When Novels Become Assassins: The Problem with Writing on the Edge

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Not feeling so good...
Not feeling so good…

A version of this essay was adapted for The Huffington Post. Read that here.

I nearly died just after completing the first draft of a novel called Beautiful Morning Blues. The story I came up with is unnerving, possibly amoral, anarchic, and, certainly, nihilistic as hell — but it still tries to say life is a magnificent and magical journey. I’m convinced that this dualism, this story at play with big metaphors and dark issues, was working to assassinate me — the messenger — from the moment I conceived it.

I struggled for two years to bring the whole 438 page draft into existence. Beginning with writing the first paragraph on a whim in 2002 (a guy gets offered $300 by a neighbor to have sex with her), over the next two years I battled depression, a growing addiction to alcohol, struggles in my marriage, sexual insecurity, and a weird sort of self-centered lunacy that you really have to call psycho-narcissism. On top of all that, every few months or so I just felt really crappy. I would run a low-grade Continue reading →

An Unexpected Short Book Review and Appreciation

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Roger Raufer on right end of table, fully interrupted by bottles and cans.

The review below tells the story as well as I ever could here in an intro. Let me just say that Roger Raufer was one of the great teachers in my life when I was learning the ropes in the energy and technology economics world. Because he thinks about technology systems for a living, many of our conversations over the years have found us discussing global futures and technology advances on the horizon. More often than not, Roger has been on the money with his predictions. Roger is the first person I ever heard give a cogent and meaningful talk about climate change — that was back in the early 1980s. But if you really want an earful, get Dr. Raufer to tell you about China. He’s been Continue reading →

Divergent Paths: The Most Influential People I Ever Met

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I spent the first 30 years of my adult life as a consultant in the world of energy and the environment. I’ve done energy and solid waste audits of over 600 institutional and corporate buildings throughout the United States. During that time I wrote eleven separate manuals on energy conservation and recycling.

I was pretty good at what I Continue reading →

More on the Price of Books in America: addendum to a Talking Writing op-ed

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various e-book readers. From right to left iPa...

The Apple vs. Department of Justice anti-trust, book pricing case came to an end this past week. It offered a rare and important glimpse of the private nether regions of both the publishing world and the new corporate media industry controlled in large part by Apple and Amazon.

I co-authored an op-ed piece on this case at Talking Writing magazine with TW’s editor in chief, Martha Nichols. It’s called “Thank You, Apple, for Going to Court Over E-Books.” Unlike most of the pundits in the publishing and high-tech worlds, Martha and I took the long-term perspective of authors — not corporate publishers and consumers. Apple and the big publishers were trying to change the business model of retail book sales. Rather than allow retailers control of pricing, Apple and the Continue reading →

The Loneliness of the Self-Published Author

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I just found a short Huffington Post ditty attached to a video rant by media phenom John Green sort of seeming to trash the idea of self-publishing and going it alone as an author. The link to it is: John Green on Self Publishing.

Green makes some good points, but he’s also sort of fizzling out of both assholes at once. On the one hand, he’s pushing back on those who have been using him as an example of an author who can “flip the paradigm” because he’s got such major social media cred and a pot full of fans and readers, and shouldn’t need the support of publishers.

On the other hand he is presenting thoroughly drenching sputum (watch him) that has insulted a number of indie authors I am in contact with throughout the Universe.

But what he makes me think about (I’ve watched the video 3 times now) is how lonely it is Continue reading →

Watching Fiction Become What It Wants: Stories Crying to Become a Novel

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Prototype Cover

I’ve spent the spring adapting stories I began writing almost a decade ago into a novel. The stories all had to do somehow with a character I called Julia Davenport. It’s been quite an interesting task converting short stories into long prose. Six tales were completed by 2005, and  another four or five fitful starts came after that.  I figured I could finish these starts over the spring and then turn it all into a book that would effectively amount to a series of vignettes about life here in the early part of this new century.

Julia was the connecting piece through all of the stories I wrote. However, each piece was composed in a different voice with a somewhat unique narrator and a weird perspective on life and love. In many ways, although I wasn’t overtly aware of it at the time, this approach to creating fiction is now a common methodology for contemporary storytellers.

Point of view is a key element in all storytelling. The standard way of doing things is Continue reading →

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 →