Writing with Pico’s Cycling: A Year On.

By Jack Hawkins http://jackonabike.ca
Photos: Jack Hawkins

I have been writing for this publication for a year now, as this is our anniversary edition! Previously, I was only publishing articles on my own website, and was having difficulty regularly updating it, I have a horrible memory - and was trying to find somewhere that would take my articles and publish them elsewhere.

That’s when I found a call for writers on BikeForums.net, it was exactly the opportunity I’d been looking for. I sent an email to Pico Triano, Editor of a brand new cycling webzine, Tales of the Road. It was even local, being located about an hour from me. ‘Perfect!’ I thought.

I was to begin to write two articles per-month for this publication. I was delighted, my first opportunity to get my writing out there to more people! My first ever articles published on this webzine were two recounts of recent day-trips that I’d been on that year…These, along with picture were graciously accepted by the Editor and I was so happy when they were published at the end of the month.

And, as the winter of that year trundled on very slowly, I came up with new and exciting article ideas - as I don’t ride during the winter, I had to find other ways to tell cycle-touring stories to our ever-growing contingent of readers. I wrote pieces on an epic Fatbiking race in Moncton, New Brunswick, interviewed an intrepid and quite frankly mad explorer - Iohan Gueorguiev, and wrote wishful-thinking pieces, pining for Spring.

Once Spring hit, I was on the road almost immediately, destination pieces and new bikes followed, as Spring merged into Summer. Although I didn’t get the opportunities to get much travelling-by-bicycle done this past Summer, I did get the opportunity to meet and connect with so many new and wonderful people via Bicycle Touring Facebook Groups, online Forums and chance-meetings in local coffee shops. I’ve posted a couple of these interviews to the webzine, and as that was the bulk of my summer, that remained a bit of a staple in my pieces that appeared on here.

Overall, my year of freelance writing has culminated with the publication of my newest interview piece, by a major North American canoeing magazine, CanoeRoots, and while this doesn’t pertain to bicycle touring in anyway, it just goes to show that months of hard work, really do pay off.

I am immensely grateful to Pico Triano for giving me an opportunity to connect my articles with a wider audience, were it not for him, perhaps I would still be struggling along, not regularly publishing to my own site, and perhaps my freelance writing career would never have gotten off the ground.

It is my hope that my contributions to this project will continue into the New Year, as the webzine grows in readership and garners more publicity. Who knows what 2015 will bring for this publication? I’m off on a big trip across the country, though, so you can expect plenty of tales from the road, with a very different slant from usual, interview/review/miscellaneous article pieces. Ride on, everyone.