Keith Bellows, Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, and Me

Word on the street (that would be 17th Street NW in Washington) is that an essay that I wrote for National Geographic Traveler MIGHT make it into the March, '08 issue. If so, it will have been almost two years since the day Editor-in-Chief Keith Bellows wrote to me and told me that they wanted to buy it--the day, in other words, on which I would have been perfectly happy to spontaneously combust and disappear in a shower of ecstatically blazing sparks, because I could ask no more of the gods. Keith was (and still is)a rock star right up there with Kurt Cobain (albeit alive and sans Courtney) in my mind; the truly odd thing is that he's also apparently a really nice guy, too. Go figure. They even PAID me to publish something that I'd written simply because I wanted to.
That kind of thing doesn't happen too often. If you're a travel writer, you know that. There are plenty of websites and magazines that will publish your most cherished, personal pieces without burdening you with the need to invoice them for the sum total of their zero-cents-a-word rate, and some even offer to relieve you of all rights to said writing (and please don't think that I've always been above allowing them to do it--well, they didn't get the rights, at least).
I figure that if opportunities to do the kind of travel writing that I really love to do and get paid for it by top-quality publications are going to be so rare that spontaneous combustion seems to be a perfectly good response when they do happen, and my only other option is to write for free, then I may as well as least hire myself as the Not-So-Nice, Zero-Cents-a-Word-Paying, Rights-Hogging Editor-in-Chief of my own blog.
So this will be my own personal travel-writing playground. Fortunately for you, I often write pretty well, and I travel a lot, and it's quite possible that you'll glean either some useful information, or pure entertainment, or both, from reading the stuff I accept from myself for publication.
As Editor, Publisher, Writer, and Photographer, I grant all rights to everything I publish here to myself. In other words, it's copyrighted. In other other words, if you publish any of it anywhere else without my express permission, I will hunt you down and kick your ass (mentally insert that image of Courtney here).