How to write for a travel outlet publication? I’m still trying to find out for the past 15 years.
During Tourism and hospitality college, I spent countless hours at the library reading Travel Magazines. At that point, while living in Brazil, my dream and life goals were to travel and write to one of those magazines. Not to be stuck in a hotel for the next 15 years, at the front desk, dealing with people traveling all over the world. I should be the one traveling!
I was never meant to get roots behind the desk.
My favorite magazine at that time was Lonely Planet. It contained the travel guides, which I pretty much became obsessed with and promised myself, someday I would be one of those cool travel writers. I would write the article, take amazing photographs and leave like a Nomad. I just found out they have nomad visas now, since some people are working remotely full time!
At that time, I was also checking the possibility of being a photographer for the National Geo magazine. Little silly 20 years old me with big dreams, living in Brazil. That was way before we have internet access and all this cool things that the technology gave us.
One day I stared a blog to talk about my internship programs abroad, which I carefully and ruthlessly named “Where the hell is Joana?”
“Where the hell is Joana?”
The blog “Where The hell is Joana?” was to write about my experiences abroad, during the 3 months I was out of my country, for the first time ever, while living in North Carolina. My first mistake was: I decided to write in Portuguese, because my vocabulary at that time was rough and kept to a bare minimum.
When I wrote my first post and send it to my mom, she didn’t like it. She wrote me on msn messenger (yes, that long ago) and told me to not expose her or my dad. Nobody needed to know our personal life. I didn’t mean in any way to expose them, its not like they were celebrity rock starts and I was about to drop a major gossip on them.
I just wanted to write!
I would move on to my own adventures in short time. I just get drowned. I tried others posts, but my writing was confusing and random, as I focused more on the plugins and photos than my pieces I was writing itself. I tried again and reactivate the blog during the other internships, until I quit BlogSpot all together in 2009.
No shame on that. Years and years later, the writing got better. After all, this is my second language, I was born and raised and for my entirely life, Portuguese is my first language.
Life has a funny way to go around.
First I had to learn how to write fictional pieces, learn how to put a storyline, characters arc and development in perspective, until I could actually write non fiction with more confidence.
Again, I always wanted to write travel magazine articles, but for that I needed to learn how to tell a story. I still don’t have a magazine writing job, but I’m thankful we have blogs now. I’m also thankful for being able to document my travels on Youtube. It’s all taking place now.
Blogs and Youtube videos run on the same expectation of being heard and seen, but due to people’s lack of attention, my Youtube travel content is going much better than the blog has ever been. I’ve been learning a lot, especially about SEO and algorithm, so I will write a post about it, probably in the next week.
TRVLS & Comida – Youtube Channel
It’s all in the air now.
Maybe I had to go around for a few years or many years before I was able to pursue my long life dream of telling stories while traveling. Maybe some day I will get financed to write my web series, If I ever sit down to write it.
It’s all in the air now. Things actually work, you just have to be patient. And no, you are never too old to pursue your dream. Yes, I get that we can’t just drop everything and focus only on what we’d like doing it. We have bills to pay. (most of us has anyway. Trust fund kids, no)
Hang in there. It will get better.
See you next week!
JS
XXX
