MissAdventures

Freelance Travel Writing and the Art of Being a Parent

I recently turned down a press trip to a place I’ve always wanted to go. The press trip was going to be an all-expenses paid trip to a destination near the Mediterranean Sea. I would go, see the sites, and write about the destination for a few publications. I didn’t have a firm assignment for any magazine, newspaper, or website, so this presser was going to be more a frivolous pursuit than a full-fledged moneymaker.

So, why did I turn this opportunity down? Ethics? No. I discussed that in an earlier post. I turned down a fabulous press trip opportunity because I couldn’t bear the thought of traveling without my children.

To those without kids (and some with), this probably sounds like a pathetic excuse. I think back to Eat, Pray, Love, in which Elizabeth Gilbert confessed

I have always felt, ever since I was sixteen years old and first went to Russia with my saved-up babysitting money, that to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice. I am loyal and constant in my love for travel, as I have not always been loyal and constant in my other loves. I feel about travel the way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, restless newborn baby – I just don’t care what it puts me through. Because I adore it. Because it’s mine. Because it looks exactly like me. It can barf all over me if it wants to – I just don’t care.

Gilbert compared her love of travel to the love of a parent for a child. And, while I once had the very same feelings about travel – that it was what made me me – it was before I had children. It is not the same. (I am saying this at the end of a week being snowed-in with two bored children under four. So it must be love.)

The thought of traveling thousands of miles away while my children stay behind is a frightening proposition for me, not in the least because I have only spent one night away from either of them only once in the three and a half years since becoming a mother. While I know that the kids would be fine in the care of their father and/or grandparents, I can’t help but envision the sense of abandonment they would feel while I was away. No doubt, if I took the trip, the thought of my children missing me would put a pit in my stomach from the moment I walked through the airport security gates and would haunt me throughout the entire journey.

And then I start thinking about “what if something happened to me?” I’d never forgive myself. I imagine my husband explaining to my children, “You will never see your mother again because she had to go on an unnecessary press trip.”

Now, you must be thinking, “You’re a wuss!” There are plenty of mothers who must travel for work and they – and their children – do just fine. In fact, my husband is set to go on a two-week business trip next month and I don’t think the idea of leaving his family has even phased him. Maybe it’s like that for fathers and some mothers – “It’s work. It must be done. I have no choice.”

But I wasn’t planning to go on a business trip to Cleveland to talk about business forecasts. I was going to be traveling in a foreign country, over-indulging in the local food, seeing gorgeous, historic sites, practically going on vacation. I was going to be working, yes. But I was also going to be having fun.

This, of course, presents an existential crisis for me. Can I call myself a travel writer if I don’t want to travel?

It’s not that I don’t travel anymore. In fact, my husband’s job as a diplomat guarantees that I will be traveling overseas again – with kids – in the near future. In our last post, Turkey, we traveled all over the place with our sons in car trips to the Mediterranean and Black Seas, on overnight train rides to Istanbul, on day trips to villages near Istanbul. Traveling with kids was trying, but we we couldn’t think of leaving them at home with the nanny like so many others did. I also did a few trips alone with my oldest son (before the youngest was born) back to the States which was a serious hassle, what with airport security, overweight carry-on baggage, and all the fatigue that goes along with keeping a toddler engaged on a plane and in airports. When we returned to the States for good last summer, I vowed that I wouldn’t get on a plane again until I absolutely had to. Friends and family could come to us for a change.

Almost all of the travel writing I’ve ever read, save for maybe Paul Theroux or V.S. Naipaul, mythologizes the way of life in foreign countries. People in countries outside of our own have their priorities straight. They have honest, unhurried meals. They take walks after dinner with their loved ones. They live with less but enjoy life more. They take time for family. All of those traits that we as travel writers admire about residents in foreign lands are not at all beyond our grasp. In other words, we can talk the talk but we rarely walk the walk.

So, call me a heretic for breaking the freelance travel writing creed. Call me crazy for not accepting a free trip to Mediterranean bliss. Call me an embarrassment to feminists everywhere. Call me whatever you want because you won’t be calling me a bad (or absent) parent. There will be more chances to travel later. And I am sure that I will eventually travel abroad without my kids. But right now, I’m going to enjoy to enjoy this time. Besides it’s time to put my youngest down for a nap.

Continue reading...

The Little Train That Could

Here’s the link to my latest travel article on National Geographic’s Intelligent Travel Blog. This was my first piece for them, and I’m really pleased with how it turned out.

