Definitive Edition of “Sound Effect Infinity” to Release May 5

Read Sound Effect Infinity
~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

Finally, the fully formed, definitive version of Sound Effect Infinity is ready for flight. Both the paperback and ebook launch on May 5th.

The team at Flat Branch Press has worked hard to get this edition up to snuff for readers everywhere. I love the new cover. Buy the book and you’ll learn the origin of that painting of a red house (if you look inside carefully enough). You’ll also definitely learn more about the famous red house in general – more than you ever thought you would.

If you are a music person, this book is for you. Also, if you know music people, especially those who love rock and electric blues, this is a perfect gift for them. Gifting books is a very important way to combat the anomie we are watching and experiencing in the world today – gifting books and reading them, too, and leaving them lying around the house or your office for others to see.

If you wonder about telepathy, CIA mind control experiments, the magic of improvisational loud guitar, answers to questions about altered states and psychedelic consciousness, especially those that were raised by Terence McKenna and others, this book will be at least intriguing and, hopefully, get you thinking up in the front of the line and around lots of corners. Obviously, if you know folks with those types of bent, give them Sound Effect Infinity for a perfect summer 2026 reading experience.

Also, if you are at least intrigued here, please share this post to your people everywhere. You never know who will thank you for the rest of their lives.

Final Note: The hardcover version of Sound Effect Infinity has been available as a special edition early adopter’s offering since late February of this year. You can read more on that in several posts that I’ve referenced below. It will be discontinued once the paperback and ebook arrive on the scene. A hardcover may return, but never with the preface I wrote in that original special edition or the weird textbook-looking cover.

Not the Marriage Plot: On Men Reading Novels in the 21st Century

Marriages or running from them are both creative acts.
~ davidbiddle ~ 5 Comments

I originally posted a version of this in 2013. Seems useful still, now, these days of lost men and boys (not all of us, but maybe too many). Apologies for length. What’s a novelist to do?

Here’s what I think about at some point of every day:

What is going on in this world that would lead so many men far, far away from reading modern literary novels?

I’ve written here at this blog and in other places around the Internet about my overall concern for literary fiction. A helluva lot of intelligent people want nothing to do with it anymore. Before the Internet took hold (about 30 years ago), I thought that somehow it was just my little world here in Philadelphia. Over the past three decades or so, however, it’s become quite obvious as I travel around the Internet (and parts of the country where they play minor league baseball) that most people in America at least don’t give a shit about serious fiction.

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Is the Book World Done with Science Fiction?

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A version of this essay was posted last year, but is certainly worth posting again in modified form given, finally, the publication of Sound Effect Infinity by Flat Branch Press.

I’d guess most hardcore readers of what used to be called “science fiction” know that the book industry has decided to wrap fantasy and science fiction into a single package they’re calling “speculative fiction.” However, the music world is also attempting to lump smooth jazz and R&B into “neo soul,” so…

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The Effect of Amplified Sound

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Crazy new sounds and melodies consistently showed up on the radio for those of us growing up in the 1950s and 1960s (and on into the early 1970s). Every week or so brought astoundingly unique, creative, highly developed songwriting, production, and performance that constantly knocked our socks off…again, and again, and again. The record companies back then understood they could only partially make the call about what would work and what wouldn’t. Artists ruled. So did their listeners.

I still remember hearing “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” in the first few days of 1964 right after it came out. I remember as well Elton John’s “Rocket Man” in April 1972, and “Sweet Caroline,” by Neil Diamond in May of 1969, both within the first day or two of release. And so many more. We were all sitting-duck virgins over and over again, sometimes on a daily basis, waiting for the latest by the performers we loved (and didn’t know we would come to love). DJs could be so artful with our pristine ears: “Here’s a new one from a guy we’ve never heard of named Don McLean. The song is called ‘American Pie.’ Weird name, but I think you’ll like it.”

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Sound Effect Infinity: early adopter special edition

Read Sound Effect Infinity
~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

Finally, a hardcover, paperbound version of Sound Effect Infinity is available!

For now, you can only get it through Amazon. They’re set up to ship to you on-demand. Yes, you may have pre-ordered a version from my old publisher, but that book never shipped (sad face here). They were having issues with a big media company merger. After waiting three years, it seemed only right to take back my copyrights and go to work independently. That’s how real artists do things anyway. I’m not proud, just old-enough these days to be seriously tired and done with all of the bullshit.

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A Brief Scene from “Sound Effect Infinity”

~ David Biddle ~ 1 Comment

My novel, Sound Effect Infinity, is available exclusively, for now, through Amazon as a hardcover edition. We were busy prepping it for print-on-demand publishing by Flat Branch Press over the first two months of 2026.

Dropping a brief passage below, and not from the early sections of the book either. Deep in. You won’t likely have enough context to fully get it, but hopefully your interest will be piqued. If you love music and wonder why it has such a powerful effect on people, you will likely enjoy this book.

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What About Emotion in Fiction?

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

I recently received an email telling me that someone “liked” a comment/post I made to a Substack last June. One wonderful thing about writing when you’re in your last quarter is that you often forget about some of the stuff you wrote–both on the fly and even stories and passages in novels you’ve been working (for far too long). The forgetting allows at times happy surprise and even pride.

Indeed, I’m quite happy, surprised, and even cant’ help feeling a little pride in what I wrote below. If you go back in my website here, you’ll find numerous references to this issue over the past decade and a half.

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Still Sitting in a Circle

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Weirdly, I found a Joy Harjo interview in a recent edition of AARP Bulletin. What a great discovery! Near the end of the piece, she says, “My sense is that when a child is born, mother’s milk emerges to feed the baby, but grandparents feed babies with stories.”

I got two things out of that statement. One is that, Yes! Indeed! I have been a grandparent now for almost 20 months. I plan to live another 20 years at least so that I can download all the stories I know about our grandson’s (and, hopefully his siblings and cousins) family. That role is particularly poignant for me because I am adopted and I am (as is he) a mixture of a half dozen family connections and a blend of

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How We Tell the Story Together

Notes on the Story of the Golden Country
~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

Rebecca Solnit writes comfortably in multiple veins as geographer, historian, environmentalist, memoirist, feminist, humanist, journalist, activist, even novelist. It’s pretty clear to me that she is one of our finest writers. In particular, her consistent artistic and poetic approach to essays and long-form narrarative is always surprisingly insightful and enlightening. And the way she writes, melding deeply personal perspective with a constant drive to pull back the curtain on the special ironies and contortions of American life, is the rarist form of reporting and commentary I know of – especially here in the 21st century (which, may I remind you, is now 25% in the can and still foaming).

Lately, Solnit’s been up on the battlements pushing hard to turn the tide in this current attempted

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