I Wanna Be a Travel Writer – Barfing Up a Byline

June 10 – Barfing Up a Byline

I leaned over the toilet and offered up to the porcelain god another slice of my digested pepperoni pizza. In return for my donation, I asked that the guardians of all things gastronomic be kind and merciful with me. After all, I was in my new editor’s flat and I was pitching him on a regular column in his new magazine.

Please don’t let him wake up and hear this, I repeated in my head as the mantra for the moment. But I think I was wishing my grandmother were there with a wet face cloth even more. I heard him roll over…no snoring…just the quiet stillness of three in the morning. Damn, who makes doors with shutters these days? What happened to solid wood and privacy? He had to have just heard that awful un-author-like heaving. This was pretty embarrassing. I crawled back to the cot in the spare room and curled up with my blankets. My stomach felt a little bit better.

This was day three in Sydney on a stop over on my way to Melbourne. I was meeting and visiting with Joe Florian, the publisher and editor of the new Australian travel, leisure and entertainment magazine, WhoopWhoop.

I first met Joe through the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree, Australia & New Zealand section, while I was researching my trip to Australia. He had put a call out for travel writers for his new magazine. I answered (surprised to find a paying writing gig on the TT), and we soon had a back and forth going. He was looking for writers with attitude, and since I asked him a lot of questions about how he was going about starting his business, he thought I had the edge he wanted to embody in WhoopWhoop. Little did he know that the edge of my seat in a movie theatre was the only kind of edge this agoraphobic was getting close to.

A few months later, after he’d weeded out many of the submissions, he announced the first seven Global Crusaders he wanted to include in his magazine. I was one of them and was thrilled to have a work related tangent to tell my family back home so they could understand why I needed to quit my job of nearly six years and take off for an extended amount of time.

When I got to Australia, Joe flew me down to meet in person and get some advice on how to lay out the editorial content. I have to admit, I was pretty excited and quite seduced by the multimedia office at Fox Studios where his investors worked at GoManGo. He was in the middle of discussions with a private editorial and marketing team that were considering partnering with him. They made it clear to me that there could be spots opening up in editorial, but the reality of it was that start-ups always take longer to launch than expected. Besides, I wasn’t ready then to commit full hog when I was just beginning my trip and had many other irons in the fire.

Over the next few months the magazine grew. What started off as a travel mag for a new breed of dot.com backpackers, turned into a hybrid magazine targeted at four types of travelers: extreme, adventurous, hip and backpacker. The budget travel market was already saturated in Oz with TNT, The Word, and Backpacker among a few others. But a glossier, more upscale market rag that combined domestic travel with international adventure temptations could reach a whole new crowd interested in more than just where the good hostels are and the best way to get between them.

I had been preoccupied with my own experiences in Brisbane and let my involvement as a Crusader slide while I waited to see if the magazine was actually going to take off. In May, Joe came to Brisbane and let me know of the change in direction. His baby was taking shape and the layout had a ton of potential. I saw WhoopWhoop in a refreshed light, and got my creative ambition engines revved up again.

I had failed to pitch a proper Survivor story to the travel sections in the States as planned, and the only thing I can say is that I think I was trying to do something that didn’t fit with my style and I just couldn’t force it. Excuses, excuses. Now with WhoopWhoop’s new angle, it came to me loud and clear that what would fit for me was a website review column. He didn’t have anything like that slated, and I think all forms of current media – be they print, broadcast or online – are not complete if they’re not addressing the web world to some extent. I couldn’t wait to tell him about my idea for the column.

In less than two weeks I was in Sydney, using his office as a hostel, pitching him my column, and barfing up my dinner. I was sick for three days straight in his spare bedroom. But staying there the extra days couldn’t have worked out better. Joe brought in the iMac, set me up with two big stacks of DVDs, and gave me what I wanted…Siberchic by Jen Leo. When I got better he handed me some URLs and some money to go to an internet café in Bondi Junction. He wanted my raw comments, and I gave it to him.

I don’t recommend that you invite yourself over to all the editors and publishers that you plan to pitch travel stories to. However, personal contact is important. When in town, go beyond email, phone and the old-fashioned snail mail. Make a point of doing the meet-and-greet with a firm handshake. Let them put a face to a name. If they get to know you, within reason, the whole process of submit and reject becomes much easier and more personal. And hey, they might even have a story idea for you that you haven’t thought of.

I met with Joe to talk about a web review column, but I also left his office having done some marketing research, feature story editing, and co-creating the first mock up of their movie review page…where on and off you will see my reviews under Cinema Girl. A few weeks later he called to ask me to be the content manager for the Grrl Power issue. All of that surely would not have happened if I hadn’t gone down to Sydney and vomited in his sparkling clean can… I mean, met him in person.

Did you like this article?

    

 

Share it

 

Place a comment