AvantGuild Member of the Week: China Williams
Age: 32
Location: San Francisco, CA
What is your specialty or focus?
Travel and culture writing
What’s the latest thing you’ve worked on?
I leave for a monthlong stint in Bangkok to update Lonely Planet’s Bangkok city guide.
What has been your most difficult assignment and how did you deal with its challenges?
Updating the Thailand country chapter for Lonely Planet’s Southeast Asia on a Shoestring was a tough assignment. I had seven weeks to cover the whole country, which meant that I could spend only a few hours in a town and then hop a bus to get to the next town. Rarely did I wake up in the same city twice. And I forgot what a Western “throne” looked like. But re-visiting the town where I had taught English years ago was an enormous reward. I got all teary when I went to the foreign language department and saw one of my old teacher friends. He got a good laugh out of that.
What’s the best or most helpful thing that an editor has told you?
I worked as an editor for several years before jumping the fence so I saw the typical speed bumps that writers make when dealing with in-house staff and procedures. Now that I am a free radical, an editor once told me that breaking into the national magazines was a game of persistence and blind confidence, like getting laid on a Friday night. Who knew that bar pick-up skills had a professional application?
What’s the worst writing or freelancing advice you’ve ever gotten?
My first job out of college was an internship in DC where my boss said she would help me find something permanent at the end of the period. As I was wrapping up my last few weeks, I asked her if she had any job leads. Her response was “Have you tried the Washington Post?”
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