Colby Free Press Article

I was happy to see my hometown newspaper in Colby, Kansas print a story about Church of the God Particle after they interviewed me. They even managed trigger a few buried memories from when I first began to write fiction. Here’s a pic of downtown Colby followed by the article:

Colby downtown1

Colby author finishes book

By Sam Dieter

Colby Free Press

sdieter@nwkansas.com

 

An author from Colby just finished his first book, about a preacher obsessed with quantum physics, based in part on his expe­riences here.

“Growing up in that country out there has influenced everything I do,” said David Piper, who now lives in Austin, Texas.

Piper said he moved to Colby when he was 8. While living here, he said, he learned about both telephones and fiction writing. He recently finished his first novel, “Church of the God Particle,” based partly in Colby from the 1960s to the 1980s.

One of the main characters grows up in Colby, attending a fictional Catholic church which houses an orphanage and has a different name.

Along with his life in Colby, Piper said, his career in telecom­munications helped inspire his book.

After graduating high school in 1972, he went to Colby Com­munity College for several years. During that time, he worked for Bell Brothers burying telephone cable. He went to the University of Kansas in 1974, but dropped out. Then he was a repairman for Southwestern Bell in Lawrence for 11 years.

“Going in and out of people’s places, I met some really odd peo­ple,” he said.

He went back to school in Law­rence in 1989 and finished a tele­communications degree in 1991 at the Northwest Kansas Techni­cal School in Goodland. Then he worked for telecommunications companies in Memphis and Co­lumbus, Ohio, before ending up in Austin, working for a company called Grande Communications. He helps program computers to run a telephone network.

“Part of what I did was to write algorithms for telephone network computer systems,” he said. “I wrote programs that ad­justed the network to compen­sate for calling patterns.”

Watching computers at work to help people making phone calls was a big inspiration for his book, in which the main villain tries to absorb a new technology into his body.

“That’s where I got kind of my real love for, I guess, tech­nology,” he said, “and how it combines with people and how people use it, and how it inte­grates technology and behav­ior.”

He said also developed a love of writing early on in his life, starting with a short story he wrote in a high school class taught by Jack McCraken, who was also the football coach.

“I’m not saying it was very good, but I thought that this was something I like to do,” he said.

Working at Gibson’s Discount Store, then next to Pizza Hut, during high school, he wrote short stories on rolls of cash register paper on nights when he closed the store and had nothing else to do.

“I’d have three or four feet of cash register tape and a story that I’d written,” he said.

He said he spent a lot of time painting in Lawrence, including landscapes, and the main pro­tagonist is a landscape painter who lives on a ranch.

The wide-open landscape of the High Plains helped him write a book that was 354 pages long, he said.

“Growing up in that country out there, has influenced every­thing I do,” he said. “Just grow­ing up out there with such an expansive view, I guess, contrib­uted to this expansive book.”

The novel, which is indepen­dently published, is available at major online outlets such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble Kindle and iTunes.

Another Kansas newspaper, the Hays Daily News, also ran a story on my novel. Here’s that link: http://www.hdnews.net/mobile/news/LabLitAuthor122512