AlmostFearless.com

If you find yourself with an itch to travel, you might have more in common with early migrants than just wanderlust.  Stanford University geneticists have identified a gene that could explain why early man left his farming communities to explore the world, why Americans are natural capitalists and perhaps even why you can’t wait for [...]

I had this idea the other day.  What if I spent one month, really focusing on my writing?  Not just polishing prose that will never get published, but actually thinking like an editor, finding angles and pitching my ideas to a publication.  What if I spent the entire month of August, submitting a query letter [...]

I am haunted by the things I want to write.  Just as I’m about to close my eyes, it comes to me… the perfect article about Madrid or Paris or somewhere I haven’t been yet.  I always promise myself to remember it for the next day, but it never returns, these twilight inspirations.  I think [...]

While researching on writersmarket.com I ran across the listing for the perennial dog lover’s magazine from the seventies: Dog Fancy.  Curious, I clicked through to the submission guidelines, where I found this instruction: “No stories written from a dog’s point of view.” Which can only mean that they have not only received stories set inside [...]

I have a rough idea of some of the places I’d like to go, but I’m a bit torn on my next trip.  Should I go somewhere I’ve already been, like Rome?  Or should I see another big city, like Berlin?  Or should I head to beach in Croatia?  Or leave Europe altogether and check [...]

If you’re an aspiring writer or better yet, an aspiring travel writer, you might run across several opportunities to make a name for yourself by writing for free. I know many people have covered this before, but recent events have changed my mind about the entire write-for-exposure market.  If you had asked me two months [...]

1.  Turn it off 2.  Flip upside down 3.  Pull apart the keyboard and hard drive and dry off 4.  Let air dry over night 5.  Go to your happy place (mine is Belgium waffles with strawberries:  see above) Hopefully tomorrow it will at least turn on, so I can get the thousands of photos, [...]

In my last post, Finding the Words in Brussels, Geoff commented that “I find it sad that it’s quite rare that one of the many languages spoken is Dutch”, and while I won’t touch the political issues around the French and Dutch populations in Belgium (the Flemish community has quite a bite of political autonomy, [...]

When the shuttle bus stopped just 20 minutes away from downtown Brussels, there was a collective moan.  We had just flown RyanAir from Madrid with a four hour delay and this pit stop definitely couldn’t be good.  The bus driver said something in French at the front of the bus, that most of us didn’t [...]

Recently fellow blogger Nerdy Nomad, wrote about living on $5 a day in China.  I hate to break the news, but this is completely impossible in Paris.  While I spent four days in Paris, living as cheaply as possible I nearly broke 50 Euros a day.  If you consider that most travel websites feature articles [...]