Author: davidbiddle

Lonely Rebels Unite: It’s Novelicious

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Photo by Jonathan Cooper on Unsplash

You go through quite a journey of discovery when you write a novel. The reason that long fiction is so important is because it’s an extended opportunity to learn and think about being in the world. Sometimes novels and their ilk can also be a catalyst for Big Thought about the meaning of life and the Universe itself.

For novelists, as much as we want to provide readers with intriguing stories, what also happens is that we figure out new tidbits for ourself about the writing process and about storytelling in general. I’ve written extensively on that journey already in a number of places, but most importantly over at The Story Plant’s website I wrote about what I learned about American fiction while writing Old Music for New People.

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Talking to Each Other Without Understanding Much at All

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Photo by Meg on Unsplash

My essay post at The Story Plant from mid-July touches very directly on how poorly all of us have done talking with each other about gender identity issues. For years!

We’re not doing well in general these days talking about a lot of stuff, but the gender thing is really indicative of how inadequate people’s abilities to speak and listen have become. So many of us think we know “the truth” about gender. So many speak from the side of feeling judged by others and then judging back in return. It’s kind of a weird do-loop. What is the deal with judging others without trying to understand them first?

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Do You Know What You’re Missing?

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Bookshelf at Booked in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia

I’ve had three guest posts up now at my publisher’s web site . Each of the pieces gives a bit of a different take on the origins of my novel, Old Music for New People. The read time for each of them is about a five minute read or less. I’m quite happy with each of those brief essays. They’re worth a read whether you buy my novel or not.

I’ve always had a difficult time as a writer with the idea of needing to explain myself and my work. It may be a weird way to look at the finished product, but ever since I published my first magazine article back in the 1980s it always feels like the words I wrote belong to each reader and to the world at large. My personal intent and purpose in writing something–anything–is secondary. What the reader thinks of whatever I’ve created is all that matters.

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A July 4th Clip from “Old Music for New People” Chapter 11: Fireworks and Duds

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A scene from the book Old Music for New People

That first shot of light into the night sky feels like they’re offering you a promise of magic that you’d forgotten about all year. There’s a single volley with a tail of faint light opening up a crack in the black, then a big bang followed by a shower of sparkles and glitter swirling and falling. You wait maybe ten seconds, then you hear two quick phumps, one by one, and then a big spray of sparks and a bunch of small spider flowers burst against the black sky. Masked by the explosions those two made are a bunch more phumps and then more sparks and glitter light.

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The Old Music Part of Writing “New People”

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My novel, Old Music for New People, is driven in part by its characters’ thoughts and feelings about specific songs and musicians (baseball and food also have prominent roles in the plot). Many of the stories I write, whether long or short, have music painted into them. Sometimes I wonder if I’m a bit too hopeful about the idea of using words to describe what music does to characters emotionally and philosophically–and what it does to readers as well in their everyday lives.

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My Story “Like They’re Waiting” Gets Published

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I just learned that the folks at Adelaide Literary Magazine published my story “Like They’re Waiting” at their site back in January. It’s a very short piece of flash fiction, but one of my favorite projects from the past few years even though it’s a bit confrontational for the reader. I came to it partially inspired by real life events. Also, perhaps, I was a bit touched in the head by all the time we all spent in that first two years living on Planet Covid.

Besides having a comprehensive online publishing presence, Adelaide Literary Magazine is a print-based operation publishing a monthly journal of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, book reviews, and interviews. They also run a small press imprint called Adelaide Books that is more prolific than any other micro-type operation I’ve encountered.

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Writing in a Girl’s Voice

Girl looking in a mirror
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Never tell a character in your head to get lost

A slightly different form of this essay was published in Medium.com

One morning nearly ten years ago, a voice showed up in my head as I was walking up the stairs to my 3rd floor writing room. They were offering the beginning line of a story. By the time I sat in front of my laptop, the voice made it clear that I needed to get to work immediately. “She” absolutely was not going to leave me alone.

No one told us we were going to have a summer-long visitor until the night before that visitor arrived.

Ivy Scattergood

A few months before that, I’d gone back and read a bunch of young adult coming-of-age stories. This was around the time I was becoming acutely aware of the fact that our youngest son was about to leave home for college. I suppose that because I’m a writer going back to my reading roots made sense. Maybe others return to old music, long walks, or pre-parent hobbies.

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On Tour with My Book

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I am grateful as heck to all the people who have been enjoying Old Music for New People, and to the team at The Story Plant working hard to get folks to pay attention to this story that wants to touch your heart. Sometimes I get quick texts or messages on Facebook where people tell me how engrossed they are in the story or that they’re having fun with 100 pages to go.

Gender identity is the big story driver in this novel, but there’s so much more to identity than the simple binary opposites of boy or girl. I don’t want to give the story away, but when one person questions who they are, whole families (extended families, in fact) become part of the questioning process. They become part of the answer, too. Things get messy. They can be intense. But the only way people grow is through messy, intense questions and answers.

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What Does Gender Mean, Anyway?

Old Music for New People
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I’m happy to say that my new novel Old Music for New People comes out early next week (click here to go to its main landing page). As anyone who loves teens knows, stories about young people coming of age are stories about all of us. Without doubt, my intention with this novel was to write about family, love, and the problem everyone has trying to figure out who they are in this nutso world. Old Music for New People takes place at a time well before the covid pandemic ever hit the world. Hopefully it will be a balm to readers in this time of great uncertainty. Below you will find text from a letter my publisher’s staff and I prepared to go out to editors and reviewers everywhere. I think it’s a great introduction as well for potential readers.

Dear Editors, Reviewers, (and Readers),

A few years ago, one of the younger generation in our admittedly hyper-progressive extended community declared that they were considering a gender transition. Sadly, no matter how well-meaning and supportive the rest of us wanted to be, we wound up responding somewhat incompetently in how we handled this new knowledge. It became painfully obvious to me in our collective ineptness that gender transition moments are actually huge tests of love and insight and family intelligence.

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