Updates

Where are you from/where are you based?

I grew up in East Anglia, Outwell mainly but over the last twelve months have also revisited in life and memory Sutton Bridge, where I was christened and started school. I now live in the Midlands.

Do you write full time or do you have a ‘day job’?

Like Kerouac, I probably do more typing than writing, with millions of words from the past available to feed my website feature Dave Daze. My new material, by day and night, includes reports on international insurance markets as well as maintaining my personal publication schedule of a book every year.

How has your other work influenced your writing?

More so perhaps in this first venture into non-fiction than my earlier novels. The discipline of checking rigorously sources of information for my insurance reports helped me to dig into the past for corroboration or correction of boyhood memories in ‘The Sunny Side of the House’, though I hope this still has the narrative drive of fiction.

What is your favourite book?

As well as taking instruction from various published and unpublished memoirs of early years, including the gold standard of Tolstoy’s ‘Childhood, Boyhood, Youth’, I returned to my adolescent reading of fiction from them Amis boys, Donleavy, Vonnegut and Kesey. I could not fully recapture my teenage enthusiasm, but perhaps appreciated more this time around the ambition of Kesey’s flawed ‘Sometimes a Great Notion’. Old Henry’s injunction to his son is made for the writer struggling to keep alive his own ambition: NEVER GIVE A INCH.

Did this book inspire any aspects of your book? If so, how?

The first inspiration behind ‘Sunny’ was a desire for completion, a brain dump of my earlier memories to complement the contemporary record I have from the age of sixteen. In the writing I realised a memoir cannot be a diary; every day is a good day, not necessarily an interesting one – selection is everything, but must not be in your own favour. I did not want to take the fifth, unless it was the fifth commandment: honour thy father and thy mother.

Where is your writing space?

I usually write my diary in bed, recently on a ReMarkable gadget with handwriting recognition software embedded. Anything else nowadays goes straight into typescript, on a crowded desk in a cluttered room, with the Typhoo Tea mid-sixties United line-up on the wall behind my screen.

Are you currently working on anything new?

Unless the world clamours for a second volume of memories from a Fenland boy (I have three more in completed first drafts without yet taking me to age thirty), I am working for 2025 on a novel set among older people around the COVID-19 years, ‘The Tuesday-Thursday Tontine’. Then I hope to begin my second five-year plan, again a mixture of young adult – ‘Joe Kingmaker’ provisionally in 2026 – contemporary novels (‘Ray’s Last Ride’, ‘Trifocal Nostalgia’, possibly a start to ‘The Caribandia Trilogy’) and – whether the world cares or not – more about myself as myself.

How does it feel to be a published author?

Unprompted by social media mood makers, I feel blessed to be a published writer. Kingsley Amis was daunted by the eight feet of shelf-space Robert Graves had for his own work (are translations cheating?) at his home in Mallorca. Martin Amis’ ambition was to leave a shelf of books. Ken Kesey, from whom I would have liked to read so much more, produced only a handful. Maybe the merry prankster was right to focus on other dreams and visions, but the writing is the only thing I feel I can fully claim as my own. So somewhere between a handful and a shelf is the goal. As Anthony Burgess, another favourite of my youth, put it in his own memoir: ‘Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now.’

Thank you, David!

Find out more about David and his books here: https://www.silverwoodbooks.co.uk/david-g-bailey-author-page