as unique and impressive and funny as possible, regardless of the topic.
After all, how many ordinary, PowerPoint-guided presentations can a person deliver before realizing that he or she could probably be replaced by an online tutorial, a four-page booklet, or perhaps even a simple sheet of paper containing the necessary information? I’m not saying that every meeting, training session, and book talk must feature a comedian or entertainer, but at least make an effort to do something different.
Stale and staid and ordinary has been done already. Move on. Try something new. I may not always be successful, but I make an effort.
Why not? Right?
These thoughts filled my mind when I came across NPR’s twist on their Page Not Found link. Someone at NPR is clearly thinking along these same lines. Rather than simply returning the reader with the usual webpage indicating a failed search, NPR put a clever and unique spin on this typically mundane encounter and earned a lot of credit in my book.
They managed to create an amusing and memorable Page Not Found experience. And you know what? It didn’t take much to do so.
About a week ago, writer Ann O’Connell, who wrote a piece in The Hour about my appearance at the Wilton Library, posted on Twitter:
It's been two years since the most awkward date of my life. And we'll be married in two months. Bring on the lobster.
I asked her about the story, but she informed me that she could not convey the tale in 160 characters and that she does not currently have a blog. Wanting to hear the story (how could one not with that kind of tease?), I told her that if she would write the story, I’d post it on my blog and feature her as a guest blogger.
She agreed. Here is the story of the most awkward date of her life:
The Most Awkward Date of my Life
Two years ago I went on the most awkward date of my life.
Telling you this date was awkward is saying something, because I have had some awkward dates. There was the guy who picked me up in a Cambridge, Mass. coffeehouse with an invitation to stroll across Boston. “I’m in a band,” he confided. It was only when he got outside and started walking that I learned that his primary instrument was the accordion. Then there was the time I went for coffee with a guy I’d met through his massive group of friends. Four hours in, all of those friends showed up, pulled up chairs and joined the getting-to-know-you conversation. But the hands-down winner of the Awkward Award goes to a college boyfriend whose first words to me were “I’m the woman your mother always warned you about.” He’s a lawyer now, so I’m going to leave those details to your own sordid imaginations.
What I’m trying to say here is that I know awkward. Still, nothing measures up to my September 3, 2007 trip to the museum with the man called Cowboy. He was fourteen years my senior and I knew him only from a local bar, where the other patrons referred to him only as “Cowboy.” We were meeting at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City on Labor Day morning. Thanks to a night of carousing in the city with my friend Beth, I was suffering an immense hangover that day, but I was nursing an unholy crush on the Cowboy, and I thought maybe this outing would rid me of it. It didn’t.
I accepted the date on a Friday in a fit of nerves, and spent the next two days feeling like I’d eaten jumping bean salad. When Labor Day rolled around, I was up early, running on no sleep, so excited I left my cell phone charger in Beth’s apartment. I realized my mistake two blocks away from the museum and had to sprint back to her place, then taxi to the museum. When he arrived, I was soaked with sweat and lugging an overnight bag.
It was the first time I’d seen him in daylight. There were two things we wanted to see, we decided, as we stood around waiting to make our $20-an-adult “donation.” He was looking for the medieval armor. I wanted to see the giant whale I remembered from a childhood trip to the museum.
We made small talk as we continued through the line, into the museum and into the exhibit in which to-scale models of protons and electrons hung in a room made completely of plate glass, which was, incidentally, too bright for anyone recovering from a night of cheap beer and ‘80s music. The pain of my headache pried my attention from the electrons and the conversation. I was gazing out of the glass wall when I realized that the small talk had taken a wrong turn. I tuned back in, and then tried to tune out again immediately, but it was not possible.
He was standing there, near a neutron, confessing family secrets. These were not garden-variety family quirks. These were major sins-of-the-father skeletons in the closet; the sort of ancestral horrors that a significant other tends to learn about gradually; the kind of revelations that take root as a suspicion, and finally explode years down the line when a family member gets drunk at Christmas. The tamest one involved a cousin, a dwarf from Texas, who chased his mother around the graveyard at his father’s funeral.
My first impulse was to wonder what that could do to a child; my second was a fight-or-flight response. The headache began to fade, and I remembered, as I searched for an exit, that two days before Cowboy told me he hadn’t had a proper first date since the ‘80s. When I relayed this information to a girlfriend, she stared at me and said, “Run.” Standing there, listening to him go on about his cousin, the inappropriately horny Texan dwarf, I readied myself for flight.
Then my phone rang. It was my mother. I tell my mother almost everything, but this date was on the short list of items I’d decided not to share.
“Hi honey.”
