The fine people at Displaced Nation have asked to me to write for them. My new gig is a monthly column about writing. God knows why they think I have anything particularly useful or original to say about this subject (or any other) but I’ll give it a go and hope I don’t run out of things to say.  So, ladies and gents, I give you my inaugural piece…

jack-the-hack-_writingtipsYou’re thinking about writing a travelogue or memoir. Should you start with a blog?

When Liam and I first flogged off the family silver, jumped the good ship Blighty and waded ashore to Turkey, we planned to put our feet up and watch the pansies grow. Twelve months into the dream, we began to feel, well, a little bored. It was a benign type of boredom — not the terminal kind that leads to low self-esteem, heavy drinking, chocolate binges and serial infidelity. More…

Imagine the absurdity of two openly gay, married, middle aged, middle class men escaping the liberal sanctuary of anonymous London to relocate to a Muslim country. I chronicled our exploits with the mad, the bad, the sad and the glad in a blog for the whole world to ignore. Then came the book which became a critically acclaimed best seller. Its success opened out a whole new career for me, firstly as an author, and now as an indie publisher. Who'd have thought it? Certainly not me. In June 2012, we ended our Anatolian affair and paddled back to Britain on the evening tide, washing up in Norwich, a surprising city in eastern England, then to the wilds of Norfolk as the only gays in the village. I’m sometimes nostalgic for our encounters with the hopeless, the hapless and, yes, the happy go lucky. They gave me an unexpected tale to tell and for this I thank them.

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