Letter from the Editor

It’s not cold out — yet —  but there’s an awful lot of rain falling from the sky. The seasons are shifting in Seattle, and when this happens, it’s a good time to turn to money earning pursuits, the making of soup, and other activities that take advantage of indoor time. As I’ve migrated to writing more travel essays, it’s become increasingly rare that I peel back the curtain and let you take a peek at the machinery, but there’s lots happening that I’d like to tell you about, and some of it you might find you want to participate in.

• The crew behind Passports with Purpose, the travelbloggers fundraiser, has been hard at work. We’re super excited by this year’s sponsors. At the top of the lists, there’s BootsnAll, our Portland based friends who totally get the whole “travel plus community equals awesome” equation. We’re grateful to Sean Keener for coming to speak at the last Seattle Consortium of Online Travel gathering, and more grateful for his support for this year’s initiative. Wondering what that is? Well, we’re building a village. No, really, you should check out the Passports site for details. In addition to the BootsnAll crew, we’re supported by Live Mocha, an online language learning community, HomeAway, my favorite “book your vacation rental” service, and Traveller’s Point, a great place to share your experiences online. Oh, yeah, and as of today, over 80 bloggers have signed up to participate in our efforts. So we’re supported by you, too, and thank you for that.
• AvidBlog launched with some beautiful stories and photographs by a handful of great contributors. I’m proud of sourcing the work that went up in those first few updates, but the current editorial model “isn’t sustainable”. You’ve heard that message before and it’s the struggle with so many travel story sites. There’s some restructuring happening, but I remain optimistic.  I don’t know when the next update will be published, but I hope you’ll take a peek at what’s there now, the gorgeous photographs, the evocative posts, and oh, yeah, the hot Venezuelans. Whew.
• I have a new venture with two great co-conspirators! Together with Peter Carey and Debbie Dubrow, we’ve created Travelblog School, a weekend of focused, hands on workshops that are designed to shine up your blog, big time, with better writing, photography, and marketing. We’ll work on the craft behind making a blog that people love to read, on getting out of the classic “journal of my trip” trap that so many bloggers get stuck in, on taking great pictures, and on finding your audience. We’re excited to be hosted by the very blogger friendly Maxwell Hotel in Queen Anne. We won’t be holed up in a conference room all weekend — Seattle Food Tours will be our hosts for a guided tour of Pike Place Market, giving us great fodder for blogging. Come spend a weekend with us in Seattle, go home a better blogger. And hey, if someone has been pestering you to teach them how to blog, you’d be doing us a favor by sending them our way.
• On the travel/writing side, I had a story published in the October issue of Perceptive Travel, and National Geographic Intelligent Traveler ran this photo essay from my recent trip to Alaska. I’m still dizzy from the wonder of that trip and later this month, I’ll be a guest at the Alaska Travel Media Roadshow. I want very much to go back to Alaska in winter — while I know it would be bitter cold, I also think there must be nothing like it and I’m very curious about the experience. I recently received the best rejection letter ever from Afar — “Nerd’s Eye View! We love your blog!” — and was not disheartened in the least by it; I promptly sent the same pitch elsewhere and I continue to wait, wait, wait for a response. I’m currently working on a trip to Maui that will give me much needed fodder for my Hawaii blog, Holoholo Wale. The trip will coincide with our anniversary — we were married south of Kihei at Poolenalena Beach Park ten (!!!) years ago. Finally, we are trying to plan a trip back to Austria to visit the in-laws next spring or summer. That’s a ways out, but still requires complex planning and budgeting.
• On the “day job” front, I’ve been quite busy — I contributed some copy for a beauty product (not my market, this was very hard), a nuclear research facility (turns out I like the science-y gigs), and am currently tied up not quite full time as the content strategist/copy writer on a biotech site. I’m happy to have the work as my health insurance payments decided to get closer to 400 dollars a month than they were far away from 400 dollars a month, a topic that isn’t really necessary for me to elaborate on besides saying, “So, um, Congress, what’s up?” West Seattle Tech Support Guy continues to get good word of mouth business, and on this front, your word of mouth would be appreciated.

If things seem a little slow here online at Nerd’s Eye View lately, all this should explain why. In between making a living, trying to do good, launching new ventures, and pursuing some off the blog writing opportunities, there’s not a lot of time for much else. But we are well, thriving, even, and yes, of course I’m still playing the ukulele. And I think that’s as good a place to leave this as any — with something silly, featuring things I love: ukulele and claymation. Enjoy, be happy, and don’t tell a narwhal who to love.