I’m in New Zealand — sort of

Through the wonders of the blogosphere, I’m featured in a post this week by New Zealand blogger Liz Lewis.

It’s part of her series of email interviews with various travel writers worldwide, and I’m honored to be included in such esteemed company (and to be featured on a Kiwi blog!) 

I’m not sure how many pearls of wisdom that I bestowed in her interview with me, but feel free to pay a visit and leave a comment. 

Liz launched herself into the blogosphere with the gutsy My Year of Getting Published, an account of her efforts to get started as a real-live freelance writer and blogger.  

How’d she do it?  Hard work, careful building of a portfolio of published clips, properly targeted queries and playing to her strengths, including her expertise on New Zealand travel.  (She’s also a nurse, and landed a paid blogging gig discussing Alzheimer’s disease.)

I learned about her “publish thyself” project through Deb Ng, who scopes out writing jobs most weekdays at Freelance Writing Jobs, and gives good blogger tips at About.com’s About Weblogs.  Thanks for the intro, Deb.

Liz and I keep “running into each other” in the comments section of various travel blogs, especially the Perrin Post — I don’t know how you can manage to wave to another person in print, but somehow we do!

The blogosphere is like this very cool social gathering where you circulate and run into the neatest people….OK, so you do have the obnoxious drunks at the party sometimes; the ones whose writing makes you feel as though someone just grabbed your butt and needs a good smack upside the head.  

Overall, however, I love that I’m featured on a New Zealand blog, that the post includes a link to a Houston tech blogger who’s helped me a lot, he sees the link and sends me an email to say thanks, plus tells me that he put up a blurb about it on Twitter, which I learned about at SXSWi, which I wrote about for a wonderful blogger in Chicago, who I’m going to actually see in person next month, along with having dinner with another travel writer that I met online, where I also ran into Liz Lewis.

Technorati tags:  travel, family travel, blogging, travel writing, New Zealand