This piece is about the Toy Train in Matheran, a hill station outside of Mumbai. India has submitted the toy train, which made its first run in 1907 during the British Raj era, to UNESCO for consideration as a World Heritage Site.

What was nice about writing this piece is that I mined two different areas to come up with my pitch. Using the power of Twitter, I had just happened to save a search column on Mumbai. One evening when I was looking at that column’s most recent tweets, I saw the headline about UNESCO officials in Matheran. I visited Matheran in 2004 and wrote about it on this blog. I used that blog post to jog my memory about the place, did a little research, and voilà! – a new clip!

The Little Train That Could…Be a World Heritage Site

Photo © Himanshu Sarpotdar

Continue reading...

Of Freelance Writers and Junkets

There was a debate about travel writing ethics today on Twitter (#twethics), which started with a story on Gawker called “New York Times Travel Writer Broke These Travel Writer Rules With Junket.” Gawker ran the above photo of Mike Albo, said travel writer who was accused of engaging in a “swag orgy” because he accepted (from JetBlue) a paid trip to Jamaica. First of all, I don’t know about you, but that guy doesn’t look like he has been privy to any kind of orgy. This guy doesn’t even have time to shave, much less be involved in an orgy, swag or otherwise! Though, interestingly enough, this photo was taken by one Irina Slutsky. Bad joke…I know.

Anyhow, Gawker and numerous people on Twitter were appalled that a travel writer – for the New York Times, no less! – would go on a junket. Also known as a press trip or a “fam” (short for familiarization trip), a junket enables a writer to get third-party funding for a trip to where the news is occurring. The New York Times writer guidelines and the guidelines of many other fine newspapers and magazines forbid freelance writers from taking paid trips. I am quite familiar with the NYT guidelines, as I’ve sent in numerous – rejected – queries on which I had to state at the top of the page the date when the trip was taken. I suppose there’s some fact-checker in-house who looks to see if any trips coincide with any known press trips.

I certainly understand why the “no free travel” guidelines are in place. But, as one Twitter user chimed in “no press trips means #travelwriters have to pay to go to work.” (@tjohansmeyer).

I have been travel writing for more than 10 years. I have taken some press trips – most of them early on in my career – and I have written about travel while paying my way and/or living “on location.” I think there are advantages to both.

Press trips, which are usually sponsored by tourism and visitors boards, hotels, or tour companies (or a combination of those), can be very helpful to a writer. They help us get in, get what we need to know, and get out. Indeed, the trips can be a whirlwind, with CVBs whisking you around to only the places they want you to see. But travel writers have hearts, minds, stomachs, eyes, and curiosities that enable them to see past the fluff and swag.

As far as getting in and getting out, that’s important. While on a press trip, most travel writers are thinking of how they can sell this particular experience 2, 4, or 10 times using different angles and pitching to different markets. So, while we may have an assignment to write for “X” magazine, we also want to try to spin the story to write for A, B, and C magazines, too. So, could it be possible that Mike Albo was on a junket in Jamaica for an assignment for, say, High Times Magazine, but found something that would have been of interest to the New York Times while he was there? I think that a majority of travel writers spend more time writing (and querying and marketing) than they do actually traveling. And that’s because it is so expensive. Subsidization is often the only way for it to make any sense.

You can also have a bit of a Catch-22 when it comes to press trips and assignments. Many publications won’t allow you to accept free travel. But then, many press trip providers won’t invite you on a trip unless you have an assignment.

On the other side of the coin is writing while you’re already living in the location. “Go where the locals go!” is what many travel publications beckon us to do. But maybe the locals don’t know as much as we think they do. For example, I lived in Mumbai for two years. Someone recently posed me a question of a good, mid-priced hotel in that city and I drew a blank. I knew the Taj and the Oberoi, but what did I know about the other hotels? I had no reason to spend a night in one of the rooms. Had I been asked to research the hotels, I would not have paid to stay the night to figure out the quirks of each hotel room. And, yes, it takes staying in a place overnight to figure out if the bed is lumpy or whether room service is any good. Locals may also not be as attuned to the tourist sites, either. For example, my husband, who grew up in New York the son of immigrants, has never been to the Statue of Liberty. Some local knowledge, huh?

Publications like NYT do not approve of press trips, nor do they pay for writers’ expenses so that they can travel. But, could you imagine if David Pogue, the Times’ chief tech writer, had to pay – out of his own pocket – all of the gadgets that he reviews? Perhaps travel just isn’t important enough to merit its own budget?

At any rate, I’m going to keep TRYING to write about travel because I like exploring and telling people about new places. Luckily, I can use my many web outlets to do just that. Because it’s not only readers that are leaving newspapers and magazines to die at the hands of blogs; writers are conducting their own boycott, too.

