Sarah J C Gillespie

@sjcgillespie.bsky.social

Scottish-Filipina travel writer 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇵🇭 Words in Nat Geo Traveller, The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian and more. Glasgow-based. sarahjcgillespie.com

Editors: would it annoy you if a writer (me) put multiple pitches for the same country in one email? Obviously you could only take one, but I feel it would be so much better for me and the host country if I could get multiple stories assigned straight away for one destination

The ideal AI endgame (for me) would be that it writes all my emails, and everyone else's emails, so eventually everyone has these personal assistant robots that talk to each other and no one has to deal with email ever again. One can dream...

I feel for the PRs whose press releases end up "below the fold" (the "[Message clipped]" banner) in news roundups. That's the equivalent of me getting an OOO at the beginning of an editor's annual leave – that pitch is DOA 😐

Going to have to be stricter in working only with travel companies/tourism boards where everything is comped from the off. Getting into drawn-out conversations about flight support and a hundred other particulars is devastating for freelance income (I don't get paid for emails)

OK I feel like I've asked loads of people and read blogs and seen a lot of different opinions so... Simultaneous pitching. To declare or not to declare? I've read that it's polite to, but I've also read a lot of "it's none of their business" or "they know you're doing it anyway"

When I was new to this industry, I followed a lot of bad advice from "expert" writing bloggers with no more clue than I. Such as: "You should send five pitches per day (in addition to, y'know, your actual paid work)." Five?! That's completely insane