This story is about a ten year old boy called Joe who lives on a farm in Australia miles from anywhere. He is an ordinary intelligent boy, but is more troubled than most by some of the Big Questions in life, such as "why are we here?" and "why am I me and not someone else?". On the farm, months of drought are taking their toll on the sheep and his weary parents. Joe meets a stranger from another world called Oom who knows how to help them, but it is Joe who has to do the real work of convincing his father to try something new. And then Oom isn't visiting Earth to top up his tan! His real reason for being here blows Joe's mind and will forever change his way of looking at the world and the human race. But that doesn't mean there is nothing Joe can do to help his alien friend.
David Webber was born in Kent, England in 1977. From ages 3 to 11 he lived in "Foxhole", a tiny hamlet in Seven Sisters Country Park, East Sussex where his step-father was a ranger. The "Seven Sisters" cliffs have appeared many times in the movies, for example in the opening act of "Robin Hood Prince of Thieves". David and the other "Foxhole" children ran a small museum in a nearby barn where they exhibited various curiosities. Among their collection were the skulls of badgers, foxes and sheep. They even had a coypu skull. They also exhibited local fossils and one rusty man-trap. They charged entrance at 10p for adults and 5p for children, one summer making over £60.
Between the ages of 11 and 18 he lived in the picturesque village of Alfriston with two women - his mother and older sister. After that he moved to Cardiff, Wales to study Philosophy where he lived in squalour with 8 other male students. They had mice in the cupboards and the occasional slug wandered into the kitchen from outside.
Whilst studying Philosophy David excelled in Predicate Logic so he decided to take a Masters in Computer Science. He graduated around the time of the Dotcom boom and moved to London to work. He was later posted in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on a big government project. Surreally, he lived in a hotel and spent every waking hour with ten Swedish colleagues, and a geordie named Gary Binns. One of the Swedes, Viktoria, became his wife!
They didn't marry straight away - they went on a round the world trip, spending time in New Zealand, Australia, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Japan. This was when he wrote the first draft of his book, "Oom". Oom, incidentally, is based on stories told to him by his father many years before.
He has lived in Sweden with Viktoria since 2003. The have one son, Elias, who is 2, and are expecting a baby in January.
David now earns a living programming for a big Internet company based in Stockholm. His programming skills played a large part in helping him to complete Oom - he created his own specialised word processor program called "Novello" (He is currently giving this product away free at http://novello.sourceforge.net). He became disillusioned with Microsoft Word when could not keep track of all the little edits he had to make to the manuscript.
David welcomes emails from readers to davew1977@yahoo.co.uk
