05.14.10
Posted in Arts & Culture, Media & Internet, Travel, Writing at 9.35 pm by Caitlin
We have been back in San Francisco for a week. My husband has started his new job and is liking it so far, apart from the mammoth commute. I’m discussing an interesting work opportunity myself, but it’s early days.
I’ve also started an advanced fiction writing workshop with Linda Watanabe McFerrin, who I first met at the Book Passage Travel Writing & Photography Conference last August. That’s once a week until the end of June with one-to-one work outside the group meetings as well. I’ve been trying to write a novel for some time and I’m hoping this could get me on track.
Meanwhile, I’m expecting to go to New York at the end of June for TBEX10, the Travel Blog Exchange conference. I’ve raised money through a site called Kickstarter, which is about funding creative projects by raising money from the public. A few face-to-face friends have contributed but mostly it’s been online friends – readers of my food and travel blog Roaming Tales and Twitter followers. I still need to book my airline ticket and arrange a hotel but I’m excited by the trip – it’ll let me meet a lot of fellow bloggers face to face, plus I’ll get to see friends in New York and hang out in the city for a few days.
I’ve updated my travel blog quite a bit lately, so please do check it out or become a fan on Facebook. This week’s posts have mostly been about Hearst Castle on the California Coast.
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01.10.09
Posted in Career, Film, Life, London, Media & Internet, Travel, Writing at 3.13 pm by Caitlin
A snapshot of my life in January 2009.
- It’s really cold here in London right now – we’re apparently getting winds from the Arctic rather than the Gulf Stream. There’s often a dusting of snow on the trees and grass in the mornings, plus we’re getting heavy frosts. Apparently it got down to -12C this week. Today we’re expecting a maximum day temperature of zero celcius (32F) so it’s literally freezing. It’s meant to warm up a little next week though.
- Freelance work has slowed right down in the past few months so I’m pitching furiously trying to drum up more work. I’m certainly open to any ideas or offers so please keep me in mind if you know anyone who needs writing or editing work done. I’m still doing regular posts for EcoSalon, which I’m really enjoying. I also had a piece on music copyright published recently in The Observer – it was lead media feature in the Media & Business section – and a piece on podcast fiction in The Bookseller.
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The countdown to the wedding is on in earnest – the date is 4 April so it’s less than three months to the day. Yikes! We’ve booked the venues and the caterer and I’ve bought the dress. The dress fits now but I’m focusing really hard on healthy eating and exercise in the hope of shedding a few kilos and toning up so hopefully a few adjustments will be in order closer to the day. We’re hoping to get invitations out really soon.
- On that note, we are still madly researching honeymoon destinations. We want to stay close to Australia to cut down on flights because my cousin Rhia’s wedding is 15 days after ours in Queensland. We were looking at New Zealand at one point until we decided we wanted a tropical island. The problem is that April is the tail end of the rainy season in places like the Great Barrier Reef, Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Fiji. We’re not really sure what that actually means – days of torrential rain and cyclones or just semi-regular showers to cool down an otherwise hot and sunny day?
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We went to see Changeling last weekend and I was really impressed. We had resisted seeing it to a large extent because it looked suspiciously like an Angelina Jolie Oscar vehicle. I guess it is to an extent but it’s also a really good movie. I’m a fan of Clint Eastwood as a director and he does a really good job with this movie. It’s tightly plotted, emotional but not contrived, and it’s a real testament to his directing talent that there are so many strong performances particularly from the child actors. It’s based on a true story and was quite a pivotal point in the development and reform of the Los Angeles police force so that was interesting too. Plus, there are some fab hats – not only the Jolie character’s 1920s cloches and 1930s wide-brimmed hats but also for the men and the journalists (can I have a hat with a ticket that says ‘press’ for the next press event I attend, please?).
- My blogs are in the running for a couple of awards and I would really love your help. Please consider nominating my travel site Roaming Tales for Best Travel Weblog in the 2009 Bloggies and the travelogue category of the Lonely Planet Travel Blogger Awards. Please also consider nominating The Gooseberry Fool for Best Food Weblog in the Bloggies. I would also be delighted if you would nominate either or both blogs for Best European Weblog or Best-Kept Secret Weblog or any other category that you think is appropriate. I think my chances are best with Roaming Tales so if you want to focus your fire on just one blog, that’s the one I would ask you to go for. It would mean a lot to me to have your support and if I have any degree of success, it could really boost my readership and help pay off my blogging efforts.
I haven’t actually nominated myself so I’m relying on friends, family and readers to do it for me – and apparently the more times I am nominated, the higher my chance of making the finals (it’s not based exclusively on votes – there is a panel of voters as well). The Bloggies have been running nine years and they’re quite well respected and prestigious but this is the first time they’ve had a travel category, so that’s quite exciting.
