Well over a million words published in magazines, newspapers, trade books, art catalogs, college textbooks, school textbooks, web sites—and even stranger places. One of the things I do best is to provide easy-to-understand explanations for complicated topics. The Hypertext Guide to Prostate Cancer is the best example. Others include an introduction to Hispanic culture for a television series, some of the earliest (and simplest) computer manuals, and style sheets for textbook projects.

Recommended by the Encyclopædia Britannica.

This was the first book to cover the young Spanish artists of the post-Civil War period. The Herald Tribune of Paris called it an “enormously complete directory of who is painting and sculpting what in Spain today.”

Written because no simple introduction to flowcharting existed, and many people seemed to find it confusing. The trick was to use a story everyone knew, and the best choice was the ultimate multiple-choice fairy tale. (Videodiscs have fallen by the way, but this explanation is still useful for understanding CD-Roms and other flow-chartable things.)

A description of the techniques that cinematographer Wolfgang Treu used when shooting this adaptation of Kafka’s novel. Treu began using a gyroscope more than ten years before the creation of the Steadicam.

I recognized the value of books on tape when they first appeared in the early seventies, mainly because they seemed to be the ideal way to reduce the drudgery of house-cleaning (a theory I have yet to put to a test). This article was written at a time when they were catching on in Spain. El País is the most important newspaper in Spain.

Because of my background in photography, I was one of the first reviewers to recognize the value of the Photo Realist movement—and to explain what was new and interesting about it.

One of the few valid realist movements of the late twentieth century developed in Madrid. This article comments on the work of this small group of painters and sculptors.

A site filled with clear and very complete information about this disease. The top level is a brief overview that introduces all of the topics one needs to learn about in order to make a treatment decision. Links lead to a second level where each topic is discussed in more detail and where there are other links to medical web pages dedicated to specific topics. I also did the design and wrote all of the code. Recommended by the National Cancer Institute.

Podpages
Several pages of how-to on podcasts, the Webradio programs you can carry with you (2006).

Voice In Off
You’re looking at it. Written, designed, coded, and Photoshopped by Bill Dyckes.

Written for a show that included several series of recent works by the Spanish sculptor Martín Chirino. The title refers to a series that shows influences of both Africa and the Canary Islands, where Chirino was born.
I wrote several catalog essays while living in Spain.

I wrote two in-house manuals in the1980s. The first was for the Development Office of Columbia University, then in the process of switching over from typewriters to the IBM 5520 system (1984). My version was contained in relatively few pages. IBM’s version was contained in a great many looseleaf manuals.The second, Word and Data Processing: WordPerfect 5.0, explained how to use WordPerfect 5.0, with information relevant to creating foreign-language textbooks (1988). Again, it was simple, direct, and much, much shorter than any other explanation at the time.

Not the prices, essays about food that I wrote for El Internaciónal, a very off-beat (and extremely popular) New York restaurant. At first, the essays were about the special of the week, but I soon shifted to themes involving food, history, and anthropology.

I began doing occasional public-relations pieces in Spain, often as part of a package deal in which I would also oversee the printing. I never really looked for PR work but rarely turned it down. Many of the materials I did were untraditional, usually employing a strong visual element. My principal clients were:

A monthly build-your-vocabulary series. Example: Things That Go Bump in the Night

Several short films (and a number of unfilmed longer scripts).
Goldilocks vs. the Three Bears, a script written to show how DVDs and related mediums can be expanded.
(It is a variation on the example in the article An Introduction to Interactive Flowcharting.)
Interactive videodisc and workbooks to accompany Scholastic, Inc’s Science Place textbooks. (The disc was controlled by barcodes printed in the workbooks.)