Hot Type, for the week of February 14, 2003 -- continued But then the New Yorker brought in new editors who didn't buy his stories. There were no new novels. I heard that he'd left the Tribune, that he'd given up writing. "Twelve years ago," says Dickinson, "that was the last one that got published. Between that and A Shortcut in Time I wrote three different novels that for one reason or another -- they weren't good enough, I guess. One I pulled back myself after finishing it, and the other two I thought should have been published, but I couldn't find anybody. In retrospect, I guess they weren't very good. I don't really remember them. It's like I'm working off the bad karma I worked up publishing Rumor Has It." Rumor Has It was Dickinson's newspaper book. It was set at a woebegone Chicago tabloid about to go under, a tabloid very much like the Sun-Times, where Dickinson worked for six years, jumping to the Tribune just before the book came out in 1991. His fictional Bugle was peopled by journalists remarkably similar to specific friends at the Sun-Times. "A lot of people had hurt feelings," he says. Rumor was an excellent novel. "Man, that book was so dead-on for what the Sun-Times was like then," says Bill Adee, too new to the Sun-Times to be in it. "'Rumor has it' was always how a sentence would start at the Sun-Times, so it was a perfect title for the book." The Sun-Times's sports editor, Adee came over to the Tribune last year, spotted Dickinson, and told him it was the best newspaper novel he'd ever read. Says Dickinson, "He would mention lines from it that I didn't remember and characters I didn't remember." Says Adee, "He's still wearing his Hawaiian shirts, so he hasn't changed a bit." Dickinson resigned from the Tribune on January 1, 2001, to find out if he could write full-time and still support a family. He couldn't. "They were nice enough to take me back because basically I ran out of money," he says. "But those 603 days were really great." He spent them how? "I became a baseball umpire and a basketball and football referee. I was an election judge, and I volunteered at a teen center in Schaumburg. It was fun." While writing full-time? "Sitting on the copy desk I felt like I was not out in the world," he explains. "Part of leaving was to get away from that sense of being in the same place all the time, letting the world come to you in the stories you edit. I wanted to do something different -- and write. My concentration span is so short nowadays. I can get quite a bit done in two hours or so, and those were things I did with the rest of my time." Has he ever been tempted to write for the Tribune? "It's ironic you ask me that," he says. "I used to be a sportswriter at the Daily Herald. I got out of that because I didn't like interviewing people." Metro editor Hanke Gratteau recently asked Dickinson to become the Tribune's head obit writer, a job that requires a certain sensibility. "I was flattered they'd asked me," he says. He'd known the job was open; he'd even thought about applying for it. When asked, he brooded, but then he said no because it would mean working days. He wants his days free to write fiction. A Shortcut in Time is set, in all its eras, in the town of Euclid Heights, Illinois, which is inspired by Arlington Heights, where Dickinson lives. One big difference is that in Euclid Heights a dashing young man compromised by a trace of black blood was lynched in 1908 after a 15-year-old local girl disappeared, and nothing of the sort ever happened in Dickinson's suburb. The missing girl shows up at Josh Winkler's house telling a story that Winkler -- an unsuccessful artist with plenty of time on his hands -- is much more willing to consider seriously than his wife, a stressed-out pediatrician. The issue further vexes the marriage -- which is no worse than many -- and their union takes an unusual turn when Winkler's excursion to yesteryear happens to undo the circumstances that led to it. But if fate takes one wife, it provides another. Winkler's daughter Penny reluctantly returns from her own visit to 1918 to discover she now has no mother -- or rather that her mother married someone else instead and has no idea Penny's her daughter. Don't try to diagram this, but on the level that matters it works. "I didn't try to explain anything," says Dickinson. "I figure it can't happen, so why try to tell how it happened?" The time-travel aspect to A Shortcut in Time perplexed the mainstream publishers who rejected the manuscript. "So my agent sent it to Tor, which is a science fiction house, and they bought it under their Forge line, which is not so much hard-core science fiction," says Dickinson. "And they've done a good job on it." The novel reached stores at the end of last year. "It's the first book I've published since the Internet became so prevalent, and it's amazing how much you can keep track of that was in the dark before. It was 104,000 on Barnes & Noble. It passed 50,000 books in one weekend and fell back almost as far the next time I checked. It was surreal. I couldn't imagine all those books out there, so I stopped watching." He says, "In the original ending of the book the daughter doesn't get back, and my son says he actually likes that ending better because it was more heartbreaking. But my editors said it couldn't end that way." In my reading, Josh Winkler returns to our day dying of the influenza bug he picked up in 1918. He doesn't realize that he's doomed, and oddly enough, Dickinson doesn't either. Winkler has slipped the traces not only of time and matrimony but of authorship. Dickinson is under the impression that when he caved in to editorial pressure he gave his book a happy ending. News Bites • On Monday Steve Neal writes a hard-hitting Sun-Times column trashing 47th Ward alderman Gene Schulter on behalf of Neal's friend, 47th Ward committeeman Ed Kelly. On Tuesday Mark Brown writes a hard-hitting Sun-Times column laughing at Kelly, cheering Schulter, and -- you figured this out if you'd read Monday's paper -- grabbing Neal by the nose and twisting it. The newspaper game at its finest. • It could be a long year for Conde Nast's Lucky magazine, listed in the new Chicago white pages as Yucky magazine. Send tips, tirades, and comments to hottype@chicagoreader.com Copyright © 2003 Chicago Reader, Inc. All rights reserved.