Ask the Author: David Biddle
Answered Questions (5)
David Biddle
You can find a lot of detail about my new novel SOUND EFFECT INFINITY and how it came to be online. But 50 years ago we were up all night in an altered state listening to Cream, Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Hot Tuna, Derek and the Dominos, etc. Loud guitar music. I was deeply pained to think that Jimi Hendrix had died just five years before at the age of 27. I was 17. But I heard something in the music we were listening too, some form of intelligence in the sound of loud guitar. What was that?
David Biddle
I sit down to write every morning, ideally around 5:30 AM. My brain shifts gears into writer mode and the improv session is on...I've learned that I have anywhere from 2-6 hours of battery-power in me. And then I need to do other stuff. Generally, with it will be closer to 2 hours...I try to write every day. There are phases too. Sometimes its original work. Sometimes its screen editing. Sometimes its red pen work. Sometimes it's revisions from paper back to screen. Sometimes it's re-writing from 1st person to 3rd person. Sometimes it's experimenting. Sometimes it's a first draft op-ed commentary that I may or may not ever try to finish.
David Biddle
Directly, I am revising a very big novel (900 pages, likely more) called Notes on the Golden Country. It's about all of us and just one person who is searching for the story of his birth with strange science fiction mysteries formally occurring.
I also have a collection of short stories I'm working on and final tweaks to my first novel, Old Music for New People, that will be re-released by Flat Branch Press early in 2027.
I also have a collection of short stories I'm working on and final tweaks to my first novel, Old Music for New People, that will be re-released by Flat Branch Press early in 2027.
David Biddle
Writing is an endless learning situation on multiple levels all at once. Writing fiction is super hard but even more educational than reading. It's like lifting weights though. There's only so much you can lift before your muscles spaz out.
David Biddle
Writer's block is a paranoid delusion as far as I can tell. Psychologically, it's really just a sort of imagination and inspiration stutter or glitch. I rarely have that problem, but when I do I go away and read or play guitar or find poetry and short stories I'm working on which can always be revised and edited. I don't mean to trivialize this issue. ON a general basis, life has a way of taking over the imagination and inspiration. That's especially true when artists are doing things like self-medicating with drugs, alchohol, and other obsessions. If you're serious about your art, you really need to make it the only obsession you have...and just know that there will be days (or nights) when things are wanky. That's okay.
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