“Hi Mom. I can’t talk. I’m in the city with Beth.”
“Oh! I didn’t know you were visiting Beth. Where are you?”
“The Museum of Natural History,” I muttered. There was a pause as my mother sniffed the air for lies.
“With Beth? You’re at the Museum of Natural History with Beth?”
“She loves culture. You know Beth.”
My mother did know Beth. She also knew that after a night out in the city, we were more likely to be swanning around behind dark glasses than inspecting arrowheads and stuffed antelopes.
“Okay,” she said in her we’ll-talk-later voice. “Have a good time. And say hi to Beth.”
I turned back to my date.
“That’s my mother. She’s psychic when it comes to the phone. She always calls exactly when she shouldn’t.”
“She knows,” he said, smiling.
My mother’s well-timed intrusion saved me from any more horrific revelations but it did not break the ice. He walked a few steps behind me as we cruised through the exhibits. I could hear his boots echoing off marble floors and the dinosaurs’ glass display cases, each step accompanied by a jingle, which made me wonder if he’d taken his nickname one step too far and worn spurs.
Rejuvenated by a lunch of street-vendor hot dogs, we realized we had found neither the suits of armor nor the whale. We charged back inside only to be told by a sour old lady in a museum vest that there were not suits of armor in this museum. European history – unlike the history of every other continent – was housed down the block in the Met, with fine art. Ignoring for the moment the ethnocentric policies that shaped the collection of the American Museum of Natural History, we plunged into the heart of the building, searching for something that should have been unmissable – a gigantic whale, suspended from the ceiling.
“How do you hide a whale?” lamented Cowboy as we careened through the halls, led astray by maps that looked simple enough for a child to follow, passing the suspended Viking boat for the fifth time. We found it at last, by accident and it was exactly as underwhelming as I hoped it wouldn’t be. Left with nothing else to do, we left the museum and took the train back out to the Connecticut, making stilted conversation. I haltingly tried to kiss him good night in the train station parking lot, and missed when he turned his head, hitting him somewhere east of the corner of his mouth. He looked shocked, I felt stupid, and we went home — separately.
That was two Labor Days ago. In two months the Cowboy and I will be married. Last Labor Day, we went back to the city to find the suits of armor. They are indeed at the Met. I can confirm he does not wear spurs, although he does have the loudest car keys I have ever heard. Our local bar closed, but we still see the other patrons and everyone still calls him Cowboy. But I don’t. Now, I just call him Honey.
Follow Ann O’Connell at http://twitter.com/ann_oconnell or visit her page on Facebook at www.facebook.com/people/Ann-J-OConnell/692839248.
I read a piece in The Guardian about Project Bookmark Canada, an organization that’s mission is to “place permanent markers displaying text from stories and poems in the locations where they take place.” What a novel idea (pardon the pun).
Though I am a writer of fiction, my first two novels are set in the real world, with only minor geographic variances here and there for a variety of reasons. For example, I invented several streets in Something Missing in order to avoid misidentifying any real homes located in the area with the homes described in my book.
I wouldn’t want people to mistakenly assume that one of Martin’s clients actually lived in an actual home, though the homes used in the book were loosely based upon the homes of friends and colleagues in the general vicinity.
In fact, both stories take place within the same geographic area, and for a while, I actually toyed with the idea of Martin, the protagonist in Something Missing, running into Milo, the protagonist in Unexpectedly, Milo.
I didn’t think my wife or my agent would like the idea, and they tend to be my litmus test for ideas.
Both stories are set near and around my own home, in the towns of Newington and West Hartford, CT (though Milo takes a long and significant road trip at one point in the book). My new book is set in a fictional Vermont town, but I am drawing many elements of this town from my hometown of Blackstone, Massachusetts, as well as the waterfront district of Rockport, Massachusetts.
It’s just easier this way.
But if Project Bookmark Canada wanted to make an excursion south to the United States, it might be fun to imagine some of the markers that they might place in honor of my first two books.
Mill Pond Park in Newington, CT, a location of some significance in both books
West Hartford’s Town Hall
The Newington Public Library
West Hartford Center, specifically The Elbow Room and Max’s Oyster Bar, two local restaurants
Never mind. I guess my locations aren’t as glamorous as I had originally hoped.
A friend of mine recently noted that I was wearing sweat pants out of the house. “And?” I asked.
“I just would never wear sweat pants in public,” she said. “And I know that most people don’t.”
Getting beyond the questionable validity of my friend’s statement and the veiled insult that her comment implied, I indicated to my friend that:
a. I wear sweat pants all the time, particularly during the winter.
b. I do not base my clothing choices on the choices of others.
c. I haven’t noticed that other people don’t wear sweat pants regularly.
