Author: Ian

Daily Creative Work Schedule in Japan!

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(This one took a couple of tries to iron out…)

After I got to Japan, I had trouble sorting out the best way to schedule my creative work time—like, a lot of trouble.  I finish work at 4:00 every day and get home soon after that, so it seemed pretty simple to walk in the door, throw down my bag, and get right to work on the novel, right?

Negative.

Looking back, I wasted a lot of time when I first got here, especially in the afternoons between 4:00 and 5:30, when I’d come home, plop down on my bed, and scroll through my phone or listen to a podcast for longer than I intended.  I was also losing a lot of time after dinner to inactivity Continue reading »

Does Your Day Job Have Power Over You?

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A while ago I heard a guest on Kelly Carlin’s podcast talking about power—who has it, and more importantly, how we know who has it.  His point was pretty simple: the people who have power over us are the ones we’re not allowed to criticize.

Think about this for a bit: the people who have power over you are the ones you’re not allowed to criticize.

His counterexample was the government, because in America people criticize the government all the time.  When President Trump, say, talks about grabbing women, or looks the other way when the Saudis assassinate a dissenting journalist, or declares a national emergency because he couldn’t get boarder wall funding from congress, or even looks at the sun during an eclipse, journalists, writers, pundits, and random people on Twitter will all be there to criticize him, with their only consequence being some childish name-calling.  In these cases, people feel safe voicing criticisms knowing that speaking out won’t directly take away their livelihoods or affect their personal lives.  This suggests Continue reading »

Stuff I Do Before Bed to Help Me De-Stress

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Two weeks ago I talked about reducing stress and slowing down, a subject that’s been on my mind a lot lately as I work to, well, feel better about things.  And getting a decent night’s sleep is a big part of that.

Let me rephrase—when I say “getting a decent night’s sleep” I’m talking about more than just the actual body-rejuvenating sleep I try to get eight hours of per night.  I’m talking about an overall end of the night routine that’ll relax me overall, and that includes the part before I actually go to sleep.

So here’s a list of things I do before going to bed—I don’t manage to do all of them every night, but I think of them as general guidelines I like to follow.  (On a side note, I once had a friend who kept an elaborate 3+ hour going-to-bed routine from which she never, ever deviated, to the point where Continue reading »

I’m Querying My New Novel! (Here’s How That Works)

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Quick Note: If you’re a literary agent who’s stumbled across my blog, this might be a good place to start reading ;-)

I’ve had this one in the works for a LONG time—MFA Thesis Novel is my satirical novel inspired by my experiences in grad school at the University of Nebraska.  It’s about a twentysomething writer from the Northeast named Flip (who’s totally not based on me at all, btw) who leaves his mind-numbing office job to start an MFA in creative writing program in an unnamed midwestern state.  The problem, though, is that Flip’s a literature nerd who’s stuck in the past—his heroes are Joseph Heller, John Updike, and Kingsley Amis, and he hasn’t read much of anything from the past twenty years—which means his fellow grad students are more than happy to tear his novel to pieces on the first day of workshop.

While Flip’s main goal is to create great writing, the other grad students…think differently.  Everyone around him is obsessed with getting published, beefing up their CVs, Continue reading »

A Kind of Sappy Post About Why You Should Keep Your Space Clean

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This is my Japanese-style shower.

It’s a separate room from both the sink and the toilet, with stone walls, a stone floor, and a sliding plastic door.  The bathtub is deep enough so you can sit with your knees hugging your chest with the water up to your neck, and it’s surprisingly comfortable.  The shower head detaches and can be held in your hand, fastened up high (my preferred style), or clipped at waist-height so you can wash yourself while sitting down.  Because the walls, door, and window are all watertight you can spray water anywhere you want, and it all runs down that big drain in the lower left-hand corner.

I’m showing you this because 1) It’s a pretty cool way to take a shower, and 2) It’s a bitch to clean. Continue reading »

Productivity, Burnout, and Trying to Do It All

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I’ll start this (short) entry by doing something I don’t normally do: pointing you toward something I didn’t write.

That something is this BuzzFeed News article by Anne Helen Peterson entitled How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, and it covers a social phenomenon I’ve talked about elsewhere but haven’t seen explored in this kind of depth.  The gist is that by trying to do it all—and by trying to harness every ounce of our productivity and working efficiency—we’re not only burning ourselves out, we’re overlooking simple errands like registering to vote or taking knives to get sharpened (something I’ve never done, btw.), which in turn is having adverse effects on our sense of fulfillment.

