I've been thinking a lot lately about where I want to take my work—both in terms of what I do professionally as well as what I do in my "spare" time, which currently consists of posting on this journal and working on cars. Professional career and garage hobbyist aside, I'm starting to get an idea of what I want to do as a writer—although I haven't figured it out entirely yet.
My work on the Collectible autos series has been immensely rewarding for me—it's something that I plan to continue doing for at least a while now, but I'm not sure if I'm going to do it forever...because I think I could do something even better. The thing about the Collectible auto series is that even though I get to wade through big piles of information about cars I've never studied, it nevertheless doesn't give me much of an opportunity to grow as a writer. In order to maintain the velocity of articles posted here to /dev/null, I generally take between 45 and 120 minutes to write each article and by the time I'm done, I generally don't spend an awful lot of time editing. I think that it's really important that you (as a reader) get frequent and varied content, and that journalistic style is something which can be compromised slightly to ensure that you're never left with a bored moment.
But eventually, I'd like to try my hand at something printed on actual honest-to-god paper—or hell, even newsprint. I know that Rob has mentioned on at least a few occasions that I should try to write for Grassroots Motorsports Classic Motorsports (Update: oops, I was close), and I suppose that I don't have a good excuse as to why I haven't. But the point remains that my goals include being more than just a small-time weblogger...I guess I'd like to be a small-time automotive journalist, too.
Not necessarilly GRM, although that'd do - but you could also do a piece for GRM's sister publication, Classic Motorsports. I think they might eat up some of the collectable auto type pieces, especially if they are well researched and perhaps even include some first hand experience/pictures. I'm sure you wouldn't have any problem finding someone at work with an interesting auto that would let you tool around in it for a few minutes and allow you to take some pictures. And who knows, if you spend some time on it, you could come up with a really nice article.
Ahh yes, that's right—Classic Motorsports. Hehe
Check this piece out... it's pretty decent amature writing:
http://forums.vwvortex.com/zerothread?id=2419832
Not bad—he's got a bit of work to do on the writing, but the photos are absolutely top-notch.