I recently received word that the slots in my Creative Writing Workshop this July at the Paris American Academy are about half full. The application deadline is April 30th (or when all slots have been filled), and you can request an application by sending a query to: info@pariswritingworkshop.com

Since six hours of academic credit will be available, I’m hoping to promote the Paris course at individual colleges and universities in addition to the online realm. If you attend or work at (or have access to) a college or university, please send me an email, and I’ll send you a printable Paris Workshop flyer to post or distribute at your school.

Or, to make things even easier, you can download a printable Paris Workshop flyer by clicking here.

Today I’ll give a sneak preview of my April interview with Canada’s National Post travel columnist, Cleo Paskal.

As a writer, Cleo has contributed to everyone from The Economist to the (better paying) Weekly World News. Along the way she has hosted BBC radio travel shows, appeared in several anthologies, wrote an Emmy-winning TV series, taught at universities in the U.K., Canada and New Zealand, and won ten major travel writing awards (including the Grand Prize from the North American Travel Journalist’s Association). She claims that the secret to her success is that her TV is broken and she is allergic to alcohol.

“There are a lot of different ways to be a travel writer,” she tells me. “You can make a great living churning out front-of-the-book and back-of-the-book hotel reviews. Don’t scorn. After researching the latest ‘It’ place, those people are then free to wander off on private adventures. And they’ve actually provided a useful service to the readers (assuming they aren’t puff pieces). Or, you can live out of a fanny pack and try to get into Granta. Another perfectly fine model.

“Obviously, good advice for one would be snake venom for the other. Regardless, here is a random list:

• Register your own domain name, and to set up a website. Great democratizers, websites.
• Treat it like a business. There are start-up costs (which could mean eating Kraft Dinner for a few months while you intern and make contacts). Make rough short, medium and long-term plans (is your goal Conde Nast Traveler or Granta?). Reread those plans regularly to see if they still make sense.
• Know that a lot of time is spent neither traveling nor writing (planning trips, tracking down sources, fact checking, etc.).
• Meet deadlines.
• Spell check.
• Don’t call the editors a million times to see what they thought of your work of genius.
• Don’t take rejection personally – rejections often have nothing to do with the writer or story idea. It could be that the editor just ran something similar, that they are over-stocked, that they are having a bad hair day.
• Find a comfortable niche. It is a huge industry. Figure out what you like then become an expert in it (I have dibs on the world’s smallest countries).
• Set realistic goals. If you send one cold pitch a week, you’re doing ok. Find another writer and set up regular pitch sessions in which you go over magazines, brainstorm ideas and then actually send them in.
• Join relevant writers groups. At least at first. It will give you and idea of the parameters of the industry. Whether you choose to respect those parameters is another thing…
• Short sentences speed up the pace.
• Try to remember that you are always telling a story.

Cleo’s full interview can be found here.

Though it’s been several months since the tsunami hit Asia, the recovery continues. Here is a recent travel report from vagabonder Wendy Wrangham, who is visiting Sri Lanka:

I drove down to Galle from Colombo yesterday morning, and the wave seems so unbelievably arbitrary in who/what it hit. Next door to each other are the foundations of a house (all that remains) and next door, a house still fully standing. Boats still lie broken on the side of the road, the train carriages are being kept by the track as some sort of macabre memorial, and today is the three-month anniversary. Yesterday was Puya, the full moon holiday (it was Puya when the wave hit on Dec 26th too) so all is very subdued here at the moment and there is no relief work (that I can help with) going on today. So, I have two days off before going into Project Galle which is located inside Galle Fort.

There are press and aid workers everywhere, UNICEF and Red Cross have the most amazing buildings in town as HQ buildings. There are also individuals here helping — who people say get more done, as their hands (read: money) aren’t tied by bureaucracy. I met one who I hope to help out with some press release/PR bits to promote tourism and get people back down here. The beach I’m staying at, Unawatuna (very lyrical name) is about 4km from Galle, and there are guesthouses, restaurants and even nightclubs (The Pink Elephant) open. The beach is incredible, and there is no one on it.

Lonely Planet Travel Writing author Don George was intereviewed by World Hum this week. Here’s my favorite outtake:

“When I first realized that I could make a living as a travel writer, one of the things that most appealed to me was that travel writers are in a way the last great generalists. You can write about travel and almost anything that you