Novel Ideas - K. B. Dixon

I'm not sure how it all started, but somewhere along the line I began getting K. B. Dixon's books for review.  They are all short novellas, are quirky and different, and I've enjoyed this little reading detour every time a new one arrives.  So far, I've read the following:

A Painter's Life
The Ingram Interview
The Photo Album

Dixon's books all tend to be written in short musings, making them very easy to read.  While the thoughts come in little bursts, they are full of personality, dry sarcasm, and snark.  I've never met the author but I have a feeling his books may be a window into his own disposition.  I get a big kick out of it.

In "Novel Ideas", our narrator is a struggling author, writing notes to a friend of his.  His thoughts range from his current project (true crime?  an essay?  a story about a cheating musician?) to his wife, his in-laws, his friend who just published a memoir, or just simple observations.  Interest levels wax and wane, apathy and distraction are constantly a battle.    

"Why is it always considered a good thing to have a positive attitude.  There are times - many of them - when having such an attitude is nothing more than an expression of delusional mentation."

"Dinner at Oboe's with the Motts - which brings me to a sensitive subject, a recurring issue in this charmed circle:  dessert.  No one but me ever wants to order one, so I am given carte blanche.  Unfortunately, whatever I order will not, in the end, be mine.  When it arrives everyone will remark on how good it looks and eventually jump in for a bite or two.  I come up three-quarters or a dessert short.  This has happened often enough for me to develop a defensive strategy:  I have changed what I order.  Now it is not necessarily what I want or what sounds best to me, but what seems likely to be the largest."  
Inevitably, I ended up chuckling through much of his books.  At the same time, the reader gets a very intimate view into the mind of a frustrated writer, who is surrounded by other writers and the noise of life that drags his mind everywhere but on the task at hand.

For an entertaining couple of hours (in my case, in a doctor's waiting room) you cannot beat it!

3 out of 5 stars