Review Redux: Implosions of America

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A short five-star book review from El Dink The UK EBook Magazine

Reviewer: Barry Purcell

Release date: November 16, 2012
Release date: November 16, 2012

Implosions of America: Nine Stories

by David Biddle

★★★★★

This book is nine short stories full of desperate, confused middle-aged men who want to have sex with younger women, who miss the thrill of new love, and who suspect something is deeply wrong with their essentially uneventful lives. Nine thoughtful stories revolve around the broad theme of mature love and if you’ve ever loved anyone, and then loved someone else, you’ll identify with most of the narratives.

In each story, there is a man called Wendell. He’s a different person each time, but he represents the same thing: what we might consider the “straight man”, the guy to whom things happen, and who is the “normal” one by the standards of the story. In each Continue reading →

Spilling Your Guts: Writing That Makes a Beautiful Mess

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The author with his cocker spaniel, 1978.
The author with his cocker spaniel, 1978.

It took me at least a year of college to learn to live with my Midwestern sincerity. I went to a school on the West Coast full of super smart people. That was bad enough — being kind of average intelligence on a campus full of freaking geniuses. But on top of that a lot of my peers were from LA, The Bay Area, NYC and the Boston area. Each of those regions has its own version of cynical irony through which to approach life. I hadn’t learned cynical irony yet.

To say the least, then, I was a fish out of water in my freshman year. It was a hard year. A good high school friend committed suicide two weeks after I last saw him during Christmas break. My girl friend broke up with me because she was having a hard time with the concept of a long distance relationship. And I really felt out-gunned in class Continue reading →

When Books and Social Networks Mate

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Barnes & Noble nook (ebook reader device)
Barnes & Noble nook (ebook reader device) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The share of the book market attributable to self-published books is not an easy number to track down. But a lot of folks with skin in the game feel data like this is pretty important now that the indie publishing movement has a few years under its belt. However, if you pay attention to all the bloggers on this subject, its kind of comical how they stretch the math given the paucity of meaningful and transparent numbers.

Market share questions for both indie work and electronic books may in fact be a major red herring that will fade away in the next few years for most of us as writers continue to enhance their creative offerings. Here at the dawn of the economy of the Continue reading →

What Can Bookstores Do for Writers? Indie + Indie = LOVE?

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bookselling-cover
bookselling-cover (Photo credit: DaveBleasdale)

My most recent “Talking Indies” column is about independent bookstores and whether their interests mesh with promoting indie authors. The piece is called “Why Bookstores Aren’t Helping Indie Authors—Yet.” You can read it in the Spring Edition of Talking Writing (find the column link at the end of this entry).

I wanted to post an addendum to my column here because a number of indie authors I heard from after the piece was published  have gone on record saying they really don’t care about their book being shelved in bookstores. The basic argument is the rather facile one I began my first draft with: “Why put effort into interacting with small businesses that may see a few score of customers a day when posting to Internet books sites provides you with an entre to billions of potential readers?”

The obvious answer, since most writers have limited time to market and sell their work, is “Yes, why?”

If you think short-term, that’s probably a good answer. But bookstores really are, as Continue reading →

Notes on the Heart of Darkness: Ex-Urban Wildernesses

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Photo Credit: Photo Gallery from the Canada-Wide Science Fair

When someone speaks knowingly of a heart of darkness somewhere, understand that they don’t realize this heart is only an opening or an entrance into something that is hard to understand. Inside a real heart of darkness there are dimensions. We’re not just talking about a black smudge of mystery signifying the beginning of a cave. What is inside that cave matters far more than some mystical representation Continue reading →

The Physicalism of Hallucinations | Psychedelic Press UK

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“So here we have the case that pathological people can be experiencing parts of reality in ‘high-definition’ compared to that of ‘normal’ people or, in other words, an experience of the heightened awareness of certain areas within the sensory stimuli  and their subsequent evaluation by the brain.”

via The Physicalism of Hallucinations | Psychedelic Press UK.

Close reading of this excellent commentary on the nature of reality is highly recommended here…that is, if you want to consider ideas on the leading edge.

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PsyPress UK Literary Review: Beyond the Will of God

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BWG ThumbnailMy psychedelic novel, Beyond the Will of God, was reviewed by the Psychedelic Press UK — a book review site that does exactly what you’d think it does. Here’s a snippet from the review:

“Very few novels come across the review desk of the Psychedelic Press UK. When they do, they tend to be independently published, steeped in the history and popular culture of psychedelics, and David Biddle’s first novel Beyond the Will of God is no exception. However, while a good deal tend to focus on the inner workings of a protagonist’s mind, Biddle’s offering involves a multiple narrative stream, which, like any good mystery, winds its way together for a dramatic, revelatory and thought-provoking conclusion.” <Snip>
 

Rob Dickins, PsyPress impressario, has to be the world’s #1 expert on all books psychedelic. The site is a treasure trove Continue reading →

“The Ass Hole Club” : an excerpt from a novel-in-progress

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This excerpt is getting a major facelift today. It will self-destruct into a few truncated sample paragraphs very soon, so read up now. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section…

He discovers two bananas, soft to the eye, still stem connected, blacking. He thinks about the heat they must be giving off along with their smell. These fermenting fruits can only partially be seen under a flattened, plastic half-and-half bottle lying on its side and an old pack of birthday invitations with a “Where’s Waldo?” motif, never used. An empty clay flowerpot growing a bit of dark green mold is on the corner of the sideboard. He wonders what might have happened if he had just kept everything clean on his own. That sideboard Continue reading →

World-Class Baseball: The March World Series is Extraordinary

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Ah, baseball. I don’t write about it enough anymore. Last night’s World Baseball Classic face-off between the USA and Dominican Republic was one doozy of an event. The DR won in the 9th, busting open a 1-1 tie with scrappy hitting, ballsy base running, and incendiary pitching by their closer Fernando Rodney. The final score of this virtual all-star game between two titan teams was 3-1.

It was a game that all baseball fans — die-hard and casual — would have loved. What’s truly amazing is that it happened two weeks before the Major League season opens. Yes, there were less than pretty moments of fielding, and the US fizzled in the bottom of the 9th not even mustering a last ditch runner on base, but as a whole Continue reading →