Pauper Travel

Travel Writing Ideas!

2005-06-22T11:51:00.000-05:00

Some Steps Travel Writers Need To Take:

1. Make Good Contacts

This is essential in order to establish a oslid reputation. Get yourself on several press and mailing lists. Touch base with embassies, tourist boards, and editors of publicaitons that interest you.

2. Gather Unique And Saleable Story Ideas

Persue opportunities made available to you through the ocntacts you have established. Develop intriguing slants for articles you would like to research and write. Be speicfic and unique. Then pitch your ideas to the editors of publications that you think will be interested.

3. Write Your Query Letters.

Before you wrtie to try and sell your story idea, read the publications you will be querying. Decide on the department that would be appropriate for your article and the length it should be. Contact the Editorial Department and request writer's guidlines. The more you prepare, the better.

4. Charm Your Contacts With A Letter Of Introduction.

Don't be shy. This is common and legitimate a practice used by freelance writers everyday. Write a letter to the hotel manager, the PR director for an airline, the manager of a restaurant you want to try. Introduce yourself and your project. Request a discount or complimentary service in a polite and professional manner. But don't rely on just one potential "freebie"--- make several contacts and cover all of your bases. Don't forget to include your assignment letter as an enclosure.

5. Follow Through With Phone Calls and Thank-You Letters.

After you've sent a query or letter of introduction, call to make sure the correct person recieved it. Check on its status. And don't forget to send thank-you letters to those who have given you assistence along the way.

6. Put On A Professional Face.

Boost your credibility and estalbish a professional image for oyurself. Make business cards, design personal letterhead, stock up on professional stationary, and arm yourself with a good dictionary, thesaurus, AP style guide, The Elements Of Style, and the Writer's Market.

7. Hold up Your End Of The Bargain.

Although you are not bound to write an article after you have taken advantage of press benefits, it is good freelancer etiquette to do everything you can to try and publish a piece.

The Travel Gene

2005-03-01T11:13:00.000-05:00

Many people finally figure out that they deserve a treat. They've worked hard and want to reward themselves. Travel is that reward.

Others see travel as the full expression of the word: "freedom". Freedom from the weight of possessons and from ruts, freedom to be the person you think yourself to be.

Evan Connell said something to the effect that "Some peope do not travel the way most of us travel. Not only do they sometimes choose odd vehicles, they take dangerous and unusual trips for incomprehensible reasons." If you understand the reasons for your desire to travel, that's good. If not, "incoprehensible reasons" do fine. Someone suggested, perhaps with tongue in cheek, that the desire to travel may be genetically programmed into some people. If so, I have that gene. I can't not travel.

Travels With Bob Dylan

2005-02-25T12:55:00.000-05:00

I just finished reading Dylans' autobiography: Chronicles: Volume One.

It just reminds me how pivotal travel can be to a young person finding his creative voice. In this remarkable book we find the young Dylan begin his search long before Greenwich Village 1961. Though the magical city of New York is filled with possiblities, smoky, nightlong parties, literary awakenings, tranisent loves--- before that---to New Orleans, Woodstock, Minnesota and points west.

In every locale a new influence is felt, another discovery is made. How does one find a unique voice, anyway? When does the art student become the artist? Where must he journey to discover himself?

Here are Dylan's thoughts:

"I'd come form a long ways off and had started a long ways down/ But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else."

While reading this book I remembered just how distinctive Bob Dylan songs were to me as a youngster. He was always engaged in some metaphorical battle with my conscience. I thought his storytelling was unequaled. I remembered taking one of his albums from my shelf and pleading with my father, a man formed in a very different generation---more practical and much less dreamy than mine,--- and wanting him to hear this sliding, high pitched voice sing songs of lament, joy, confusion and enlightenment.

It all seemed so important, back then. Of course, my father in his wisdom, would remind me that epic stories had been told since Homer, and that this new voice I had discovered was a good thing if it led me to the ancient wisdoms that permeated the world of literature and philosophy.

