Why I Write Everywhere:

On Niches, Honesty, and Not Giving a Damn Whether You Read This

People ask me sometimes why I don’t just pick one lane. Food, or crime, or the blog, or the memoir stuff… pick a thing, brand it, flog it. That’s how you’re supposed to do it, apparently. Build an audience, know your niche, and stay in it like a good dog stays on the mat.

I’ve never been able to manage that. And for a long time, I thought it was a flaw in me… some failure of focus, some inability to commit. Then I got older, and I stopped caring what it looked like, and I realised the truth is much simpler than that.

I write about the things I love. And I love more than one thing.

I love true crime because I spent a career around the machinery of justice and injustice, watching how thin the line really is between the two, and some of that never leaves you. Years in RAF Police, then more years in senior security management, teach you a particular kind of literacy… You learn to read a room, a lie, a cover story, the way other people read a novel. That skill doesn’t switch off when the uniform comes off. It just finds a new outlet, and for me, that outlet became “Inside True Crime Stories”, not for the shock value. I’ve had enough real shock in a real career to last several lifetimes. I write it because I understand, better than most, how ordinary the beginning of most terrible things actually looks.

I love food because a good meal, cooked slowly and eaten with people you trust, is one of the last honest pleasures left in a world trying very hard to monetise every other one. *Foodie Scribbles* isn’t really about recipes, not underneath. It’s about the ritual of it. Out here, in the cave, cooking isn’t a lifestyle choice you make to look good on a platform… It’s how you mark the day. When the water’s running and the stove’s lit and there’s something good happening in the pan, that’s a small victory worth writing down. I’ve cooked in barracks kitchens, and I’ve cooked over open flame with half a working supply chain between me and the nearest shop. Food, properly understood, tells you more about a person and a place than most interviews ever will.

I love the blog because sometimes the world does something so absurd, so quietly cruel, that I need somewhere to put it down before it curdles into something worse. dominusmarkham.com is where the systemic stuff goes… institutions, hypocrisy, the gap between what people say and what they do. And I love the satire because if you can’t laugh at the whole grim pantomime, you’ll end up believing it’s normal. “Unharnessed” exists precisely because some truths land better wrapped in a joke than delivered straight. That’s not me being flippant. That’s me knowing, from long experience, that people can hear things through laughter that they’ll flatly refuse to hear through a lecture.

None of that is a business plan. It never was.

Here’s the bit people don’t expect from a bloke who’s been shot at, shouted at, and shipped around more countries than I can count on both hands… I write for free, essentially. I mean that literally and I mean it as philosophy. I’m not chasing subscribers like a man chasing a bus he’s already missed. I’m not writing to be liked, and I’m certainly not writing to be agreed with. I write because the writing itself is the reward, the way some people find peace in a long walk or a quiet garage full of tools. It’s mine. It doesn’t need an audience to be worth doing, in the same way a good chicken coop doesn’t need an audience to be worth building.

I keep chickens now, by the way. That’s not a metaphor, though I could probably force it into one if you gave me an evening. I live off-grid, in a cave dwelling in rural Spain, with a small group of friends who bought this place on retirement and were good enough to invite me along when I was running their online business for them. Nine years, give or take. The water supply here comes from a reservoir that goes down more often than I’d like, so I’ve learned to keep backups, to plan for the gaps, to not panic when the tap runs dry. There’s a lesson in that, if you’re looking for one, about how most of what we call resilience is really just familiarity with disappointment. I speak Spanish with the locals, badly at first and better now, because I think it’s rude not to try, and because half of what I know about this country I’ve learned from people who had no reason to explain it to me except that I asked.

I tell you all that not to pad the piece out, but because it’s relevant. When people ask why I write across so many different subjects, what they’re really asking, I think, is how one person can contain that much. And the honest answer is that I don’t contain it neatly at all. It spills. The security career spills into the true crime writing. The kitchen spills into the newsletter. The rage at institutional nonsense spills into the blog, and when the rage gets too heavy to carry straight, it spills sideways into the satire instead. I’m not managing separate brands. I’m just letting a long, strange, occasionally difficult life leak out through whichever door happens to be open that day.

But if you do read it… if you happen to wander into one of my true crime pieces at two in the morning, or my food scribbles when you’re hungry and half-hearted about cooking, or the blog when you’re furious about something and want company in that fury… then I’d like to think six decades of knocking about this earth might hand you something useful. Not advice, God no, I’ve stopped trusting anyone who hands out advice like it’s free biscuits. Just a perspective. A different angle on the thing you’re going through, from a man who’s lived in barracks and boardrooms and now lives in a cave in rural Spain with chickens and good friends and a water supply that fails more often than the trains back home.

That’s the whole thrust of it. I’m not selling anything. I’m not building a personal brand, whatever that phrase is even supposed to mean. I’m a bloke who likes writing, who’s lived enough life to have something worth saying across several different rooms, and who refuses to squeeze himself into one identity because some algorithm somewhere prefers tidy categories.

The niches aren’t a strategy. They’re just me, split across several doors. Walk through whichever one you fancy. I’ll be the same person on the other side, kettle on, chickens fed, still writing whether you’re there or not.

Until Next Time