Southern Trails is the ST4WD Club monthly magazine.

Trip reports, and articles that are relevant to Club members are welcome, as are photographs and illustrations.

Closing date for all material is the Friday following the monthly general meeting. Send contributions to publications@st4wdc.org

Guidelines for Contributors

Articles of interest to members are always welcome. Places you can recommend,  websites you find useful, which GPS you've found useful, what tyres, or battery, or refrigerator, or publication or......... have you found good (or otherwise).  These, and many other topics are all of interest and your experiences can often save others a lot of searching. Share your information and insights by writing an article for Southern Trails.

A few do's and don't's

It saves the Publication Team a lot of work if your writing can be in electronic form-on CD or emailed. Microsoft Word is very commonly used and is preferred. Please do not use any formatting other than left justified and new paragraphs.  Raw text is just fine.

In writing articles and  trip reports, ask yourself "Would I be interested to read this in 6 months time,?"  If your answer is "No" then best leave it out!! Personal, trivial or "in" stuff is unlikely to be of interest to most readers, while overly personal references may offend.

Things like "We had a good night's sleep" or  "We got away from camp 5 minutes earlier than planned" contribute little. Avoid a running commentary, or blow-by-blow description. References to time and weather should be used sparingly.

Good photos add interest to your article. When taking photos for publication try to place the vehicles, the action or the people in a wider scene. Avoid photos that could be anywhere eg a group of people sitting around a fire, or a  vehicle on a track. A resolution of at least 800x600 pixels is preferred, but the higher the better. Choose 3 or 4 good quality photos showing different things for a short article, 6 to 8 for a longer one. All photos may not be used but a selection allows the editors some flexibility in layout.

Please DON'T embed photos in your text, as this causes difficulty when re-formatting is necessary .  Leave them in separate files. Please list photo captions separately- do not incorporate a caption into the image itself, because resizing the image will then also resize your text.

As far as possible avoid any kind of formatting. Using tables, dot points,
 numbered lists or embedded photos are all great ways to spoil the editor's day!