The book is called Somewhere Different – The Journey. It’s our story from when we left the UK, why we left, our travels through 20 countries in a beaten up old American camper van that leaked liquid shit everywhere through to the whole Tsunami episode. That chapter is called ‘The longest day’ its 75 pages… it was a long day. I finished writing it years ago, and have slowly worked through the editing of the story. I have nearly finished the first draft and plan to get it off to my agent in the next few months.
The second book is called Somewhere Different – Living the Dream (or not). It’s all finished too but needs heavy editing as mostly still in diary format. The story continues on into Egypt and how we deal with post traumatic stress disorder, living in Croatia with our drunk builders to us finally settling down to run Somewhere Different in Siwa Oasis and the Carpathian Mountains in Northern Transylvania.
The third book I have not written yet, but I am in it now, it’s called Somewhere Different – Just Livin It!. After setting up our successful little travel business life has changed, it’s not seat of the pants stuff any more. Well it wasn’t, and then I got this phone call late one night 
I think I have one more month of editing the first book before I can get it out to a professional editor and ready for publication. I am so close.
I get asked now and again “Duncan, when we gonna get to read your book?”. “When I get time to edit it.” is the simple answer.
After the Tsunami we went to see a physiotherapist to see how it would affect us all. “What was the most precious thing you lost?” She asked me. “My diary” I said “All 150 pages of it; along with the 40 hours of video I shot and the 1000′s of pictures I took.”
“You can’t replace the video” she said “But you could rewrite your diary and go one step further, turn it into a book.” she smiled ” As I think your story just got a bit more interesting.”
From that moment on I was determined to get back at what had happened to us. I have written it, I don’t know quite know how I found the time in between swinging axes and throwing up mud houses, but its all done. It’s sitting on this web server all backed up waiting to be edited. All 615 pages of it. The problem is, editing is a different ball game, your can’t edit whilst bumping down the road in a bus looking out at the Sahara or on an overnight train to Bucharest, which is where I wrote most of it. You need quite, nothing going on and you need to able to do it again tomorrow. I am optimistic that time will come soon for me and I can get it off to the printers.If there were 1,000 comments below of encouragement to finish the book, I’d drop everything and just do it. But, as you can see LOL. It’s has not been a priority in the last few years as it can always unfortunately be put off until later. We’ll see, I got this far. I HAVE to finish it now!
Home,
Just seen this – finish it! You have to, it’s too good a story not to share with everyone, and maybe inspire people to do jsut what they want to do and not what they feel they have to do.
Excellent site. Keep living your dream.
After having spent several wonderful weeks as your guest in both Egypt/Siwa and Breb, Romania I can only urge you to keep living the dream and writing it down at the same time. The Negus family are keen to read all three of your books when they are published – so hurry up!
I love looking at your website. I only look occasionally though you are in my favourites. I have plans to bring my Egyptian husband to Siwa one day with my our young family I just need to convince my husband he won’t be bored. I was very interested to read your article about the current state of the Egyptian tourist industry. It is a concern that people will continue to be afraid to visit Egypt for probably at least a couple of years. Indeed my husband is worried about us visiting his family in Suez in July/August but I am not afraid. I also think we will visit Cairo to see friends and family I don’t believe there is anything to keep us away.