While this second and third point may sound a bit pretentious and unnecessarily highbrow, they were not meant to be. It’s a simple fact that I am not a visual learner. I once dated a school psychologist who needed to practice administering an IQ test and used me as a test subject. When it came to the visual-spatial section of the test, she became angry with me, assuming that my poor performance was due to a lack of attention or a desire to be amusing, when in truth, I was trying my best. I simply cannot perform visual-spatial tasks with any effectiveness. I’m the worst Tetris player on the planet, and Jenga is a joke for me. Without looking down, I can’t even tell you what pair of pants I’m wearing at this moment, because my choice from earlier this morning did not imprint on my memory (I checked. I’m wearing sweat pants again).
In contrast, I am an exceptionally strong auditory learner. I remember everything that I hear and can often repeat conversations word for word. This makes me an especially effective debater, since I will often find ways to use my opponents' own words against them. There have been times when I have been sitting on the couch, listening to an audiobook and watching television at the same time, thus baffling my wife. My ability to process auditory information is especially strong.
All of which leads me to my writing. As with any writer, certain aspects of the craft are easier for me than others, and some are much more difficult. I think that I’m especially effective at noticing and capturing the subtle humor of a situation, and I seem to be able to inhabit a character well, bringing that character to life.
My wife pointed out that I also bring my innate desire to problem solve to my work. In SOMETHING MISSING, for example, Martin is faced with a number of perplexing situations, and for each one of these dilemmas, the problem existed well before the solution. In other words, I tend to create problems for my characters and then force myself to find solutions to these problems, without any idea of how I might solve them beforehand and without altering the problem from its original inception.
But with these strengths come certain weaknesses, and my greatest weakness relates to my lack of visual memory. I have a remarkably difficult time describing characters, and moreover, I have no interest in describing them physically at all. When I first submitted the manuscript of SOMETHING MISSING to my agent, she pointed out that there were no physical descriptions of any of my characters at all. Not one solitary word on a character’s height, eye color, wardrobe, or even age. Not only did I fail to notice this, but working on physical description was the most difficult part of the revision process for me. I remember thinking, “Eye color? Hair color? What else is there?” Having never noticed these things before, I had nothing with which to work.
Though my ability to write physical description has improved over the past couple years, it’s still one of my greatest challenges in working on the new book. While many aspects of writing come naturally to me, this does not. My agent, Taryn, recently suggested that I read Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, which I have begun reading, and it has helped. In the words of Taryn, who was providing me some notes on the first half of new book:
“Good opportunity to describe Freckles more here. Descriptions do seem to be a weak point, what little we get is sort of…dare I say…boring. Read Zadie Smith’s WHITE TEETH, she is the master at character description (that’s all that novel is!).”
It’s good to have an agent who is willing to say that your writing is at times, "dare I say… boring." And I mean this with the greatest of sincerity.
Along with reading WHITE TEETH (Taryn also suggested SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS by Marisha Pessl), I have begun making a concerted effort to notice physical description more, particularly when out in public. Whenever I notice an interesting physical descriptor on a person, I record the observation for later use. Just yesterday, I noticed a man in Lenscrafters with an especially wrinkled forehead. I made a note of this, and you are likely to meet someone with this unfortunate cranial disposition in a future book. I recall a day early on in my physical description search when I noticed that people’s eyebrows were different. I know it sounds silly, but this was a revelation for me.
So when you’re reading SOMETHING MISSING and come across the physical description of a character, please know that a great deal of effort went into those sentences, and that they still may be, at times, dare I say, a little boring. But I’m working on it, looking for ways to improve, and am always open to suggestions, as painfully honest as they may be.
Greetings! Welcome to my little corner of the world.
My name is Matthew Dicks. I am a writer.
In the spring of 2008, under the guidance of my remarkable agent, Taryn Fagerness, I sold my first novel, Something Missing, to Broadway Books, an imprint of Doubleday, and thus made one of my childhood dreams come true.
Slated for publication in July of 2009, I thought that a blog like this would be a good opportunity to connect with readers and writers, in order to discuss the writing process, the publishing process, my experience in the world of literary agents and editors, and answer any questions that people may have about the book, my life as a reader and a writer, my latest projects, and anything else that my come to mind.
I’m currently working on my second novel as well as finishing the final editing and proofreading of Something Missing. In addition to fiction, I write poetry, essays and opinion pieces and have published in major newspapers and journals throughout the United States.
If you have a question or would like me to write on a specific topic, please feel free to email me or leave a comment in any of the coming posts.
I look forward to sharing my thoughts, my experiences, and my ideas with you!
