I must be doing something right?

After that last gut-wrenching treatise on travel writing, I came across this recent entry in Slate...it's a discussion of how the author took mushrooms on his last day in Amsterdam because, well there wasn't anything better to do.

The swager in this article is palpable...and typical of just what I was talking about in my last blog...what gets published is lots of daredevil stuff that I've not the stomach for.

Nonetheless, not everything that's published falls into this genre. In my surfing I also came across an article by Patricia Leigh Brown (New York Times) on Mountain View Cemetary in Oakland, a subject that I was preparing to try to hawk to some travel publication soon. From the little stub of article that is free to preview in the archives, it doesn't sound like there was a lot of adventure in the article but still I don't know.

What I do know is something that my travel writing teacher told me...that when a young, nubile travel writer initiate starts seeing that their ideas have already been done by others, this is a good thing for it means that they are blessedly on the right track...that they now have the nose for if not the chops for the job.

So I'm on the right track. It's all about persistence and practice now...