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 »

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 »

Doing More With Video as a Creative Person

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I think a lot about some advice I got from the Youtuber and speedrunner Karl Jobst during our Day Job interview: Everyone in a creative field should be using Youtube, because whatever you’re doing, it can only help you build your platform.

There’s a lot of truth to this.  On one level, people watch a lot of YouTube—like, billions of people watching billions of videos racking up zillions of views.  The YouTube algorithm also drives viewers to keep watching, to check out new YouTubers, and to watch videos related to what they’ve already seen.  So, not only is YouTube a HUGE outlet for sharing your work, but it can also help you reach people in new ways that can potentially be fun and natural.

Plus, YouTube advertising is like, an enormous industry that helps creators earn real, folding money, if that’s the direction you’re headed in.

On my end, though, I want to be a writer, not a YouTuber, so a big part of me doesn’t want to get wrapped up in the process of prepping, filming, editing, and hyping videos all the time, since I’m already busy enough as it is.

This begs a really important question: Is there a way for creative people to do more with internet video without it becoming their main focus? Continue reading »

The Quest for 50

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I’ve embarked on a Quest.  Some might even call it a Second Quest.

It’s a quest fraught with danger, menace, and hazards at every turn, a quest that involves a perilous journey whose conclusion is uncertain, a quest beyond the reaches of anything mere mortals can imagine, and a quest that will undoubtedly expose me to attacks by dastardly villains who’ll stop at nothing to thwart my goals.

Fantasy-speak aside: I’m looking for more online reviews of MFA Thesis Novel.

(Also, my apologies for the somewhat click-baity title, since I was looking for an entertaining way to lead into this topic and thought the whole pseudo-fantasy bit would be fun.  Keep reading, though, and I’ll explain more!) Continue reading »

Here’s What I Got Done in 2022

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So I’ll admit, I’m a little behind on the blogging game: after taking some time off from writing and creative work for Christmas and New Years, I returned to But I Also Have a Day Job last week to write about my New Years Resolutions.

Thinking about the coming year also got me reflecting on the previous year and what I’ve been getting done (I made a similar post for what I got done in 2021 too).  In a lot of ways, 2022 was my biggest year ever as a writer, both in terms of accomplishments, and making positive life changes.  However, it’s easy for me to forget that when I’m busy or having a stressful time, which is why in this post I decided to list out my accomplishments for 2022.

In total, that list came out to 8 different accomplishments—and as much as I love Top Ten Lists in the David Letterman sense, it didn’t seem right to force two more in just for the sake of aesthetics.  It also didn’t feel right to put these accomplishments in order of importance, so instead I’ve listed them out chronologically to form a mini-story of what my creative work year looked like.

So without further ado, here’s what I got done in 2022… Continue reading »

Do You REALLY Need an MFA to Become a Writer?

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Do You Really Need an MFA to Become a Writer

Instead of a full post this week, I thought I’d link to an article I just had published on how writers gain the skills they need to succeed, and how grad school is just one way of building a writing career (though there are other benefits to grad school too!).

The article was for the email newsletter Spill It! put out by Vine Leaves Press, which sends out monthly articles on thought-provoking topics.  (You can check out the Spill It! newsletter here.)

Plus, this article was a paid writing gig, which is always nice ;-)

I’ve written on this blog about my own grad school experiences and how, while I learned a lot there, it was an incredibly rough experience and I wished the environment had been more positive. (But hey, it also gave me plenty of material to work into MFA Thesis Novel, which I’m super proud of and hope will help make these programs better!) Continue reading »

Reflections on Six Years of Blogging

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Hard to believe that I started working on the But I Also Have a Day Job blog six (!) years ago this week.  At this time in 2016 I was testing designs and playing with WordPress formatting while I drafted the very first posts on Day Job Basics, and from there, it was off to the races.

This blog represented a really big step for me: back in 2016, I’d finished grad school, was trying to sell one novel and finish another, and made a major life change by moving out of Nebraska, where I’d gone to grad school and stayed an extra year working in the Agriculture department.

I knew I had to start taking my writing more seriously and figuring out my next steps, and the But I Also Have a Day Job blog was a HUGE step in clarifying the direction I wanted to take my creative work and my life in general.  Before this blog, I didn’t have much of an online presence at all, had very little published work, and it felt like I was just barely starting out.