In addition, the article reads like a laundry list of issues that I’ve dealt with myself and/or have had friends deal with, including putting off low-reward errands, maximizing time by cutting meal prep, excessive multitasking, learning to overwork while in grad school (!), Continue reading »

Good Art Breaks Us Out of the Monotony

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A bunch of years ago I read a book of letters and short pieces by the writer Franz Kafka, and one of his reflections struck me hard at the time, in reference to how really great books affect us:

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.

(bold emphasis mine)

I thought about this axe for the frozen sea idea a lot, so much so that I talked about it on my old blog over a decade ago.  I didn’t go into much detail about it the time, but I feel like it deserves my attention more than ever now. Continue reading »

Don’t Just Say “I’m Too Busy”

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I’ll try to keep this one brief, since I’ve got stuff to do today.

I don’t like saying “I’m too busy” when someone invites me to something or asks me for a favor.  It feels like a copout—because in a lot of ways, it is.

If have a chance to pick up a new editing job or write something or even just go out for drinks with friends, I try to think about the other things I’m currently juggling in comparison to this new opportunity.  Do I really want to do this new thing, or would I rather focus on what I’m already working on? Continue reading »

Thoughts on Hyping Your Shit

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I think a lot about promotion, and how a lot of creative people don’t like doing it.  I hear from a lot of creative people that they want to be in a position where they can handle the actual making-stuff part and leave the selling and the hyping and the getting-the-word-out-about-the-stuff-they-made parts to someone else who’s doing it as a separate job.

For whatever reason, this attitude seems especially prevalent among other writers I meet, who find the idea of promotion distasteful.  Maybe I notice this because I also used to feel awkward about promoting my work, especially after having jobs where I had to sell shit I didn’t care about.  The selling at these jobs sucked so bad that I began to hate the entire idea of selling anything, especially if I was doing it to make money for some super-impersonal corporation somewhere.

Selling things for other people made me feel unclean because I was usually repeating a script someone else had written Continue reading »

I Paid Off ALL My Student Loans!!!* (with an asterisk)

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Happy New Year everybody—I’m feeling rejuvenated after my vacation and ready to take on a whole new set of challenges for 2019.  Hope you’re feeling the same way.

I also reached a big, BIG milestone, as implied by the title: last month, after making my first wire transfer of money back from Japan, I paid off the very last $3,400 of my very last student loan.  At 5.8%, that final loan was costing me $16 bucks a month in interest, but moreso than the monthly savings is knowing that I’m now COMPLETELY FREE OF INTEREST-ACCUMULATING DEBT, which just feels all kinds of awesome.

It was hard to describe the feeling of pure freedom I experienced when I clicked Send on that last payment, Continue reading »

Why I Still Write in a Journal Every Day

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(well, really like 4-5 days a week, but that made for a less catchy title)

I first started journaling seventeen years ago back in early December 2001, when I was sixteen, worked in the dairy section at my town’s grocery store, had just gotten my first car, still watched Simpsons reruns every night on Fox, and spent more time acting in school plays than writing.  So why did I start journaling?

Truth is, I don’t really remember—maybe it’s that I’d entered a time in my life when I was first starting to do things on my own (getting that first car was a BIG deal) while the last remnants of my childhood were slipping away forever.  Or maybe things in my life were just going really well and I wanted to record how awesome they were so I wouldn’t ever forget.  Also, I won’t lie—I secretly hoped I might be famous someday Continue reading »

I Edited a Writing Anthology!!!

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So this one’s pretty cool.

Last spring I put together and edited Concord Writers Night Out 2018: An Anthology of Writers and Writing in association with the New Hampshire Writers’ Project.  It’s a collection of short stories, novel excerpts, poems, and essays from writers around the area with an introduction and a short story by yours truly. (My piece is called “Rejection,” a fictional rejection letter to a REALLY bad writer).  I handled the editing and the bulk of the organizing while fellow writers Gary Devore and Kevin Barrett formatted the e-pub and distribution ends.

It was a pretty rad project to work on, and I’m happy to say that it’s finally out.  After much discussion we decided to make the electronic versions available FREE to literally anyone who wants one, so if you want to check it out you can download the PDF from the NHWP website or get the e-pub for Kindles and tablets directly from the publisher or the iTunes store. Continue reading »