The Blind Freelance Writer

When I was growing up, I wanted to be a journalist. I spoke to one of my uncles, who was teaching journalism at the time, about whether someone like me, with a vision impairment, could do the job. He thought it would be difficult, as I would struggle with describing things around me, so I gave up the idea.

But now the dream is coming true, but in a slightly different, and probably better, format. For the past four weeks, I’ve been working as a ghost blogger for Paul and Jenny Geelen who are Occularists in Australia. I love the work. It involves brainstorming ideas for blogs and being creative with the content. The best thing is that by writing the blogs, really good information is getting out to people all over the world about eye loss and artificial eyes. I say good information, because there is a lot of badly thought-out and poorly written blogs out there. But Jenny and Paul run a professional service, and so their blog reflects this.

To help me do my work, I have a fantastic little audio digital voice recorder. It wasn’t designed for the blind, but the blind have snapped it up. Why? Because it has voice menus. Yes, it talks. I don’t know why the company made it that way, but thank goodness they did. I find it a far more efficient way of recording interviews and notes than by typing things up on my portable computer. It’s amazing how much you miss when you’re typing while you’re listening.

So inbetween the novel writing (which is coming along really well), entering short story competitions, doing talks and generally running my business, I am happily engrossed in my new freelance writing work.

IN fact, this work will overlap with some of the content for my own blog. Since I listened to ‘The Blind Brain’ and posted about it last time, I’m keen to do more research on blindness and other senses. So stay tuned for more blogs on this topic, and maybe some in-depth articles.

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