Please note, you can nominate as many times as you like in the Lonely Planet awards and you have until early February. However, you can only nominate once for the Bloggies and you only have until the end of Monday 12 January. Also with the Bloggies, you need to put at least three blogs in total forward so you can’t just nominate me.
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12.06.08
Posted in Arts & Culture, Books, Career, Life, Media & Internet, Theatre, Writing at 10.47 pm by Caitlin
Gentle readers, I need your advice.
The biggest lesson I need to learn in life is that I can do anything I want but I can’t necessarily do everything I want. I have to choose and focus. That’s hard.
Actually, maybe I can do everything I want – just not all at once. Rose Kennedy apparently once said: “You can have it all, my dear, but you can not have it all at once. Life is a journey with many different adventures and each part of it is special. Sometimes you will have to focus on the task at hand.”
It still comes down to the same thing. I need to choose what to focus on right now.
I am doing a lot of things in my life, all of which I enjoy. Yet there is an opportunity cost with anything I choose to do and right now I don’t feel that I’m concentrating on the really important things.
Here are some of the things I’m doing right now:
- Working as a freelance journalist – balancing making a living, pitching for new and interesting work and trying to figure out how my strategy to survive and thrive in a changing industry.
- General life stuff, including trying to keep fit and healthy.
- Organising our wedding in April next year.
Once of my most important goals is to finish writing my novel. To be honest, I’m not really making great progress on this goal.
I’m wondering if there is anything I should give up in order to make the time for this. I’m loath to give up the theatre given that I really love doing it and also aspire to write plays in the future – though maybe trying to do the novel writing and acting at the same time is too much. The British Museum doesn’t take up much of my time and I’ve already cut back so I’m comfortable with that. I obviously can’t give up life, or wedding organisation, or work, even if I wanted to.
The area where I feel I can cut back is social media. As I mentioned, I have three main blogs, plus also the occasional dated update on my professional site or True Wild Catches and Century of Books. All of this takes time and it’s not just a matter of writing my own posts and forgetting about them – the fun comes in being part of a blogging community, interacting with other bloggers, micro-blogging on Twitter (where I am undoubtedly spending too much time), using tools like StumbleUpon and Digg.
All this stuff is a lot of fun but it takes up a lot of time. I find it very hard to do social media in moderation – it’s the kind of thing where you have to jump in feet first, and as my frequent Twitter updates show, it’s very addictive! And really, with my industry (media) changing so quickly and so profoundly, it’s essential that I keep abreast of it. If anything, I should be doing more, not less – it would be valuable for me to try podcasting and online video production, for example.
The problem with blogging, as novelist A.L. Kennedy points out, is that there’s no definable end. You can never say a blog is done and there’s always more you can do for it, whether in writing, site design or promotion. I’m beginning to feel that part of the answer for me might be to reduce my blogs. It’s very hard to put a blog to death though so the question would be how – should I consolidate everything under my real name or on this blog? Or should I merge my food and travel blogs in some way? Or just stop writing one of them?
The other thing I really like the idea of is the Secular Sabbath – one day a week where you don’t use the computer or a mobile phone. I find this really appealing – I love the internet but the truth is, my brain is sometimes filled with digital detritus. I don’t know if there’s been any research but I do wonder whether too much time online is just as stifling to creativity and deadening as watching too much television.
Does anyone have any suggestions for how to best use my time? If you agree with my diagnosis, how should I rationalise my blogs?
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11.30.08
Posted in Family & Friends, Food, London, Media & Internet, Writing at 8.00 am by Caitlin
Today is the last day of NaBloPoMo – I’ve managed to blog every single day in November. It’s certainly not been as hard as NaNoWriMo last year!
Have you enjoyed the extra blogging? I can’t promise to keep it up at this rate but it’s been fun and has helped me recover my blogging mojo, so hopefully I’ll be around a bit more.
I have friends coming to lunch today and house guests arriving tonight. I’ll keep this brief as I need to get the lamb in the oven – not the Jamie Oliver version this time since it’s quite boozy and our friends are bringing their kids.
I have two other blog posts today as well:
- A post on unusual vegetables featuring pics of Romanesco cauliflour on The Gooseberry Fool.
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11.14.08
Posted in Career, Environment, Media & Internet, Writing at 6.24 pm by Caitlin
As a freelance writer I’m very interested in new media since I believe it will be a big part of my future. It’s not just a case of print publications moving online, it’s also a case of the internet throwing up new types of businesses. Educating myself about this is a large part of the reason why I blog – here and also at Roaming Tales and The Gooseberry Fool – and use social media tools such as Twitter.
I have some exciting news to share – I’m joining EcoSalon as a regular contributor. I’ve been asked to write two posts a week, one on green travel and one on green tech and lifestyle.
My first post is on eco-holidays in Cornwall, looking at walking, food, art and destinations such as the Eden Project. Cornwall is one of my favourite parts of Britain and, as I hope my photos show, an extremely beautiful part of the country. The post was published today and I’m delighted that it’s currently featured as the EcoSalon Daily Favourite right at the top of the site. Please take a look and let me know what you think. Leave a comment either here or on EcoSalon and if you like it, please feel free to share the link with your friends.
