Author: davidbiddle

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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The Voice of the Rising Tide

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I’ve been reading bits and pieces of Zen master and poet Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness for the past year. I posted a note on that back in January of 2020 called “The Enlightened and the Lonely.” It was weirdly more prescient than I could have ever known.

Turns out we’re all insane and we’re all locked in the same institution together whether we like it or not. I did not see, however, that there would be a certain group of idiots stuck in this place with the rest of us who are dead set on fucking things up and being assholes. They are not funny, but they are hilarious at the same time. The riddle is how we manage to find a way to feel love for them even though they are such screw ups.

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About My Latest Story: “Animals with Nowhere to Go”

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I was so happy to see my story, “Animals with Nowhere to Go”, published this month (January) at Jerry Jazz Musician. I wrote “Animals” specifically to enter the Jerry Jazz 55th short fiction contest last fall. Even though it only wound up short-listed (go to “Chromesthesia “ here to read the wonderful winning story by Shannan Brady) it is an honor to see my work alongside so many other great creative people’s.

I discovered Jerry Jazz about fifteen years ago while researching material for my novel Notes on the Golden Country (still a few years to go before it’s out). At the time, I was writing a rather freeform essay on the effect that Ralph Ellison’s work had on American literature. You can read that brief essay here. JJM is a wonderful repository for all things Ralph Waldo Ellison. I’d found my people.

I am a writer who has a tendency to connect his fiction and essays to musical questions and mysteries. I often go find the Jerry Jazz Musician website whenever I’m feeling beat up and ragged out from projects I’m working on. It’s a great source of inspiration for jazz culture lovers on all sorts of levels with poetry, essays, fiction, photos, videos, and book reviews on everyone from John Coltrane and Thelonius Monk to James Baldwin and jazz chronicler Gary Giddins.

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Back from Facebook Freedom

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I last reported that I’d flown the Facebook coop and planned on living happily ever after. That was in mid-January of 2020. I’d only put my account on pause at that point. I had every intention of walking away for good, but as a lifelong professional planner I knew better than to burn a bridge or cut a tie or murder the messenger too swiftly.

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Sayonara Facebook: exactly 12 years

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I have finally ended my connection to Facebook. The last post I made was a link to Greta Thurnberg’s and George Monbiot’s three-minute and thirty-nine second YouTube video on solving the climate change riddle.

In preparation for shutting down my account, I first downloaded the Facebook file of my entire 12 year residency there. Quite fortuitously, or maybe not so much, I signed up to be part of that world on January 13, 2008. As I was downloading my file, I saw that it was the evening of January 13, 2020. Exactly twelve years on Facebook. Far out.

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The Enlightened and the Lonely

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Someone could become a millionaire selling a bumper sticker that says:

“If you don’t feel like you’re losing your mind these days, then you’re probably part of the problem.”

Over the past decade things in America just keep getting weirder and nastier. I’d like to blame that on social media and/or our ubiquitous portable communication devices, but I honestly don’t know if I have a leg to stand on with that.

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Anything and Everything: advice on reading and writing, plus desiring intimacy with that special weather person on TV

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Near the end of my senior year of high school, I asked my favorite instructor for advice on becoming a writer. Mr. Stawski was an extremely gifted English teacher, a PhD with 30+ years of teaching under his belt, certainly the most respected faculty member at our high school. He’d held a party for our Shakespeare class at his house. I was in a small group of students lingering after because it was so great to be around such a wonderful human being. I also wanted to hear his thoughts on what we should all be thinking about as we graduated and then headed off to college. Asking for advice on writing was also my way of telling him that I might be serious about pursuing a career as an author.

Mr. Stawski’s advice was simple and obvious. He looked me in the eyes and said: “Read as much as you can. People say writers need life experience, and I can’t argue with that, but it’s more important to read anything and everything–especially over the next decade or so as you mature.”

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Your Font Choice Says A Lot About Something

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Special Note: This post was composed a week prior to the decision to overhaul the theme for this website. Thus, the font reference below, "Domine," is now anachronistic and passé. The font family here, now, is Lora. Apologies for any confusion.

In the category of “Will the Internet Always Be a Wild West Show?” I want to discuss font choices online. There used to be fairly clear rules for when you use sans serif fonts and when serif ones were more appropriate. In the old days when you finally got that Mac and were confronted with this massive fruit basket of typefaces your instinct was to go hog wild. I have always loved Comic Sans and once used it to print out a draft of a short story I’d written, only to find myself dizzy and feeling quite puckish reading half way through the second page.

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