David Writes....the story so far

So, way, way, way back in 2003 my wife (then fiancée) and I were fortunate enough to go travelling across the US in a campervan for three months. We got back in early 2004 and with nothing else to occupy my mind than moving to a new house, starting a new job and planning a wedding, I decided to write a book about our escapades based on a journal I had kept, plus a bunch of follow up research. The result, Travels in a Tin Can, is a mostly true account of what happened to us as we drove from state to state visiting famous, and not so famous sites, and it is organised by topic rather than chronologically as I drew together themes and found patterns in our experiences (there is a whole chapter on toilets for example). I tried unsuccessfully to gain the interest of a publisher in 2005 and after an arduous five minutes or so of that I gave up and shelved the project.

And there the book sat, unread except by nearest and dearest, on a shelf or in a box or on a disc(!) until 2020.

2020 brought many changes to very many lives, and for me it brought furlough and a sudden reawakening of the idea of being a writer, an idea that had laid mostly dormant since 2005, save for a brief yawn and stretch in 2007/8 when I was travelling around the world with my wife. So, I took the plunge and after a quick re-read and edit I self-published Travels in a Tin Can as a Kindle eBook.

And having done that, I returned to an idea for a novel that I'd had over a decade earlier.