Melissa Gira GrantInterview
Writer, freelance journalist
Adapted from Melissa Gira Grant's interview on Uses This, published 17 July 2014. The kit is drawn from their answers and each reason is an excerpt, lightly edited. Shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full interview ↗
Is this you? Claim this kit →Hardware
My 15" MacBook Pro is my old reliable, but it rarely leaves the house anymore, and (in my first rule for working from home) it never comes to bed.
That's what the iPad is for.
And embarrassingly near my pillow, the iPhone (a 3GS, still hanging on).
I stash handfuls of Pilot G2 pens in my bag.
For conducting interviews by telephone or outside the office, I use a Zoom H1 digital audio recorder.
It feels natural in the hand, doesn't need to be so intrusively close to a subject, and it works as well in a packed club or on a march as it does on my desk recording a Skype call from my speakers.
There's no reason to keep the 3Com HomeConnect webcam I used 24/7 as a camgirl over a decade ago, but I am, and I will, until it comes back into style.
I wish I got to use my Shure 55SH mic more.
Communication
My own website runs on Wordpress and is hosted by Laughing Squid (and it was designed and developed by [Star St.
I label excessively in Gmail to organize myself.
The discipline that Gchat requires during the workday is usually spent elsewhere.
Productivity
(Once a story goes my editors, I leave Scrivener and reluctantly move to Microsoft Office for the sake of track-changes.)
Coding & Development
My desk pen is a refillable Tornado by Retro 51, in red lacquer.
For books and features, I write in Scrivener.
Media
Storage
I've experimented with writing and editing in SimpleNote, and had some success syncing drafts between Scrivener on my desktop and my phone or iPad, but Mail is where I end up.
Other
I've been a Mac user since I was six and forced Print Shop into service as my word processor.
Working while mobile, but that's a bit arbitrary, as I still use these too often in my own apartment when I could just reach for my laptop, but I don't: as before Mail and Simplenote, Voice Memos if my Zoom isn't handy, Speak It! (a text-to-speech app, which I use to read me work in progress if I need to pretend there's someone else in the room), Instagram (like Twitter, it's become my notebook).
The Glass Houses mailing list runs on MailChimp.