Friends/LP editors/groupies, I’m happy to announce that I submitted the last of my Tuscany work for two different LP books (Tuscany and Umbria 5 and Italy 8, both due in stores February 2008) last Tuesday, 10 full days before deadline. Now I don’t wanna brag or anything, but WHO’S YOUR…

I’ve been back from Malta for like three days, but its really only been about 12 minutes when you take out the waking hours that I’ve been entrenched in frenzied catch-up work. Apart from one indulgent shower and a run to the market in the next village because all I…

The first thing you learn as a writer – or in my case I just figured it out about a year ago – is that you really need to have your ‘space’. The space where you go to write. It should be comfortable, virtually devoid of distractions, with all necessary…

I love breakfast in Italy for three key reasons: 1. Wicked 2. Good 3. Coffee It’s one of the simple, given pleasures of being here. You can walk into the crustiest, backwater, hilltown train station café, order an 80 cent café macchiato (‘stained coffee’, an espresso shot, with a dribble…

Last year, very soon after completing my road research in Romania and Moldova, I wrote this post literally giving away the greatest reality TV concept of all time, that being following around a Lonely Planet author. Bafflingly, no one has scooped up the idea yet, probably because it was so…

I promised you incoherent sentence fragments from the road when a free WiFi cloud and a toilet intersected, and by god I keep my promises. Though, to be honest, I wrote most of this on a bed in a two-star hotel, not the toilet, though I was tempted to stay…

Travel Writer Tip 152 – “How to eat dinner alone in a restaurant, while sitting front-and-center to an audience of 20 people standing in the rain waiting for tables and not look like a total jackhole” I got some quick on-the-job-training in this arena on my final night in Florence….

Have you ever had it where you plan your freelance travel writing career in absurd detail, spend weeks fine-tuning a masterful itinerary to hit six destinations in four countries on two continents (four of them being islands) without paying more than a grand total of 300 euros in transport, then…

So I go to London next week for yet another LP author workshop. I’ve known I was going for a few weeks, but I waited until now to make this information public, so as to not give my groupies and stalkers enough time to coordinate a Beatles-caliber reception rally at…

I know it’s considered bad form to be mentally indulging in future book proposals when I should very well be concentrating on the one that I already have in play, but I can’t help it. My mind is a relentless Perfect Storm of brilliant book ideas, wacky publicity stunts and…