With A Touch of Drama, We Have Our $125 TSM Winner

November 25, 2007

The $125 Fall Writing Contest is now complete, and as with every first time venture (especially where technology is involved), we have experienced our challenging glitches.

I recently received an e-mail describing a sudden and drastic change in many of the ratings for the competition stories. I had noticed this myself, and when I looked into the logs I had to smile in amazement.

The vigorous suspect voting was between two factions who had voted all other stories down (many many times) thus pushing their story to the very top of the leaderboard.

The flood of single star votes have been removed and the scoring has been recalculated to include only the legitimate votes and yes I am proud to say we now see a truly excellent story as our winner.

Before I announce the winner I must thank the writing sponsor OTBeach.com (bargain travel specialists) as they believed in our project and provided the financial incentive to motivate all our haggard travelers to tell their tales.

Without undue pomp and ceremony, the official winner of the $125 Fall Traveling Stories Competition is……

Rowena M Love with her humorous, and captivating story

Have Lie Will Travel

Take a peak at her story and I’m sure you’ll laugh out loud at her episodes of traveling in India. Having been to India myself I can personally relate to these quirky situations which seem absolutely absurd within the normal context of the West.

Rowena will be awarded the $125 writing competition prize as well as a featured link to her website http://www.rowenamlove.co.uk/.

What’s next for TSM? In little over 3 months we are fortunate to have had over 45,000 page views and are now averaging between 200-300 visitor per day! In many ways that is a shockingly impressive start.

Our next plan is to once again re-design the site to order to make things visually cleaner and then begin another writing competition of which we already have several stories waiting to be published!

I very much value your feedback so if you have any thoughts as to the future direction of the site drop me an e-mail at tsmeditor@gmail.com .

I would also like to offer an open call to all travel writers who would like to submit traveling oriented articles during the break before the next competition. We currently have an intriguing adventure unfolding before us with Braunsteins’ weekly column Stories From A Sengalese Classroom.

If you would like to contribute your writing either in your own column or in individual articles drop me a line at tsmeditor@gmail.com .

Congratulations Rowena and to everyone else…

Happy Travels,

Michael