Earlier this year, I wrote about the best free apps for transcribing recorded interviews, speeches, videos or other audio content.

If you don’t want to do the work yourself, there is another option. For $1 a minute, you can transcribe pre-recorded text using the Rev Voice Recorder app. At a conference last week, I tested out the platform with a ten-minute speech.

I recorded 10 minutes of a speech on the app’s “normal” setting from my seat in a hotel ballroom. I recorded the speech and uploaded it to the Rev translators straight from my phone at 2:30 in the afternoon. They emailed me back a clear and accurate transcript at 9:00 pm the same night.

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Do you struggle to meet your daily writing goals? Buster Benson has created 750 Words, a way to make sure you keep writing every day.

You can sign up for the free service, track your daily writing and earn stickers for your accomplishments. Benson created the site as a digital twist on “morning pages” from The Artist’s Way. That handbook suggests you write three longhand pages every day. Check it out:

Morning pages are three pages of writing done every day, typically encouraged to be in “long hand”, typically done in the morning, that can be about anything and everything that comes into your head. It’s about getting it all out of your head, and is not supposed to be edited or censored in any way. The idea is that if you can get in the habit of writing three pages a day, that it will help clear your mind and get the ideas flowing for the rest of the day … This site of course tracks your word count at all times and lets you know when you’ve passed the blessed 750 mark. And it gives you a nice big screen to write on, automatically scrolls as you write (like a typewriter), and automatically saves your writing as you go.

The force is with this eBook: William Shakespeare Star Wars. Iambic Pentameter? Check. Elizabethan inspired drawings? Check. Kindle Version? Check. Unfortunately, this book does not double as a light saber, but I know where to get one.

Return once more to a galaxy far, far away with this sublime retelling of George Lucas’s epic Star Wars in the style of the immortal Bard of Avon. The saga of a wise (Jedi) knight and an evil (Sith) lord, of a beautiful princess held captive and a young hero coming of age, Star Wars abounds with all the valor and villainy of Shakespeare’s greatest plays. ‘Tis a tale told by fretful droids, full of faithful Wookiees and fearstome stormtroopers, signifying…pretty much everything.

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If getting inside the heads of celebrities sounds appealing to you, then you are going to love Miranda July‘s latest project “We Think Alone.” The author/filmmaker has asked ten famous people to share previously sent private emails so that she can use them to craft digital portraits. Participants include: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Lena Dunham, Kirsten Dunst, Sheila Heti, Etgar Keret, Kate and Laura Mulleavy, Catherine Opie, Lee Smolin and Danh Vo.

Readers can opt in to receive a weekly email newsletter with communications from all ten of the personalities. The emails were all sent prior to this project to someone in their life. The emails were personally chosen by the sender. Every week will have a different theme. The first theme is money. Here is more from the project’s description:

…our inner life is not actually the same thing as our life on the computer — a quiet person might !!!! a lot. A person with a busy mind might write almost nothing. And of course while none of these emails were originally intended to be read by me (much less you*)  they were all carefully selected by their authors in response to my list of email genres — so self-portraiture is quietly at work here.

The Gracie Awards were held last night in Los Angeles, celebrating “outstanding programming for, by and about women.”

GalleyCat Editor Jason Boog was there on the red carpet chatting with established authors about how emerging writers can succeed in their trade. Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight? author and Scandal actor Dan Bucatinsky gave GalleyCat this advice:

Know what your point of view is and find a way to express it. Even if nobody’s paying you to do it. That’s the most important thing. If you want to sing, sing and find a venue for it. If you want to write, wake up every day and at least write for 15 minutes a day. Whoever you are, if you have a point of view and you want to have that voice expressed, find a way.

Newspaper reporter was voted as the worst job out of 200 jobs on CareerCast.com. High stress, low pay and a contracting industry earned the career choice the poor ranking. The job ranked lower than lumberjack, enlisted military personnel, oil rig worker, meter reader and roofer, all of which made the list of the top 10 worst jobs this year.

Here is more from CareerCast.com, which ranked 200 jobs for the survey:

Ever-shrinking newsrooms, dwindling budgets and competition from Internet businesses have created very difficult conditions for newspaper reporters, which has been ranked as this year’s worst job, according to the CareerCast.com Jobs Rated report.

In contrast, actuary was voted the best job of 2013. Software engineer, audiologist and computer systems analyst also made the the top ten list for the best jobs of 2013.

When was the last time you asked for negative feedback on your creative project?

In a new TED video (embedded above), Tesla co-founder Elon Musk urged creators to solicit negative feedback when designing a creative project. Check it out:

Well, I do think there’s a good framework for thinking. It is physics. You know, the sort of first principles reasoning. Generally I think there are — what I mean by that is, boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy. Through most of our life, we get through life by reasoning by analogy, which essentially means copying what other people do with slight variations. And you have to do that. Otherwise, mentally, you wouldn’t be able to get through the day. But when you want to do something new, you have to apply the physics approach. Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It’s really counterintuitive. So I think that’s an important thing to do, and then also to really pay attention to negative feedback, and solicit it, particularly from friends. This may sound like simple advice, but hardly anyone does that, and it’s incredibly helpful.

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In a panel at the O’Reilly Tools of Change Author Revolution conference in New York today, Grub Street founder Eve Bridburg and journalist Porter Anderson discussed how authors can get involved in the promotion of their work and the best way to approach the overwhelming number of social media channels around. “Tactics don’t make any sense in the absence of strategy,” said Bridburg. Here is some advise that we gleaned from the panel.

1. Create a mission bigger than the one book you are working on.“Success is bigger than sales,” said Bridburg. “Make success bigger than the narrow idea of book sales.” Look at measuring your success in things beyond book sales. Ask yourself these questions: Does it give you energy? Does it give you joy? Do you learn new skills? Does it bring other work? Read more

Short stories occupy such a small real estate, but they now have a new home in Paragraph Shorts, a free app dedicated to the dissemination of short stories.

Paragraph Shorts is the vision of Ziv Navoth, a short storyteller with a mission to “do to the short story what iTunes did to singles – provide people with a great way to enjoy quality, bite-sized experiences, discovering not only great stories, but great writers.” Navoth’s personal novel, Nanotales, is a collection of short stories without chapters or pages. When promoting the novel, Navoth was discouraged by booksellers who told him that  ” no one buys books of short stories.”

Like Navoth’s personal work, Paragraph Shorts challenges traditional paper forms of storytelling. The app pairs short stories with beautiful photos and artwork, videos, and musical accompaniments for an inclusive entertainment experience. Paragraph Shorts are published in a weekly magazine format with a selection of seven short stories along with its multimedia accompaniments. Read more

Hello internet citizens! This is Phi Tran and I’m thrilled to be joining the Appnewser team.

I’m writing to you from San Francisco – the technological hub that never stops eating. I’m a wordy designer with a penchant for technology and gizmos. When I’m not online digesting mobile trends, I attend live concerts, read plenty of paper books, and cook up a tart or two. I also have a thing for pretty pictures so I’m constantly hauling around my cameras and lusting after beautiful photos on Pinterest.

Feel free to send me an email (chickiephi AT gmail.com) or ping me on Twitter if you want to talk about tech related gossip. I especially enjoy Photoshopped cats on buildings, so if you have any, please submit them to my Tumblr.