Author: Ian

I’ve Become the Kind of Person Who Does Work in Coffee Shops and I’m OK With That

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For most of my adult life, I had a shit-ton of debt and was chronically short on money, which meant that I cut back on unnecessary purchases as much as possible.  My thought process usually went like this:

 

[At the gas station]

Do I really want that can of Sour Cream and Onion Pringles?

Nah, I’ve got snacks at home.

 

[When Making Plans]

Do I really want to see the Blade Runner Final Cut rerelease in the theater with my friends on a fun outing that may or may not include costumes and also go out for pizza at a restaurant I really like where we’ll have a great time hanging out?

Hell yes. Continue reading »

Three Submissions a Month for Twenty Years: An Interview with Melanie Faith

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Melanie Faith is a writer, editor, and teacher whose books about writing include In a Flash, Poetry Power, and Photography for Writers from Vine Leaves Press. She’s also the author of This Passing Fever from Future Cycle Press, a book of poetry set during the 1918 influenza epidemic; and Her Humble Admirer, a pseudonymous regency romance novel.  Her short fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in over 250 publications, and she teaches online for Southern New Hampshire University and the WOW! Women on Writing program.  On top of all that, she’s a photographer whose work I’ve scattered throughout this interview.

Melanie’s also the developmental editor of my upcoming novel, MFA Thesis Novel, and after a few back and forth emails I realized she’d be a perfect person to interview about her creative work life…

Continue reading »

Why I Stopped Checking My Phone in the Morning

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My phone is kind of the bane of my existence.  Like, I know it’s useful for staying in contact with people and finding stuff online and navigating strange areas and all that jazz, but there are times when the drawbacks definitely outweigh the benefits.

For example, there are plenty of times when I’m at home or on the train or waiting for someone and I instinctively pull out my phone to check…something.  Maybe it’s a new text, maybe it’s the news, or maybe it’s social media—in any case, that smartphone time is usually time I’d rather be spending doing something else, and I usually finish these screen-staring sessions feeling distracted and scatterbrained.

Oh yeah, and the more I use my phone, the more I want to use it—like I can’t just use it a little bit.

And I’ve been trying to find ways to control that. Continue reading »

Why Rest Matters – The Art of Rest with Claudia Hammond

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I had my mind blown the other day listening to an episode of one of my favorite podcasts, Intelligence Squared.  The episode featured an interview with Claudia Hammond, author of the book The Art of Rest, which is exactly what it sounds like.

The discussion covered what rest does for us, and how it’s different than sleep.  When we rest, we’re disconnecting from all the things we have to do, and doing something simple or enjoyable instead, anything from daydreaming to taking a hot bath.  Hammond mentioned one really important aspect of rest that made me stop and think: if you’re feeling guilty about the thing you’re doing, it’s not restful.

When I heard that I realized I often feel guilty when I take time off to do restful things, whether it’s reading, spending time with friends, relaxing, taking a walk, or playing a video game.  There’s a voice in the back of my head that tells me what I’m doing is a waste of time and that I should be spending my time on something productive.  The guilt stops me from Continue reading »

Guest Post: Gina Troisi on Trading Freedom, Time, and Health Insurance

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Ian here—today’s post comes from Gina Troisi, a writer and fellow Day Jobber who also grew up in New Hampshire. The Angle of Flickering Light, her memoir about abuse, addiction, and escape, will be out this April with Vine Leaves Press, and you can check out her other awesome publications via her website.  She’s also my co-organizer for the Vine Leaves online Zoom reading on March 4th as part of the SMOL Festival, which you can check out here to see both of us read our work.

Gina was kind enough to share her thoughts on the move from part-time-freedom to a new kind of freedom through her full-time office job, so read on to see how she did it….

 

Designing Our Lives Around Art, Not the Other Way Around

Since beginning my low-residency MFA program in 2007 and getting serious about my writing, I’ve perpetually attempted to design my work life to fit around my world of crafting stories. At that point, I’d been waiting tables and bartending in restaurants for years, and while doing this work I found I could make what seemed like a large amount of money in a short amount of time. Continue reading »

Novel Progress Update: Let the Drafting Begin!

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Lately I’ve been writing.

Like, not writing shorter pieces or book reviews or essays, but working on the actual new novel I blogged about researching but not yet starting a few months ago.  I’ve been working in larger chunks of 2-4 hours one or two days a week, which is a pretty good rate for me with all the things I have going on.  So far in 2021 I’ve set aside six of these writing sessions where I sat down at the computer completely free of distractions and just wrote, which also feels really good.

Now let’s get one thing straight: I’m not the kind of person who usually brags (or blogs) about his writing progress, especially in terms of word count—which is why I’m not posting my word count here.  I don’t post my word count because all too often it can come across as bragging—like the number of words someone puts down on the page are an indicator of their self-worth even if all those words suck hard.  Other writers can read that and feel discouraged and inferior that they aren’t producing the same number of words—I know because I’ve been there.

