The Renegade Writer Blog

Whenever I get together with my one of my local writing buddies (and friend!), our meeting generates a bazillion ideas for this blog. We should meet up more often, D!
We were chatting about an online board we both belong to and wondering what possesses people to share so much with strangers. I’m not talking about […]

I’m not a travel writer by any stretch of the imagination, although I have written travel articles. However, I do regularly fantasize about all-expenses-paid trips to places like Dubai and Estonia … hey, I’m just not a Paris kind of girl. This post by travel writer Lara Dunston screwed my head on straight. No way […]

I’m sure a lot of you have seen or heard about a new trend in magazines, asking readers, i.e. nonprofessional writers, to provide all the stories in an issue.
I think we’d better get used to this, since my prediction is this isn’t just going to be a one-off experiment. People are really becoming comfortable with […]

This Monday I turned some assigned recipes to one of my editors. For some reason she couldn’t open up the file, so she asked me to send it again with the copy pasted into the body of my e-mail, which I did with a note asking her to confirm receipt. Later I sent her the […]

In my last episode here on RW blog, I encouraged you to think about your vacation plans, and how you might use them as story fodder. I just noticed that there were a couple of comments on that post that I didn’t see, and I didn’t want to let them evaporate into the void!
So, Tiffany […]

This morning one of my editors let me know that a project I had pitched them had been reshaped and she invited me to work on part of it. Suffice it to say that the part she offered was the least compelling part of the project, the recipe development. I was also annoyed because she’d […]

My blog post from last June about the hoopla surrounding the self-help movie/book and ensuing media phenomenon, The Secret, generated some commentary here. While I do believe in the Law of Attraction, I was critical of the film I’d seen, which actually dared to suggest that people became seriously ill or encountered misfortune because they […]

Recently one of my editors assigned me two features based on pitches I’d sent to her over the last year. She asked me to get back to her with some recipe ideas to go along with them by the end of the week. I looked the pitches over; one of them was very familiar to […]

This week, I’m starting work on a travel story that you might call “vintage”, and no, it has nothing to do with wine!
It was almost exactly two years ago that I paid a visit to Cajun Country, in Lafayette, Louisiana. I took a tour of the small town of St. Martinville, and became intrigued with […]

I’ve been pulling together my travel writing workshop, and happened to be preparing my materials on ethics, when a lovely little travel writing ethics scandal conveniently popped up in the news.
You’ve probably already heard about the fracas surrounding the new tell-all travel writing book, Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? A Swashbuckling Tale of High […]