Despite much pleading and negotiation, Mint informed me today that no way are they going to agree to a proposal before I actually write the pieces. In other words, my plan of financing a trip to the Philippines by selling multiple travel writing pieces to them has come a cropper.

Not a complete cropper. They haven’t refused to take stories, they’ve just refused to confirm. So I’m faced with a decision: do I blow up my entire bonus (which, by the way, I don’t even get for another couple of months) on a vacation, with no guarantee that I’ll ever recover the money?

Then, I discover this post in my blog feeds, and suddenly the decision is much less difficult.

I’m going to go, have a blast, write up the vacation, and sell it. It’ll take audacity. But then audacity is a virtue worth cultivating.