Reflections on a Decade of Day Job Blogging

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Image from the National Library of Wales used under a Creative Commons 4.0 license.

Time brings great changes.

When I started keeping this blog nearly a decade ago, I was at a very different point in my life—I was just out of grad school, trying to get my first novel published, and struggling with the very real conflict of how to both live a creative life and bring in enough money to live on.

At the time, starting the Day Job blog felt like the perfect course of action for many reasons. Not only would it help me develop a web presence, but I needed to mentally sort out some very real conflicts about where my life was going, how writing fit into it, and how to define my identity as an adult on some sort of career path—all topics I went on to write about on this blog.  I’d also been working my own Day Jobs for over a year (first as a greenhouse assistant, then as an online test-grader) while writing MFA Thesis Novel on the side, so I felt ready to share this new route my life was taking.

Once upon a time, I was imagining (and even planning for) writing a nonfiction book (naturally titled But I Also Have a Day Job) about how creative people balance their creative work with keeping the bills paid Continue reading »

How Should Writers Talk About Their Literary Awards?

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Serious people sitting around a table in a meeting

When I was in grad school, one of the things that most struck me was the way other writers, (especially the other grad students), talked about their achievements. All of them, it seemed, had a neatly canned bio listing off the magazines where they’d been published, academic positions they’d held, and, of course, awards they’d won.

I found the formulaic aspects of these bios fascinating. Their components were more or less interchangeable, their lengths (always a short paragraph) never seemed to vary, and most noticeably, I never seemed to recognize most of the journal and award names. How was I to know, I wondered, whether a literary award or journal I hadn’t heard of was significant, or just some hot air to make the writer look like hot shit?

When I started gathering ideas for MFA Thesis Novel, I knew right away that I wanted all of the pretentious writer characters to have their own bios—all of which would be filled with imaginary magazines, literary awards, and academic positions that would disorient readers the same way I’d been disoriented in the academic writing world. Here’s a snapshot from the first page: Continue reading »

Post Book-Launch Thoughts: How Did It Go and Where Is It Going?

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It’s been nearly two months since Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers made it in to readers’ hands, and since then, people have been asking me a few different questions:

How did your book launch go?
How many copies have you sold?
What else are you doing for book promotion?
Where do things go from here?

Now that things have cooled down a bit and I’ve had some time to reflect, I thought I’d give a summary of what I worked on for the launch, how it went, and where things are going from here… Continue reading »

Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers: From Point-and-Click Adventure Game to Sort-Of Fantasy Novel (Part 2)

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In Part 1 (which you should totally read first), I talked about how Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers began as a point-and-click PC adventure game I worked on with my best friend and fellow adventure game fan Mike Rushia. The novel version comes out July 22nd, and I’m currently taking pre-orders for the book and bonus postcard set through my webstore. Here’s the second half of the story.

As the years went on, and especially when I moved to Nebraska for grad school and started working more heavily on my first novel about Japan, the Carcrash Parker adventure game just kind of….fell by the wayside.

This is really common for creative projects, I think, and it happens for a variety of reasons.  In our case, Mike and I being busy adults with jobs was definitely a factor, but a bigger reason was that the project itself was incredibly large, intimidating, and went beyond our skill set, especially when it came to the art.

Had we been friends with an art person, or been more savvy about finding illustrators online, this hurdle would have been less formidable. However, for us, at that time, the whole project just felt really insurmountable. Continue reading »

Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers: From Point-and-Click Adventure Game to Sort-Of Fantasy Novel (Part 1)

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Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers Carson's Room postcard

My second (and even more ridiculous) novel, Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers, is available for pre-order through my webstore, where you can get a signed copy and support me financially as an indie author, since when you buy directly from me, a bigger share of the sale goes to the author than if you buy on Amazon.

Today, though, I want to talk about how the novel came to be, why I’ve been working on this story in some form since 2008, and how a single story can take vastly different shapes

 

After College Ended, I Needed a Creative Project to Work On

Let’s rewind alllllllllll the way to summer 2007.  I’d just finished college, and was living at home in New Hampshire, working a temporary internship with a lake protection group.  I’d also just broken up with my girlfriend, a lot of my friends weren’t around anymore, my student loans were coming due, my trusty 1990 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme had to be scrapped due to a rusted-out brake line, and it felt like people were constantly asking me what I was going to do with my life.  When fall rolled around, my internship went from full-time to part-time, and I started spending more time at home.  It was a rough, lonely, and uncertain period in my life. Continue reading »

New Year’s Updates, Future Plans, and How to Navigate Life’s Challenges

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Happy New Year, everybody. I’m writing this two weeks into 2025 after taking some time off for the holidays, spending four days in Connecticut presenting at the in-person university residency where I teach online, and in general, getting oriented to being back at my desk.

It’s been a while since I updated this blog—that’s party by choice (I want to be spending my time on other things), partly by necessity (I’ve been too damned busy), and partly because I’m in transition (working on an updated version of my author page that should be up in a few months).

But I still want to keep people updated, let them know what’s going on, and assure all of you that I’m still moving toward my goals. If I’m being honest with myself, though, I haven’t been moving toward them as fast or as smoothly as I’d like, and I’ve been working on some serious course correction to get myself back on track.

