I have been a full-time freelance writer and blogger for the past 1.5 years, but worked in the field for about 10 years before that. I've been lucky enough to have "day jobs" that intersected nicely with my freelance writing: I was the culture editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian, a policy analyst at Electronic Frontier Foundation, and did a Knight science writing fellowship at MIT. Currently, I am a contributing editor at Wired magazine, where I'm also the designated science fiction blogger for the Wired blog Table of Malcontents. I also freelance for magazines like Popular Science, New Scientist, and The Believer. My syndicated tech/culture column, Techsploitation, runs in papers throughout the US and internationally. I just published two books: Pretend We're Dead (about the politics of monster movies), and She's Such a Geek (a collection of essays by women in male-dominated nerdy fields like science, tech, and gaming). I still love indie paper publishing, and am currently editor of the indie magazine other.
I try to post relevant information about myself on annaleenewitz.com, my personal website. I present my work at a lot of conferences, from professional ones like the AAAS to fun ones like DragonCon, but this my first SXSW. I find that face-to-face meetings are still one of the best ways to network. I advertise myself by writing well, behaving as professionally as my geeky nature allows, and occasionally buying cookies for fact-checkers and copy editors because they are the hardest workers in publishing.