Dear Friend and Reader,

As you can see from the smug author photo above, my new novel came out during July. Joe is working towards his art exhibition at the Rugby Gallery during August, so interesting times for us both with all the negative as well as positive connotations that phrase carries. Promoting your work is usually not as much fun as producing it, even less fun than promoting someone else's, so I'll let Joe bang his own drum on the art side.

For 'Them Roper Girls' I have tried to be a little more active on social media than with my earlier book 'Seventeen', having recently opened Twitter and Instagram accounts as well as Facebook though without yet building up many contacts through them. I also had a look at Tik Tok, any offers of video assistance will be gratefully received. 

My publishers Silverwood Books recently posted a 'meet the author' interview, with my responses tailored mainly to 'Them Roper Girls'. An expanded version of the feature is reproduced below.

I hope you will continue to support me by reading this new book (the opening pages are extracted on my website, including them Roper girls' family pretty tree) and as always feedback of any kind is more than welcome. Do stay in touch.

All the best, David

Where are you from/where are you based?
I am from Outwell but now live in the Midlands.

Do you write full time or do you have a ‘day job’?
I am still trying to find the right balance between writing for money and writing for myself, or rather to reach the point where the two come together.

Has your other work influenced your writing?
It has facilitated more than influenced the content of my writing, instilling in me the discipline needed to carry a work of fiction from initial idea through to publication.

What is your favourite book?
I am currently enjoying ‘The Cazalet Chronicles’ by Elizabeth Jane Howard, to which I came shamefully late after being reminded of the series in Martin Amis' ‘Inside Story’. I have always been a fan of Amis and his father (whose work provided the epigraph for 'Them Roper Girls'), but am now beginnin to think their sometime stepmum / wife had more depth and weight to her writing than either of them.

Did this book or any of its characters inspire any aspects of your book? If so, how?
While I love the denseness of detail in the Elizabeth Jane Howard world I could not hope to match it, even if I had read the ‘Chronicles’ before writing ‘Them Roper Girls’. I hope my work has a little higher fun level to match what is certainly a lower class level than the wealthy Cazalets inhabit, though in the humour stakes I would bow even more humbly to the Amis boys. A likelier inspiration for my work is not in this case that of superior writers, or direct experience – I am an only child – but observing siblings across different generations and branches of my own family and others.

Where is your writing space? (Where do you like to do most of your writing?)
I am lucky to have a small room with a big desk where I can peck away, and spend probably more of my waking hours there than anywhere else.

Are you currently working on anything new?
Bringing out ‘Them Roper Girls’ a year to the day from ‘Seventeen’ took a deal of my time, but I am hoping to meet the same (self-imposed) deadline in 2023 with another, even longer novel: ‘The Prankster's Nostalgia’, featuring one couple from ‘Them Roper Girls’. I am also ready to embark on a fourth volume of autobiography (Ecuador) and either complete or ditch ‘The Tuesday-Thursday Tontine’, set in and around a golf club and, I fear, of the same quality as my golf game.

How does it feel to be a published author?
I was delighted to bring out my first novel in 2021 and another this year which is different in almost every way. A new challenge is, beside the business of publication, to keep just as hard at the craft of writing and producing new material that will please yourself and readers as better than the last thing they saw from you.