I’ve had some secrets

It’s time to spill the beans, I think. 

I’m still at Austin’s SXSW Interactive tech conference until the end of the day today (my final posts are here and here over at Successful Blog) but there are some great things going on in my writing life that I’d like to take a quick moment to share.

First, I’m happy to announce that I’m the family travel blogger for a brand-new Disney Web site and community called Family.com.  It was a lead Yahoo! tech story yesterday in this article, so my Mouse-eared bosses told us this morning that we could tell everyone about it rather than wait until the official launch, scheduled for this Thursday, March 15th.  (Update the evening of 15 March — as with so many things technical/online, Disney is pushing back the launch until the new site is tweaked a bit more. Hang in there!)

Ignore the Yahoo! headline that says the site is just for Moms — that drives me nuts as the wife of a guy who was a full-time Dad with both of our kids.  He has just as much interest as I do in parenting issues.  Grrrr, my pet peeve.  Guys are great parents!

Anyway, my blog is called Kid Trippin’ and my username is Mother_Road (a play on Route 66, of course.) I’m populating the blog as fast as I can given all the other activity I have going on, and there may be a bit of repetition between this blog and the Family.com blog until I really get going.  My plan is to have enough differences between the two that readers will find useful info on both, or can just pick one to read regularly.

Second, I’ve long admired Tim Leffel and the great work he does with Perceptive Travel, a Web site/online magazine (whatever term you prefer) “for independent travelers with open senses and open minds.”  Tim is starting up a new blog on Perceptive Travel, and I’m proud to have been selected to write for it, along with some other wonderful talent.  Stay tuned for the URL and the launch later in March.

Finally, please look for my article about north central Florida in the print version of the March 2007 National Geographic Traveler, and another article in the March/April 2007 print version of Transitions Abroad, about taking my daughter to “Flanders Fields;” the historic World War I battlefields in Belgium, near Ypres.  Of course, don’t let me forget about the latest Carnival of Cities that I host over at Home Turf Media; it posted yesterday.

Sleep is highly overrated, they tell me.