By the way, if *you* want to pay my way to travel, the Miss Adventures writer guidelines say it’s okay!

Continue reading...

Paul Theroux On How He Became a Travel Writer

Paul Theroux may be a curmudgeon, but he’s a damn good travel writer (if that’s what you must call him). This piece in the Guardian about how and why Theroux became a travel writer comes a few days shy of the release of his books The Great Railway Bazaar and The Old Patagonian Express as Penguin Modern Classics.

I couldn’t agree with Theroux more on this point:

The travel book was a bore. It annoyed me that a traveller hid his or her moments of desperation or fear or lust. Or the time he or she screamed at the taxi driver, or mocked the folk dancers. And what did they eat, what books did they read to kill time, and what were the toilets like? I had done enough travelling to know that half of travel was delay or nuisance – buses breaking down, hotel clerks being rude, market peddlers being rapacious. The truth of travel was interesting and off-key, and few people ever wrote about it.

I can hardly stand reading a long-form travel writing feature (unless it’s in Outside Magazine), even though that’s the line of work I’m in. It’s an inconvenient truth. And, yet, the guidebook writing business is one that leaves little opportunity to report on the distasteful aspects of travel. As guidebooks must take on a certain form – where to go, what to do, where to eat, etc. – there’s little room to list the negatives. And so you cull the best from what you have experienced.

I think that blogs offer the critical travel writer a great forum for expressing the more personal aspects of trips. Perhaps, some day, I will have the chance to write a book about what I really think about Italy, Turkey, India, etc. Stay tuned!

Continue reading...

A Query A Day

…keeps the creditors away!

No seriously…I don’t know how anyone does it. I have just spent the better part of mid-day working on a pitch — well, two — tailored for one specific magazine. I’ll sit on that one for a little while – let’s hope I hear back. Then I’ll move down to the next market and give it a go.

It’ll be a lot easier to devote my undivided attention to queries once I leave my day job. My last day is next Friday – woohoo! Maybe I’ll spend a lazy 4th of July weekend brainstorming. That’s the only problem with freelancing full-time: your work is never done.
(more…)

Continue reading...

Web Style Guide

I’ve desperately been trying to think of how to redesign my personal web site and came across this helpful site. The Web Style Guide lays out the whole process, giving you tips on design, editorial style, and graphics.

Now if I can find a web site on overcoming procrastinating tendencies…

Continue reading...

Market Lead: Bus Tales

I’ve seen this lead pop up a few times over the past week, and I have to say it’s a tempting offer. Not for the money, but just because of the subject. Gosh, I wonder if they’ll accept a random story about my daily commute…

Window Seat Press is looking for off-beat, funny, inspirational or tragic international bus travel stories of 750 to 4,000 words for a bus travel story anthology. Whether you’re in Kathmandu or Cozumel, the bus is where it all happens. It’s where you meet the people, hear the language and taste the culture for the price of a fare. Whether you glimpsed fear in the eyes of Rwandan refugees or played poker with Laotian nuns, we want to read your bus story. Make it funny, serious or off-beat, but make it true to the experience we’ve all shared from our seats on the bus. We pay one $500 editor’s choice per book plus $100 and two book copies for each published story. Multiple story submissions accepted. Publication summer 2005. To submit, send your story in the body of an email with subject line “Where Do We Get Off?” to: wheredowegetoff@windowseatpress.com or send a self-addressed stamped envelope with each submission to: Where Do We Get Off?, Window Seat Press, 1519 Connecticut Avenue, NW, #301, Washington, DC 20036. All submissions must include story title along with author’s name, address and phone number.

Continue reading...

Best Freelance Writing Links

On some days, like today, I waste half my time browsing for market leads, interesting writing opportunities, and advice. Some sites are a big waste of time, while others always have me coming back for more. My list of bookmarks is all over the place, which is why I’m going to list my fave sites below.
(more…)

Continue reading...

What Travel Writing Should Be

I have been absolutely riveted by Richard Bangs story on his Tour of Libya for Slate.com.

As much as I may like to fancy myself a travel writer, I’ve certainly got a lot to learn from Bangs and others who occasionally write engaging pieces.

Last year, I tried querying Tom Swick of the South Florida Sun Sentinel with several article ideas. All were rejected, sadly, but he did direct me to read his article that details what makes a good travel story. Hopefully he won’t mind if I post it here – maybe he’ll get better queries from us so-called travel writers.
(more…)

Continue reading...