
PRESS RELEASE
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Authors Note: I wanted readers to have an experience totally off the literary grid. Sound Effect Infinity is a future paranormal mystery rolled up in puzzles about the real magic of music, then wrapped in questions about the power of the human mind. As one special character says deep into the story: “There’s always been questions people don’t understand to ask about music and sound.” Hopefully, readers will come away from this book understanding those questions and, possibly, realizing some of the answers as well.
The premium hardcover will be released in March. Here’s an excerpt from the first chapter of the book that may touch a little close to home for many these days. The year the narrator is speaking from is 2062.
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“Things had broken down. It always felt like America only half noticed. Certainly, those of us in the media knew better than to harp too much on the breakdown. Somewhere in the course of things had been what we began to call the Drift Away. Some people simply called it the Drift. There was no secession or war, really. Not even an agreement that had been discussed in the media or codified with a memorandum of understanding between those in charge of regions. One of the methods of the Middle Lands was to eliminate much of what was considered official. There had simply been too much turmoil and too much inability to define anything useful between the major groups. Incompetence on all sides. The Middle Lands became a new kind of territory — still America but certainly not the United States thereof.

Rules flattened. Expectations shifted. Laws seemed to have become more fluid, difficult to predict, and weirdly random. Geography itself had lost definition. It was the opposite of a revolution in many ways, even though it had been building since the days of the so-called Final Recession. They called it the last straw here, but we’d sensed where things were going way back in my teen years. Collective memory had long ago dissipated because of computer storage and data. But that kind of predictability wasn’t even available anymore on the coastal zones. Somehow not knowing had become a version of acceptable simplicity. There was a new cognitive process that seemed to come and go with all sorts of people. They wanted to know little about the past and cared less about the future. A vague way of thinking came into vogue that seemed to emphasize the near present. It was difficult to track, though, because people seemed to fluctuate in and out of it. You sensed an intelligence fog around them. There was the present, almost like a version of mindfulness, but it was only attached to a next step or two like going to the store, having dinner, that first cup of coffee in the morning, screen watching, some basic way to catch a buzz, nudge dopamine levels up a few notches. The joke we came up with way out in Philly is that a lot of people in the Middle Lands probably lost interest during sex because they couldn’t remember they were hoping to have an orgasm.”
David Biddle’s latest release Sound Effect Infinity is being published as an ebook by The Story Plant, link here: https://www.thestoryplant.com
To order on Amazon, link here: https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Effect-Infinity-Control-Altered/dp/1611883741
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About The Author: A freelance writer since he published his first article on appropriate technology education with RAIN: Journal in 1985, David Biddle has published work with the likes of Harvard Business Review, BioCycle, Huffington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, GetUnderground, Resource Recycling, BuzzWorm, Talking Writing, etc. He was also a contributing editor to InBusiness (the 2nd best sustainability publication of all-time) for over a decade. His novel, Old Music for New People, was published by The Story Plant in 2021. This is David Biddle’s first contribution to this webzine.