David Fuller remembers summers on Kunyung Beach and the curious intricacies of corporate life in Australia, long before embarking on a journey that took him across continents. After backpacking through Asia, he joined an internet startup in London, setting off a career spanning marketing, sports writing, and sailing blogging. His work has taken him across the USA, Europe, and the Middle East, where he built websites, led training sessions, and delivered talks as a public speaker. In addition to creating and presenting podcasts, David also launched his own casual clothing brand, Pilote.
David has written travel and business content for over 25 years. His first travel blog ‘Itchy Feet’ was started in 1999. In 2008, he launched Yachtsponsorship.com which became Yachtracing.biz. He also edited, produced and published – The Dark Blue Book, the who’s who of sailing and yacht racing. More recently, he wrote ‘The Ingredients for Ecommerce Success, a business book aimed at small businesses looking to sell online.
Discarding Decency is David’s debut novel, marking his first venture into fiction.
How Did You Come to Write Your First Novel?
There are two parts to the story. During Covid, a friend of mine, Paul De Vos challenged me to write a film script. Apparently the streamers needed more content and he thought I would be able to put something together. I’d never written a film script, but I used the pandemic to educate myself and had a go at an outline, a beat sheet and wrote the first 20 pages or so. It wasn’t for me. I wanted to be director as well as writer and add in detail and observations and inner monologues that couldn’t be adequately treated in a film script format. Then the second thing happened. I was listening to ‘The Rest is Entertainment’ podcast and one of the presenters – Richard Osman, suggested that a novel came in at around 90,000 words. That felt doable, a few thousand words a day. When I was blogging, I was regularly writing 1000 to 2000 words a day. And so… here we are.