I remembered too, while visiting my father in Brooklyn, N.Y., I had ventured out to the long and bustling avenues of Manhattan on my own. No small feat for a 13 yar old boy. My destination? To a movie house to see the new Dylan film. I think it was called "My Back Pages", named after one of his more interesting and popular songs, shot in black & white, showing the young poet in all his glory.

Now 42 years later I still remember that trip to the movies. I loved Bob Dylan back then. Now I love his autobiography and the memories it conjures up in me. The salty taste of newfound lyrics that seem to streak across your brow and land somewhere deep in your lower, lizard-like brain.

I would eventually see the elder Dylan in concert in Dallas. There on the stage was the promethean figure from my youth. His towering, thin torso topped with a black hat, heavily rouged, piercing eyes, which looked right through my soul, ---alive, real, in-person. At this stage of his career he was constantly re-inventing his music, its rhythms, melodies and cadence. He would intentionally skewer the audience with his different slant on songs that each of us had grown up to love. No longer held captive to popular taste he foraged around to please his own esthetic vision of the music.

He would spit onto the stage.

He seemed to hold us all in contempt. Had we explored our lives fully? Were we free enough and courageous enough to do that? Had we traveled out of our little shelled-lives to blumb the depths of our psychies and the purposes of our existence, as he had?

Now, in his book I find a lot of the artist,--- but more of the man, ---than I knew when I thought he had the answers to all of my youthful angst-driven questions. I hear him bewail his fame, the loss of privacy and the hatred for those that wished to make him a seer or a revolutionary.

Through it all, he travels. He travels not only to geographical locations, but to new places of the heart and mind too. But that is what traveling has always been about. We touch the ground of our childhood, take up lessons both useful and barren, then test them against the wider world. Most of our early travel is dictated by others, our parents and teachers, just as it was for Dylan. His early life in Hibbing, Minnesota was constricting, as early life in one small or large town is for most of us.

He says: "In the summer of '59 after leaving home early spring, I was in Minneapolis, having come down from Northern Minnesota--- from the Mesabi Range, the iron mining country, steel capitol of America. I'd grown up there in Hibbing but had been born in Duluth, about 75 miles away to the east on the edge of Lake Superior, the big lake that the Indians called Gitche Gumee. Though we lived in Hibbing, my father from time to time would load us into an old Buick Roadmaster and we'd ride to Duluth, born and raised there. One of five brothers, he'd worked all his life even as a kid. ....mostly what I did growing up was bide my time."

Oh! The pinned down, suffocating restraints of youth. Not enough adult in us to run off, to travel, to discover. Our souls trying to breach the impenetrable coat of conformity, closeness and proventiality of our surroundings.

Though artists can come to glory and insight by staying put in one place, (Emily Dickenson comes to mind) the way of travel seems more accessable and implores our budding creativity to awaken. In the Dylan autobiography this is planinly seen. But really, I feel most every biography is a travleogue of sorts. Each contains a map dotted with arrivals and departures that form the voice of the traveler. The tenor and depth of experience is layered onto the talents one accrues along the way.

For more information on Bob Dylan visit www.bobdylan.com
For information on Chronicles- Volume One visit Simon & Shuster

Welcome To A Yakking Pauper Blog!

2005-02-24T13:01:00.000-05:00

I'm a traveling pauper. I hit the road with nary a care and use my wits to travel the world. I chance upon wonderful landscapes, rich cultures, far-away lands and report to you here.

My love of travel extends to you a warm invitation to pick up on my special finds, silly rants, happier insights, and future musings. When possible I'll invite guest wriiters, upload some interesting photographs and pass on ways to beat the multi-billion dollar travel industry at their own game.

Tis my second blog, I must admit. My other one is more personal in nature and concerns all my other lives. If you're interested in visiting a blog of mine that isn't new and unfilled like this one (but give me time, it'll brim with all kinds of material) then, by all means, drop by:

http://www.authorsden.com/victorkpryles

Then click on my BLOG. You can also check out my extensive forum for Pauper Travel where Paupers around the globe meet and travel cheap! That can be found by clicking here:

http://www.paupertravel.com/phpBB2/index.php

Until next time, keep your travel dreams alive---and thanks for stopping by.