If you are a live music or movie reviewer, the Light Writer Pen will come in quite handy in the darkened conditions! These ball point pens feature a built-in LED to illuminate the paper as you write. The lights come in red or yellow and the pen exteriors are available in a variety of colors: red marble, white, black or blue. Keep it by your bedside–it’s great for the next “big idea” that comes to you at 3 am!
Ever get a sudden idea for a great story, article, or plot device at the exact moment you can’t write anything down or e-mail it to yourself? This 1-gig MP3 watch from Skullcandy is the answer to that problem. The built-in voice recorder lets you dictate your ideas and save them for later in .wav format, compatible with all audio editors and playback software like Cubase, Vegas, Pro Tools, and iTunes. The watch stores a full gigabyte of MP3s and you can transfer music via USB just like any Zune or iPod.
Buy for $169.95
If you want one good book on freelancing and you are just starting out, Make a Real Living as a Freelance Writer by Jenna Glatzer is definitely it. Jenna walks through the query process, tells some juicy insider secrets and teaches those who are just starting out a ton about the business of writing. She has penned many an article including credits in Woman’s World, Woman’s Own, and Prevention. Glatzer is a contributing editor at Writer’s Digest and has written several books including an authorized biography of Celine Dion.
There is a lot of information out there for the new freelancer, but you have to dig around in writing forums, magazine articles and books to find it–and it’s very time consuming. It can be difficult at first to tell the good advice from the bad. Glatzer’s book is a good starter resource that can help answer those “newbie” questions all in one place. Jenna has eaned herself the moniker “The Writer’s Writer,” and one of her specialties is helping other writers learn the business. This book is the perfect example.
See Jenna Glatzer’s blog or take a look at her impressive list of titles at her official site
When you’re writing for a living, diversity is the name of the game. If you can add photography to the mix, you’re instantly more marketable in more ways than one. Since one of my main strengths is music and culture writing, I’d be a fool NOT to be a writer/photographer.
When I first started taking pictures for my pieces, I used any old bag for the gear, but after getting the Quantaray Pro as a gift, I am completely sold on a dedicated bag for all my gear. I carry my Zoom H4 recorder, mics, camera and lenses, plus my laptop in the Quantaray Pro and have used the same one for years without so much as a broken zipper. We do a lot of different types of gear reviews at Freelance-Zone, but this one ain’t based on specs alone–I am a huge fan of this backpack and will definitely buy another one just like it when I finally kill it years from now after one location shoot too many.
Buy the Quantaray Pro camera/laptop backpack for $79.00
Deborah Ng’s FreelanceWritingGigs.com is one of our favorite resource sites. There is a good mix of traditional gigs with blogger opportunities, and the presentation is top notch. One of my personal compaints about some writer’s sites with job listings is inherent user-unfriendliness. Not so with FreelanceWritingGigs.com.
For new writers, this site is a treasure trove. Jennifer Chait’s “So What” should be required reading for anyone who presumes to put up a blog about…anything. I am also a big fan of “writer beware” articles, and the piece warning about a content site called Giant Wow made me about as happy as I can get without a “paid on acceptance” check involved.
As a full-time writer, I find FreelanceWritingGigs.com quite useful in a number of areas. Anyone who doesn’t scour a fellow writer’s links section is cheating themselves out of gigs and networking opportunities. It’s also the chance to meet new people in the same boat–all still waiting for paychecks due two months ago, hunting high and low for another chance to throw some words together for money and make them stick. Your friends might not understand your job, and your family may still think you’re on some kind of extended vacation, but your fellow writers understand.
If you aren’t familiar with this excellent resource, hop on over and get acquainted with FreelanceWritingGigs.com. Highly recommended.
At first glance, stock market genius Jim Cramer’s painfully frank biography Confessions Of A Street Addict might not seem like a writer’s cup of tea. What freelancer has the money to sink into stocks or the time to properly manage a portfolio?
That’s what I though plowing into this, but I was quite surprised to read about Cramer’s horror stories as a writer–working as a broke, literally homeless crime writer for the LA Herald Examiner. It’s hard to complain about a little freelancer cabin-fever when reading about a writer who lived in the back seat of his car when he wasn’t out hanging out at murder scenes. Jim Cramer learned a great deal the hard way as a writer, including a much publicized scandal that nearly got him indicted for writing about stocks that he also happened to be invested in.
He nearly lost his entire career because of a simple editorial mistake. (He was cleared of any personal wrongdoing, and if the facts as presented in the book are true, he didn’t really deserve any of blame.) Cramer repeatedly tried to walk away from writing as his stock market career took him into millions of dollars in personal success, but his love of the craft brought him back for the creation of TheStreet.com, and the rest is history.
In short, this is an AMAZING book to read from a struggling writer’s standpoint. You can learn a lot from Jim Cramer’s mistakes and his successes in and out of the writing game. This is making the rounds at Freelance-Zone, and it’s kept at least one of us up at night, unable to put the damn thing down.
Buy for $10.20