Fast forward to six years later, and I’m…pretty satisfied with how how far I’ve come.  I haven’t done as much as I’ve liked, but I’m overall Continue reading »

Speedrunning Legend: An Interview with Karl Jobst

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Karl Jobst is a YouTuber and streamer whose channel documenting video game speedrunning has tens of millions of views.  He holds a plethora of speedrunning records in Perfect Dark and Goldeneye 007 on the N64, and was the first to beat the Dam level of Goldeneye on Agent in 52 seconds, surpassing a record that had stood for fifteen years.  His YouTube videos have covered astounding speedrunning feats, new discoveries, investigations into video game market manipulation by Wata Games, and the scandals surrounding gaming personality Billy Mitchell. The last of these videos led to his being sued by Mitchell in September 2021, for which he is currently awaiting trial.

Karl and I first met in 2000 on the GameFAQs.com Goldeneye 007 page when we were both fourteen and writing strategy guides for the site.  We corresponded by email, then fell out of touch for over twenty years until I found his YouTube channel.  I reached out to him as a blast from the past, and over Zoom we discussed classic gaming, positive life changes, and finding the balance between money and passion.

 

Part I: As Soon As We Did It, I Was Hooked

 

But I Also Have a Day Job: How old were you when you first got into video games?

Karl Jobst: Two and a half.  Some of my earliest memories are of playing a computer game, specifically Ultima V.  It’s a very complex game, and I don’t think the modern generation would even be able to play it.  Back then they didn’t really hold your hand and guide you.  It required a lot of proactiveness and investigation.  I probably wasn’t doing it right, because specifically my earliest memory is of me dying in the game. Continue reading »

I Made a Kick-Ass New Website!!! (and Here’s Why!)

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(I mean, a kick-ass new website besides this one, of course ;-)

ianmrogersauthor.com has been online for a few weeks, first in a “Coming Soon!” capacity, but more recently in more substantial form as I added pages and links.  I’m really happy with how it’s come out, people seem to like it, and I can always go back and makes changes later.

I wanted the new author website to have a cleaner, sleeker feel than But I Also Have a Day Job (which I intentionally designed to look like a blog from the late 2000s) and be easier to navigate, ESPECIALLY on a phone.  The plan is to keep the new website as a separate entity from BIAHADJ (which I assure you isn’t going anywhere!) as a way of highlighting both MFA Thesis Novel and my editing work (which I’m doing more of now!).

When people who don’t know me look me up, I’d like the new website to make a better first impression and be a bit cleaner around the edges while still retaining my intentional overuse of words like “awesome” and “totally.”

I also wrote a short humor piece especially for the website: Imaginary Hate Mail I’ve Received About MFA Thesis Novel.  I wanted a fun, absurd piece that was a spin-off of the novel Continue reading »

MFA Thesis Novel Launch Party Recap!

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MFA Thesis Novel was released last Tuesday (wooooooooo!), though for me, the real release day felt like last Saturday, when I held the novel launch party at Main Street BookEnds in my hometown of Warner, New Hampshire.

This was a BIG day for me—as in, I wanted it to be as big as I could make it.  It was also my second time doing a reading at BookEnds (the first was back in 2019 when I released Eikaiwa Bums), and because this reading was for an actual novel, I wanted it to be even better.

 

Preparing

I did a fair amount of promotion for the event beforehand: besides getting it up on the BookEnds website, I put up flyers around town, mentioned it in some blog posts, sent out a message on my email list, made a Facebook event, sent it to the town email newsletter, and Continue reading »

The MFA Thesis Novel Pre-Order is Done!!!

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MFA Thesis Novel launches TOMORROW (!!!) and I spent most of last week shipping out copies from the Special Pre-Order period.  I was no stranger to bulk mailings from the Art Swap days, but this was my first time tackling a mailing this big.

After the pre-order period I crunched some numbers and realized that with all the pre-orders, copies I’d need for future events, and probable future webstore purchases, it made sense to order 250 books and get an extra 10% bulk discount on top of the regular discount.

Continue reading »

Novel Events: Come See My Online Readings in March and the MFA Thesis Novel Launch in April!

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It’s that time!  I’m kicking off an actual, for-serious book tour promoting MFA Thesis Novel (!), with events both online and in person!  This includes the actual novel launch party (!!!!!!) that’s sure to be an amazing time:

Interested in coming to see me?  Read on for the event descriptions, plus some info at the end about how I got involved with each one…. Continue reading »