The Guardian summer holiday travel writing competition winners have been announced and you can read the best 50 stories - five winners and 45 runner-ups - on the paper's website. 1300 stories were submitted. I actually expected they might have received more entries. Perhaps the thought of an editor cutting the stories from 500 to 100 words was too much for some? The winners included Blue Spanish Skies, a tale about hiking in Mallorca, Bathing by Numbers, about a beach holiday in Croatia, and Moor the Merrier, about a boating trip on the Thames. While I thoroughly enjoyed reading the winning stories, I must admit I found the edited entries a tad frustrating to read - sometimes it was as if the narrative was just beginning to engage and then they were cut short (funny about that), while at other times they simply made no sense, as if a chunk was missing from the middle. I can understand why the Guardian wouldn't publish the full pieces in the paper version of the newspaper, but I'm not quite sure what the point was in editing them for the website. I'd love to read them in their entirety. What did you think?

These guys? They're in a back street of the medina in Marrakesh. Arguing over which story they liked best no doubt.

The Guardian's travel section is running a Summer Holiday Travel Writing Competition which for its runner-ups will also provide a very real (and for some, painful) introduction to the travel publishing industry and the role of the editor. Readers are asked to submit 500 words about their holiday and what made it special, providing as much detail as possible. The Guardian's travel editors will then choose the five best entries across five different categories, each of which will win their authors one of five holidays. And - lucky them! - they'll get their stories published in their entirety in the Guardian's travel section. No such dream prize for the runners-up, however... they'll have to make do with a hefty dose of reality. Each of their 500-word pieces will be edited down to 100 words by the travel editors. (Other entries will be uploaded to the readers' Been There tips section.) If you still want to be a travel writer after seeing your finely-crafted words whittled down to one fifth their original length, then you probably have what it takes to be a travel writer, so good on you. Go for it! If you find yourself in tears over how they've savaged your precious piece writing, then you'd better stick to short stories, poetry or simply postcards. As for the five winners... frame those pieces and enjoy them while you can. Because if you do go on to become a travel writer, rarely will your writing ever be published in its entirety again. Now, that's not always a bad thing either...