[Sword_Monkey]

You seem to know your way round words so I'd advise freelance writing. Submit a few articles to a few places that are relevant to your interests and fairly current. Naturally taking time to get a feel for the style on the site. Make sure the editors are aware that you're giving them free stuff as a good will gesture and are available for more content if they need it. You should be able to get to $300 this way fairly easily, but it may take some time for responses, and a few rejections if people don't like your writing, but eventually you'll get a few gigs, maybe some steady ones, for monthly, weekly articles.

If you think you can write something good enough (and it's not that hard to be better than 90% of the target audience) then it'd be a nice quick way of getting the cash.