TROTMH 2: Motutapu Island

This is the second in a series of extracts from my new book The Return of the Mullet Hunter, which I am posting over the the course of this week. This second extract describes my visit to Motutapu Island, an uninhabited island off Auckland which was home to Mullet Bay, one of New Zealand’s five mullets.…

TROTMH 1: Tipping

This is the first in a series of extracts from my new book The Return of the Mullet Hunter, which I am posting over the the course of this week. This first extract is from my trip to Canada, the second country I visited in the book. In amongst the mullet hunting, I was able…

One week old, and a price cut

The Return of the Mullet Hunter has been out a week now, and I’m delighted by and grateful for some of the comments I’ve received from people. Well, all of them, in fact. It’s not like there’ve been comments about it that I’m not delighted by or grateful for. At least not ones related to…

How to become a bestselling travel author

Amazon’s a funny thing. Well, some would say something worse than funny, but I’ll stick with it for now. I’m not too ashamed to confess that since The Return of the Mullet Hunter‘s release, I’ve been watching its Amazon pages like a 3G-enabled hawk to see how sales have been doing. The highlight has been…

The quiet launch of TROTMH

Well, The Return of the Mullet Hunter is out. It’s an odd feeling, launching a book on Kindle. You just press a button, and it’s there. Well, you press quite a few buttons, faff around with various technicalities,  wait a while and then it’s there. And not just “there”, but there in different Amazon sites…

The Hoja Project

I mentioned in my previous post how I am giving ten percent of my royalties from The Return of the Mullet Hunter to a Tanzanian charity called The Hoja Project. With my first book, I give a cut of royalities to my friend Kieran’s charity aidconvoy.net (with both he and it appearing in the Albanian…

Cover story

In my previous post I reflected on some of the aspects of self-publishing. Making a good cover is obviously one of the most important ones, because it is the “public face” of a book, the thing that will draw people in and catch folks’ eyes. The cover also has to tell a story in itself…

Self-publishing – a reflection

The process leading up to my (traditionally published) first book was a fascinating journey. Discussions with many people on everything from editing to marketing to the cover design, were stimulating and thought-provoking. The whole idea of having your book – from the very broad concept to the minutiae of individual sentences – subjected to such…

My call-up to international football

As if getting an email from Alain de Botton wasn’t a surreal enough experience recently, I received an offer the other day to represent Great Britain at football. The best explanation is simply to share the email I received: Hi Simon, We’ve no met but here goes something a bit different. You might be interested,…

La Ville Basse

Pretty much anywhere in Luxembourg City is close to a cliff. The heart of the upper town (la Ville Haute, which I’ve explored in my previous post) is built on a network of long fingers of rock that tower over the low town (la Ville Basse) and the two rivers that run through it. Quieter…

Honesty in travel writing. Confession time?

Over on the BBC News website, there is an interesting article about the occurrence of lying in travel writing.  It outlines some pretty severe deviations from truth, one or two by very well-known travel writers. Transgressions include creating characters that did not exist, describing first-hand events that the writer didn’t actually witness, and even making up entire parts…

The latest on the two forthcoming books

A few folk have asked me lately about how “TROTMH” (as I’m nicknaming The Return of the Mullet Hunter – it’s either that or “Mullet 2”) is getting on. By which I mean there really have been a few folk asking, and not that I just feel it would be nice to talk about it…

The death of a coffee shop

In between my two stints in Inverness (second one still going, of  course, with no end in sight – which is no bad thing), I spent eighteen months in Glasgow.  Apart from the rain, pollution, accent, insular attitude, sectarianism, Buckfast, traffic and lack of access to the hills, I really enjoyed it. Glasgow boasts (and…

The Admont monastery

Admont is a quiet little town in the Styrian mountains that, while pretty and a great base for exploring the Gesäuse National Park, wouldn’t normally be big enough to register much on a week or so’s visit to Austria. We have a pile of great friends there (why we do is a whole other story that…

Return of the Mullet Hunter

I feel that you, dear reader, are long overdue an update on the progress of my second mullet book.  This will be the sequel to Up The Creek Without a Mullet and will bring the account of my mullet-hunting adventures more or less up to the present day, charting my trips to England, Canada, New…