In this post, I want to start by summarizing what I did in 2024 (a continuation of a separate year-end series I used to do), then move on to 2025, what the future holds, Continue reading »

MFA Thesis Novel Book Club Guide & Author Interview

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Cool news from the MFA Thesis Novel front: this month Vine Leaves Press and I released the MFA Thesis Novel Book Club Guide, which includes an author interview with yours truly and discussion questions for the novel.  It’s free for download from the link above, and starting this month, it’s included with the eBook version of the novel as a bonus.

Here’s a quick snippet:

Q: What inspired you to write MFA Thesis Novel?

A: As the novel itself hints, MFA Thesis Novel sprang from my experience in graduate school at the University of Nebraska, though my program was technically an MA. I was workshopping a novel based on my time working in Japan, but the subject matter and the style I was writing in were so foreign that people around me couldn’t relate to the book. At the same time, the program seemed to be pushing us to build up longer and more impressive CVs rather than improve our writing, which I found disconcerting. Like Flip, it took me a long time to realize which parts of the program were helpful and which parts weren’t conducive to the career path I was looking for.

Read the rest of the interview here. Continue reading »

2023 Reflections: What Went Well, and What Didn’t

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I’m not going to lie: 2023 was a rough year.

Though 2023 started off on an optimistic note, and the first half went really well, the second half took a major nosedive as my productivity, organization, and overall mood went WAY down.

So what happened? How did the year spiral downward, how did I handle it, and where does that leave me in 2024?

Let the 2023 reflections begin. Continue reading »

What Happened When My Entire Life Got Upended

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I’ve had a rough couple of months because of something REALLY bad that happened back in the fall.  At first I wasn’t sure how to talk about it online, or even if I wanted to reveal it because it involved my family.  Fortunately, though, the problem’s cooled way down in the past month, and in thinking about what a crazy time it’s been, I decided I wanted to write about it frankly and honestly.

What happened is a long and complicated story, so please bear with me while I explain some intricate details, simplify others, and leave a handful of moments vague to protect some people’s anonymity.

In telling this story, though, I want to share that 1) Sometimes really bad things happen that make it incredibly difficult to do creative work, and 2) Dealing with those problems, and ultimately solving them, is a vital skill.

Here’s the story: Continue reading »

A Signed a Contract for My Second Novel!!!!!!!

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Big news! Last month I signed a contract with Vine Leaves Press to publish my second novel, Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers, in 2025.  This is the Secret New Novel I’ve been talking about on this blog for literally years.  Vine Leaves published my first novel, MFA Thesis Novel, in spring 2022 and were super-great to work with, so it was only natural that I wanted to publish Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers with them as well.

What’s Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers actually about, you ask?  Well, LARPing (a.k.a. Live-Action Role-Playing) for one.  More specifically, it’s about fantasy role-playing in the real world, with a group of twentysomethings on a quest to rescue a lost Commodore 64 from some bullies in the New Hampshire woods.

Also, it’s narrated in ye olde fantasy English speak, with wizards and maidens and stuff, even though it’s the real world. And the characters talk a lot about ’80s movies.

That’s the bare-bones gist. If you’re wondering why I waited so long to mention the deal in the age of same-day instant internet news, the answer is that I’ve been held up with a little Non-Creative Work Issue that I’ll be talking about in another post.  For now, if you want to know more, read on to find out how the deal happened and what comes next. Continue reading »

Creative People Should Speak Out Against Bad Business Practices

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I’ve blogged before about how I avoid buying things on Amazon (especially books!) whenever possible, since I don’t want to give money to a gigantic corporation that’s not only made the publishing landscape worse for authors and small publishers, it’s wreaked havoc on the retail economy as a whole.

I avoid Amazon because I want to make better decisions about where my money goes, how I live my life, and most importantly, how I portray myself as a writer and a creative person.  For me, this was about making a REALLY important decision:

Am I the kind of writer who stands up for what I believe in, or the kind of writer who takes the easy route?

When I built my author webpage, I intentionally set up the page for MFA Thesis Novel in a way that encouraged people to buy it literally anywhere except Amazon, then put a link to the Amazon page at the bottom, if readers absolutely had to get it there.  This seemed like a good balance between clarifying what kinds of buying options I wanted readers to consider (independent bookstores, Bookshop.org, and other non-Amazon online options) while also acknowledging the unfortunate reality that Amazon controls an enormous share of the book-buying market, and many readers (especially casual ones) are likely to go there first. Continue reading »

To Blog or Not to Blog? Is Regular Blogging Worth It?

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June was a busy month for me: I got back into working on my Secret New Novel draft (which won’t be Secret for much longer!), I had a few editing jobs that needed finishing, and I’m *still* unpacking and organizing after my move back in April.

As a result, I realized that I needed a blogging break, and took the last two weeks of June off.  For several years now, I’ve been blogging regularly every week with very few weeks missed, but during June, blogging felt less important than the other, more urgent matters demanding my attention.

Of course, the world didn’t come to an end because I didn’t blog for two weeks.  Instead, I felt more in control of my workload, and felt like I was prioritizing based on what needed to be done.
Continue reading »