The theme of EcoSalon is about going green without sacrificing style and this is something that really strikes a chord with me. Readers who are familiar with this blog and my food blog The Gooseberry Fool might know that I am a passionate environmentalist. However, I also believe that people need inspiration and a reason for hope. We shouldn’t hide from the immensity of the challenge – but if we focus on doom and gloom, we risk generating despair rather than the committed and focused action the planet needs. Despair is just as destructive to the environment as denial.
I’m pleased to be blogging for EcoSalon because the blog is committed to the environment but with an aim to empower and inspire people rather than hector or scare them. There’s enough troubling environmental news out there – the question is what we can do about it.
I fully intend to keep my own sites and my blogging duties at EcoSalon are as well as, not instead of, what I already do. It’s a paid gig so this properly falls into my day job as a freelance writer and is probably a sign of things to come in my profession.
I’ve posted about this over at Roaming Tales as well. It’s been a busy day on the travel blog as I’ve welcomed a bunch of chatty, new readers from the Travel Blog Camp and also published my latest Photo Friday contribution.
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08.18.08
Posted in Career, Society & Politics, Travel, Writing at 10.28 pm by Caitlin
The reason I went to Syria in July was to write an article about Iraqis crossing the border to have weddings in Syria, due to the unstable situation at home.
I was invited to the wedding of Sami and Hind (pictured) through a personal connection and I ended up staying with Hind’s family in an apartment in an Iraqi part of Damascus. It was quite an intense cultural experience!
They were happy for me to tell their story and the article was published in the Guardian last week. I had a three-page spread in G2 (the features lift-out).
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05.14.08
Posted in Career, Media & Internet, Writing at 9.47 am by Caitlin
There’s a fascinating article in Granta about the web habits of highly effective people. Being a literary tome, these people are all journalists, writers and bloggers, which suits me fine.
Novelist A.L. Kennedy says: “I don’t blog or Facebook. If I want to write, I’d rather do it to some kind of definable end.”
Wise words, no doubt. I’m sure there are definable ends within blogging and social networking but I somehow I don’t think pirate games on Facebook and blogging about South Park count.
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04.20.08
Posted in Family & Friends, Food, Travel, Writing at 9.07 pm by Caitlin
After my lovely food writing course at the Arvon Foundation last year, I really wanted to do one of their fiction courses.
One of my big goals this year is to edit my NaNoWriMo novel, which as you’ll recall, I wrote in 30 days. It’s been languishing in a drawer (or rather, elsewhere on my hard drive) ever since but as I was booked on an Arvon course in April, I knew that I would come back to it.
The week has been absolutely brilliant. Both the tutors (Alex Wheatle and Tiffany Murray) were great and there were some really talented fellow students on the course – I’m looking forward to reading 15 debut novels in the next few years! There was no internet and no mobile phone reception, which was great because the escape from work and blogs and friends and family really stripped away all the reasons not to write, while the beautiful surroundings and creative company inspired me to write. I feel really energised and inspired by my novel again and I have a bit of faith in the writing as well.
Arvon has several centres around England and Scotland but I returned to Totleigh Barton in Devon where the food writing course was also held. We stayed in a pre-Domesday farm house with a thatched roof deep in the countryside, near a village called Sheepwash. The site has been under continuous occupation since 1086 but probably several hundred years before that and the present building was built in the 16th century. It’s very quaint and full of random steps and low beams and secret passageways.
The countryside is very picturesque. It’s England as you’ve always imagined it – rolling green hills and cows and hedgerows. It’s a bit less cultivated and far less touristy than the Cotswolds. All the spring flowers are out and the shiny copper-backed pheasants are getting fat. I was told there were otters in the river and went down early to visit them. They weren’t at home but it was worthwhile because I saw a beautiful misty sunrise over frosty fields. We had four days of brilliant sunshine and the weather turned on the last day.
On Saturday, I met up with my friends Katrina and Dylan, who are temporarily living and working in Exeter. Unfortunately it was raining but we had a fun time driving around the local area, down to Dawlish and up to Dartmoor, and stopping for a cream tea along the way.
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12.10.07
Posted in Family & Friends, Media & Internet, Writing at 12.51 pm by Caitlin
NaNoWriMo taught me a huge amount about the writing process and illuminated my own particular writing strengths and weaknesses.
If you are interested, I have written a series of guest posts for Natasha’s writing website web stuff 4 writers. Check it out!
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12.02.07
Posted in Media & Internet, Travel, Writing at 1.53 pm by Caitlin
My new travel website is now live at www.roamingtales.com. There is a blog, which I will update about once a week, and a link to an articles page, where you can read all my published travel writing. Please take a look and let me know what you think!
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