The Happy Hotelier interviews a travel writer who is perfectly happy to chat away about herself... woops, that's me!

The Happy Hotelier (you know, The Hague-based luxury hotel owner who we all love who blogs away about hotels, travel and tonnes of other stuff) has just started a series of weekly interviews with hotel and travel bloggers called '10 Questions For...'. The interviews give an opportunity for the bloggers to introduce themselves and their blogs before being grilled on their best and worst destination, hotel and dining experiences. First up was Jennifer Knoepfle who blogs about (what else?) travel on from Better Living Through Travel and second cab off the rank was yours truly. (I'll take any excuse for a break during a book write-up!) You can read my interview here. And you'll hear from the Happy Hotelier here again tomorrow - he's kindly agreed to comment on the last post in our '10 things that annoy us about hotels' series. Pictured? Another photo from our recent stay at one of my favorite hotels (which I also featured earlier today, and which I rave about in my interview over at the Happy Hotelier), the sublime Villa Crespi at Lake Orta. And I'm sorry, it won't be the last you'll hear about it because we haven't even told you about the food there yet!

Travel writing and travel blogging: how and why we do it

I've recently been interviewed by a couple of bloggers about travel writing, how Terry and I got into it, what we do, why we like it, the joys, the challenges, etc. My first interview was with Liz at Write to Travel, a blog which looks at all aspects of the craft and profession of travel writing, along with the development of her own travel writing career. As I've mentioned before, Liz does an enlightening weekly interview series with writers, the most recent of which is with Angela K Nickerson, an art teacher, tour guide, and now travel writer, and author of 'Journey into Michelangelo's Rome', which sounds wonderful. I'm going to try and get hold of it for our trip to Rome in a couple of weeks. Check out Angela's blog Just Go! If you're interested in travel writing, as everybody seems to be lately (although not for the reasons we'd like), check out the recent post at Perceptive Travel investigating why travel writer's blog and you'll get a bit more of an insight into why they write. There's been so much controversy recently surrounding ethics in travel as a result of the Thomas Kohnstamm Affair, however, Julie Shwietert shares some of the secrets of the trade in the Top 5 Secrets Travel Writers Won't Tell You at the Travellers Notebook, including how those much-discussed discounts can help you. Anne at Instant Native has just posted an interview she did with me as well. Anne provides online concierge services, organizing trips and itineraries for people ('fun menus' as she calls them), and on her blog she provides travel tips, advice on what travel accessories to buy, suggestions for places to go, and stuff to see and do. I've always promoted the idea of becoming an 'instant native', of taking a long slow holiday in a place and living like a local, which I've blogged about before - it's the way Terry and I like to travel when we have time. I'm going to come back to that in future posts and tell you a bit about our time in Turkey, where we're working now.