Posts tagged getaways

Thank you to all who applied for our January/February round of weekend-getaway freelance writing assignments. There were so many high-quality pitches this time—more than ever before—that it was quite difficult (bordering on agonizing!) to narrow it down to just one person per region. Without further ado, here they are:

Northern California (Lake Tahoe) Brigid Fuller
Pacific Northwest (Willamette Valley) Spencer Foxworth
NYC/Boston (Vermont) Rob Liguori
South Florida (Miami) Stephanie Dunn
Southern California (Santa Barbara) Tien Nguyen

A bit about our selection process: We first do a preliminary reading of all of the submissions. At this time, we select a group for a second reading. Then we pick of favorites from among this batch and “trazzlerize” them (that is, we make them Trazzler trips or send them to get photos). These trips rise to the top of the list of submissions and the editors give them another reading (or two or three…) to narrow things down further. In the end, about 10-20% of the submissions become Trazzler trips and make it to this final round. While we aren’t able to provide a lot of feedback on individual trips (we wish we could, but we’re a small team and are perpetually swamped), we have written extensively about our editorial criteria and philosophy:

http://www.trazzler.com/about/writing-guide
http://www.trazzler.com/about/writing-nuts-and-bolts
http://blog.trazzler.com/2009/08/trazzler-nycgo-summer-contest.html

This last link, in particular, goes into a lot of detail about why most trips don’t make it to the final round. If this is the case, keep trying!—many of our freelancers and contest winners have entered multiple times before winning. We love it when a writer “gets” our (admittedly quirky) editorial style and focus—even if it takes a couple of tries.

Which brings us to this month’s assignments… We’ll be doing another huge round of 20 weekend-getaway writing adventures—we’ll announce it here and on our Facebook and Twitter accounts in the next few days, so please stay tuned…