Character Interview: Dan Hilles from the Sex, Love & Dating Disasters series
This week I am delighted to be joined by Dan Hilles – star of the Sex, Love and Dating Disaster series of lad lit novels by Steven Scaffardi. Welcome to Linda’s Book Bag Dan. Please tell our readers a little bit about yourself.
Thanks Linda, it’s great to be here. What can I tell you about myself? I’m a pretty regular kind of guy – regular job, regular bunch of mates, regular male aversion to shopping. I appear in both The Drought and The Flood in lead roles, which isn’t as good as it sounds.
Indeed. Let’s start with your escapades – or lack of escapades I should say – in The Drought. The story starts off with you breaking up with your girlfriend, Stacey, of three years in what can only be explained as a rather terrifying ordeal. What do you remember about that day?
It was New Year’s Day. I’d had another pointless argument with Stacey the night before and woke up to 47 rather irate messages from her. It was the final straw. Some relationships just run their course, but I wanted to do the right thing so I went around to Stacey’s flat to talk to her. However, Stacey being Stacey didn’t quite see eye to eye with me on a few things, and before you knew it things get out of control and then her best friend Sophie appears out of nowhere and all hell breaks loose! I ended up having to leg it home before Sophie could do any real damage to. That girl has a screw loose!
So after three years you find yourself single again. How did that work out for you?
Not great. After being in a relationship for three years I had completely forgotten the rules of the dating game. It wasn’t too bad to begin with; I just thought I needed to get back into the swing of things. But as the days rolled into weeks and the weeks rolled into months I started to get anxious. It was as though every girl I met knew I was on this sexual drought, like I was giving off some sort of awful scent. Women like Obsession by Calvin Klein, but Desperation by Dan Hilles makes them run a mile.
You certainly suffered your fair share of dating disasters in The Drought. Can you share any of those stories without giving anything away to anyone who has yet to read the book?
It’s not something I look back fondly on. Put it this way – I learned a lot about what not to do! For example, don’t get steaming drunk on a first date and attempt to dance in an RnB club. White men can’t dance very well at the best of times, but throw in copious amounts of alcohol and some Usher, and before you know it you’ll end up like I did. Waving your arms around on the dancefloor like an octopus that only has two tentacles and is trying to compensate for the missing six is not a good look.
Sounds like you had it pretty tough. Luckily you had your friends and their male pearls of wisdom to help you get through it then?
If that’s what you call it! On one hand you have my best friend Rob who is so good looking that he only needs to look at a girl to get her excited, so trying to take on his techniques was a non-starter. Ollie is a nice guy, but I was hardly going to take advice from a man who thinks Kama Sutra was a foreign exchange student we went to school with. And don’t even get me started on Jack. That little idiot said he was going to help me improve what he called my ‘man moves’ and the less said about that, the better! You can read the book if you want to find out what happened because I can’t even bring myself to talk about anymore.
Oh dear, well let’s move on to a different subject then. Tell me about the new book The Flood. This time you find yourself with the opposite problem of having too many girls. How did this happen?
Everything was going brilliantly. I had a new job, I had just moved into a new place in Clapham and I’d been doing okay with the ladies. Life was good. Until we went to the pub one Sunday afternoon and the boys started to tease me; telling me I was too nice a guy to be able to juggle more than one girl once. Well, after one beer too many I’d had enough of their goading and I made a rather stupid bet that I could date four girls at the same time over the course of eight weeks. Big mistake. It complicated my life worse than the drought did!
Sounds like you let yourself in for a spot of bother! That pretty much brings our interview to a close. Thank you for joining me Dan. I’ll let you have the last word. Why should people read about your life in The Drought and The Flood?
Honestly, I’d rather they didn’t! But if they do want to read the books, then at least men will be able to find out what not to do when it comes to the opposite sex, and women can find out what really goes on in the male mind.
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