From the Co-President – January 2016

Suzie Rodriguez

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BATW Travel Features & Photos
BATW Travel Features & Photos

Dear Members:
As I write this, BATW’s latest publication—Travel Features & Photos: California’s National Parks, Monuments, Trails, Seashores, and Historic Siteshas just been released. We’ll formally introduce it at the January meeting, where members will read small excerpts from their entries.
Please spread the word about our stunning new publication to your friends, colleagues and fans. You can tweet, FB post, instagramize, pin, tumbl, G+ — and anything else you can think of! And please always let people know where they can download the free PDF or purchase the book online.
I want to thank everyone involved for helping pull this wonderful book together. That certainly includes everyone who submitted an article and/or photos—and I must say that everyone did so in an enthusiastic, positive manner (thanks especially for that!). Beyond that, we all owe a huge debt to Jim Shubin for his masterful design work; to Georgia Hesse for serving as the gatekeeper of quality; and to Bob Cooper for his scrupulous editing. Laurie King and I served as cheerleaders, PR flaks, conceptualizers/
ideators, all-around administrators, and contributors.
 BATW now has three books we can be proud of. The other two are:

  • Travel Stories from Around the Globe (2012). This anthology can be purchased online and at selected bookstores, including Book Passage, and BATW continues to earn a small amount of royalties from it each year.
  • Clips & Pics (2014). Our first magazine-style publication, Clips showcased our members’ talents with beautiful photos and superb writing, and served as the precursor to Travel Features & Photos, which—unlike Clips—is juried and has a theme. Future books in the Travel Features & Photos series will also be themed and juried.

The year 2016 promises to be another dynamic year for our organization. We want to do our share to bring attention to a “hot” (and getting hotter) topic in the world of travel: climate change and sustainable tourism. To that end, Karen Misuraca’s March meeting will feature a panel of experts on “Tourism and Climate Change.” Throughout the year, members will receive news, information and resources related to those subjects on the website, FB page and Yahoo groups forum (thank you, Karen, for spearheading this important effort).
More prosaically, early this year we will probably leave our difficult and troublesome membership organization software service for one that promises to be much easier to use for everyone from administrators to members. If all works out as we hope, this change means that renewing membership and other tasks will no longer be a mystifying process fraught with opportunities for clicking the wrong button or encountering arcane or even bizarre possibilities for making a mistake. It also means that our wonderful volunteers won’t waste their precious time trying to understand what went wrong deep in the innards of a hidden, not to mention unfathomable, software program.
More BATW news is on the horizon, and you’ll be hearing about it soon.
Here’s to a great 2016 for all of us!
Cheers,
Suzie Rodriguez – BATW Co-President[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

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