I once read an interview with the writer John Banville where he talked about sometimes spending an entire day getting a single sentence exactly the way he wanted it.  John Banville writes some pretty beautiful sentences, but the point is that Continue reading »

Come See Me and a Bunch of Other Cool Authors Read Online!

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Quick plug for anyone interested: On Thursday, March 4th from 6:00pm to 7:00pm EST I’ll be reading a five-minute excerpt from MFA Thesis Novel online via Zoom as part of a reading with seven other authors from Vine Leaves Press!

The reading is one I’m co-organizing with fellow writer Gina Troisi for the online SMOL Small Press book festival.   Our theme is Commercial Meets Experimental (which we took from the Vine Leaves Press mission statement), which I liked because both of these labels get a bad rap even though they can both do awesome things. I’m not sure which section from MFA Thesis Novel I’ll be reading yet, but I imagine it’ll be one with lots of jokes.

The whole thing is free and open to the first 100 people.  Mark your calendars, and save the Zoom link: https://tinyurl.com/y6zqdrcu Continue reading »

I Got Offered a Moneymaking Gig I Wasn’t Comfortable With

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I have a category on this blog titled Doing the Right Thing in a not-so-subtle homage to the similarly named Spike Lee film. In it I tag posts that have to do with making good moral decisions in your creative and Day Job work.  Recently I had to make one of those decisions.

Quick flashback: Throughout my twenties, I was never in a good place with money.  I had enormous student loans, little savings, and most of the jobs I had either didn’t quite pay enough to let me live on my own, or left me scrambling to make ends meet every month.  I used to take on a LOT of side gigs to bring in extra cash: selling used books on Amazon, Craiglist gigs helping people move, weekends handing out cheap prizes at the racetrack, and other random stuff.  Even when I found full-time work as an elementary school secretary I still kept my old weekend gig feeding horses on a farm until the work ran out Continue reading »

Tools of the Creative Trade: Japanese Campus Notebooks are Awesome

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I’ve written before about my favorite tool of the writing trade, the blue Bic pen that’s been discontinued and that I bought a lifetime supply of on eBay.  Another of my staples is the hardbacked At-a-Glance schedule books I’ve been using since the mid-2010s, but there’s one more essential I discovered after coming to Japan and I’m no longer sure I can live without.

I love plain, simple Japanese Campus notebooks. Continue reading »

I’m Taking Time Off From My Day Job and Using That Time Productively (Oh Yeah!)

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As some of you may have heard, back in the fall I was planning a Christmas trip back to New Hampshire to visit family and friends…which I ended up calling off when COVID cases and restrictions ramped up.  This sucked pretty hard, and while I don’t regret calling off the trip, it’s unfortunate that circumstances forced me into making that tough decision.

Here’s the good point, though: while planning the trip, I got approved for a four-week vacation from my Day Job.  And when I called off the US trip I decided I’d still use the time off.

Quick bit of backstory: My job as an ALT on the JET Program comes with, among other perks, 20 paid days off per year that are pretty flexible, especially if I schedule them in advance.  Last year because of COVID I barely used any, so when my new JET contract started in August I found myself with a mouth-watering 29 days to use or lose as I see fit.

And I have no intention of losing them. Continue reading »

I Took a Stress Test at Work and Here’s What I Learned

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I’ve been taking it slow on the blogging front lately while I reorganize some of my priorities in my writing, my Day Job, and everywhere else.  One factor that ties all those things together, though, is stress.

Back in October, two weeks after I talked to my boss about my stress problems, a single-page multiple-choice English stress survey suddenly appeared on the desks of all the foreign teachers in my city with notes asking us to fill them out.  Now, even though the city had asked every ALT to fill out the survey, the timing seemed like quite a coincidence ;-)

I got my results back a few weeks ago (also in English!) and they were…about what I expected. However, they also reinforced that I’ve been on the right track about the challenges I’m facing right now, including where those challenges are coming from and how to fix them. Continue reading »

Fall TRAM Now Online, Plus Thoughts on Editing a Cool Indie Zine

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The TRAM (a.k.a. that zine I work on in Toyama) has a new issue out, one that I’m particularly proud of because of the quality of the material.  This was also our first new issue since our long hiatus earlier this year, and it has a mix of stuff that I’ll sincerely recommend here.

Those outside the Toyama JET community will be most interested in Mind Your Mindset, an article about Growth Mindsets vs. Fixed Mindsets by recent JET alum Rikio Inouye that shows how opening up to personal growth can lead to greater happiness and success.  I’d recommend anyone interested in improving their perspective and taking on new challenges check this one out.

I also put together another edition of my Let’s Talk About Japan Books! column, this one covering two nonfiction books about the JET Program itself.  While Bruce Feiler’s Learning to Bow isn’t worth getting excited over (despite its popularity, I didn’t like the book all that much), the centerpiece is my review of a book called Importing Diversity: Inside Japan’s JET Program by David McConnell, a for-serious academic study about the early years of the JET Program. The book leaves no stone unturned when it comes to the problems faced by ALTs and is incredibly relevant to anyone currently working on or considering JET. Continue reading »