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
~ davidbiddle ~ 2 Comments

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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Old Music for New People: Coming Soon

Ivy and Rita waiting for the sunrise
~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

My coming-of-age novel, Old Music for New People, will be published by the independent publishing house The Story Plant on December 7th. Go here or click on the cover widget (near the top right on the screen if you are using a big screen; probably down low on the scroll if you are using a small screen) to go to the book’s landing page. You’ll find all the links you could ever need to pre-order the paperback and digital versions now. Reviewers with NetGalley accounts can now also access the ARC (Advance Reviewer Copy) at the NetGalley site. This is my first official novel, so I can use any and all the reviews I can get.

So what’s the book about? Well, there’s a big conversation going on in this country right now about gender identity. Mainstream media tends to focus on silly issues like the bathrooms people are allowed to use and whether transgender girls should be permitted to play sports with other girls.

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Maybe Everything Depends on the Wedding

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

The traditional happy ending has the young lovers heading off together into the sunset. What the writer leaves out is the fact that not only do the lovers travel into the sun (such a beautiful and straightforward metaphor for the future) but the rest of the world rides off with them as well.

I worry some that all this negativity towards what we know to be Truth and the Good in Life may mean that certain people out there honestly don’t understand the idea of happy endings. Denial of things like the importance of public health and rational environmental investments carry an obvious dark and cynical set of presumptions.

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After My Book Deal: Life Changing or Same Old Struggle?

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

Along with the rest of the world, 2020 was pretty crappy in our household. [I originally wrote a long paragraph here about all the things we failed to do and how miserable we were, but what’s the point in that? Seriously! We’re still here and we’re vaccinated AF, and there’s really nothing else to say than: “Let’s go!”]

So, while a good portion of life certainly sucked here at the dead-end of our little street this past year, I managed to publish a number of short stories and flash fiction pieces with a broad spectrum of literary publications — large, small, well-known, obscure, etc. In addition to which, I signed a book deal in early January 2021 to write three novels over the course of the next several years.

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Those Who Wake Up in Love

~ David Biddle ~ 2 Comments

Love seems to be growing rarer and rarer in this world, doesn’t matter which kind I’m talking about. There’s vitriol and hostility everywhere — on all sides. I get it, I suppose. Love in every form requires vulnerability and courage. These days everyone on so many levels is tired of feeling vulnerable. It’s all too obvious as well that courage and personal strength and the ability to take care of other people are expended resources.

So, in the words of the world’s greatest living romantic nihilistic cynic, Tony Johnson (Ricky Gervais) in the wonderful TV show After Life:

“… (long sigh …) Ah, fuck me!”

Tony Johnson (Ricky Gervais)

And yet, somehow, I’m pretty sure a good many people on this good green earth continue to wake up in love every morning. They can’t help it. I’m thinking of those still romantically connected to their partners; those with unshakable friendships; and whole families in general, no matter how distant and separated by coronavirus.

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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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