In no particular order:

1. Greg the comics guy. Greg worked at the comics shop I went to every week when I was living in St. Charles, MO. Not only did we have similar tastes in comics, we also both were planning and saving up to move to "the big city" -- me to SF, him to NYC. We also both moved at about the same time. I think I gave him my e-mail, but I don't remember. I would love to hear from him and swap stories about "making it."

2. Andrew Chastain Lee. Andrew was a very good friend to me while I was studying for my Master's degree. Unfortunately, I lost his phone number after I graduated and moved back to StL. Last I heard, he was planning to go to school in Linn, MO, but the local college Web site doesn't have a People Finder like I'm used to.

3. Aaron Dickerson. Aaron was a cool guy who I was in theater with, and that I saw once a year after high school at a local convention. But suddenly, he stopped coming to that convention, and all our mutual friends had no idea what happened to him. Years later, I met a few new friends who also had known him, and we attended a regular club night together. One night, I left early because I wasn't feeling well. The next day, my friends called to let me know, guess who showed up after I left? Yeah, Aaron. He only showed up that one time and never came back, that I or my friends know of.

4. Bridget Tate. Bridget was my best friend during my freshman and sophomore years of high school, when suddenly her mom up and moved the entire family to Texas. I may have had contact info for her at one time, I don't recall. The really sad thing is, my family got a computer just one year later, and I took to e-mail like a duck to water.

I really hope all of these people are doing well, and I'd love to hear back from them. Post here, or e-mail me, please!

Travel writing is a really tough area to break into. And the professional organizations all require that you are already a travel writer before you can join, and get help and support with travel writing. Nice paradox there.

So for writers like me, who are just starting out, I formed the Travel Writers Livejournal community (travel_writers), so we could all talk and post links to travel writing jobs.

I started the personal journal clmoriarity mainly so I could run the community. I slapped up an intro post, and called it good, and planned to put my energy into travel_writers. And I added some other travel and writing related Livejournal communities to clmoriarity's Friends List because I thought they would be good resources.

Anyone who has an LJ can skip this paragraph. The way a Friends List works, is that you "friend" all the personal Livejournals and LJ communities that you want to read. When you click on your Friends List, it leads to your Friends page, which has all the posts that were made on those individual LJs you friended on a single webpage, listed in chronological order. A Friends Page also has it's own design layout, so a post you read on your Friends Page will look like all the other posts on your Friends Page, and different from how it looks on the journal of the original poster.

Anyone who has RSS feeds on their LJ can skip this paragraph. On LJ, you can get RSS feeds of non-LJ blogs and add them to your Friends List and thus your Friends Page, so again, you only have to go to your Friends Page to read everything you want.

One of the RSS feeds I added to my Friends List was fl_writingjobs, the syndicated feed of the very popular blog Freelance Writing Jobs by Deb Ng. I found her compilations of freelance writing job links, and her blog entries, to be interesting and informative.

Meanwhile, I started working on travel_writers. I was scouring all the sites I knew, like Craigslist and MediaBistro, for travel writing jobs. I would find at least a few links and post a couple times a week. And yes, a few of those links, I did find through Ng's blog. But I also found them through Google searches, Craigslist keyword searches, going to travel guidebooks websites and reading their guidelines, and drew off my own experience as a freelance writer.

I wanted to drum up more readers and interest fortravel_writers, so when Ng posted on her blog that she was doing Pay It Forward Tuesdays, I sent her the link to travel_writers in the hopes that she would plug it on her website.

Well, she certainly did mention me: This Is So Not Cool

At first, when I read this, I panicked, because I thought she was upset over me posting the two or three links I found through her blog, and I sent her a frantic e-mail apology.

Then I read over what she'd written more carefully. She accuses me of cutting and pasting her entire posts, including the ads. That is when I realized that she'd mistaken my Friends List for my actual blog. I sent her another e-mail explaining that.

Admittedly, my Friends Page and my Livejournal have the same layout. It's because I left the Livejournal default layouts in place when I started clmoriarity.

However, I was really gratified to see the people sticking up for me in the Comments over on Ng's actual blog. It seems that most everyone who commented realized what had happened.

Deb Ng's post went up at 9:09 p.m., or 6:09 p.m. where I am. As of 11 p.m. PDT on Tuesday, I haven't received a response from Deb Ng to either of my e-mails. Nor has she replied to the comments posted on her blog.

It hurt and upset me when I read Ms. Ng's post accusing me of plagiarism. She says that she tried to e-mail me, and the e-mail bounced. I understand that Ms. Ng was probably very upset when she believed she was being plagiarized, but I wish she had tried to e-mail me again before making that post. Deb Ng is a very popular blogger with a lot of readers, and I have a grand total of 12 members of travel_writers. I had hoped to build it up into something much larger, but who knows if that will happen now.

I hope that Deb Ng will contact me, but until then, I'm posting this so that people can read my perspective.

Best,

Caitlin Moriarity

Cross-posted to my personal LJ and travel_writers

Hi, I'm a young writer and editor working in San Francisco who's struggling to break both into full-time freelancing and travel writing.

I started travel_writers for just that reason, as a community for people just starting out in travel writing so we can exchange tips, network and basically support each other.

For more info about me, check out my online portfolio Trope of Irony