Stay-at-Home COVID-19 Creative Work Schedule!

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If you’ve read my earlier posts on Coronavirus in Japan, you may recall that cases here have progressed more slowly than in the States, and there haven’t been nearly as many.  Schools have been almost entirely closed since early March, and they’re slated to stay closed until the end of May at least.  In Toyama, most businesses are still open, albeit with limited hours and fewer customers, and most people seem to be practicing safe social distancing, mask-wearing, and hand sanitizing.

I too have been working from home since early April, and have started to understand what my friends and family back home are dealing with.  Not leaving your house…kind of sucks, especially when your house is a three-room apartment and you spend most of your day sitting on a tatami mat floor. Continue reading »

Working on New Stuff Always Gets Me Excited: Miranda Reeder of Minyan/Harlevin Visual Novels

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Miranda Reeder writes and draws visual novels (kind of like graphic novels, except you play them on the computer) under the name Minyan and the label Harlevin, where she has over 1,400 followers on Itch.io.  Her VNs include Arena Circus, The Pretenders Guild, Mnemonic Devices, and Lilith Hall, and her current project with Fablesoft Studios, Twisted: A Dark Fairytale, raised over $2,300 on Kickstarter in October 2019.

I first met Miranda in Toyama, Japan, where she spent three years in the JET program teaching English.  After leaving Japan she returned to Ohio to pursue a master’s in Japanese translation at Kent State University, and over winter break we talked via Skype about staying motivated, balancing creativity with Day Job work, and sharing her passion with her family. Continue reading »

Using Your Day Job as a Cover Story

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Think about the last time you were at a social gathering with people you didn’t know.  Think about the last time one of them approached you, or you approached them—and whether the person was older or younger than you, whether they were more established, whether they were an imposing authority figure like a boss, or whether they were a cute guy/girl you were interested in.

Now think about the things you talked about: where you were from, your hobbies, some observation about the gathering.  There’s a lot you might have talked about, but there’s one imposing question that comes up over and over in this situation, and it’s one that’s caused an insane amount of stress for me as well as for other creative people:

What do you do? Continue reading »

A Quick Thought: Day Jobs as a Way of Engaging With the World

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When I read or watch or listen to things, I always keep an eye out for insights into the creative life—the kind of life I write about on this blog, and the one I most want to forge for myself. Last week I read an old interview with the novelist Hanya Yanagihara in conversation with Alexis Cheung in the Oct./Nov. 2017 issue of The Believer, and while the whole interview provided excellent food for thought, I found myself most drawn to Yanagihara’s thoughts on why she still keeps her day job as editor of T: The New York Times Style Magazine:

Writing is essentially interior work, and many writers are interior personalities.  If I didn’t have a job, I know I’d spend virtually all my time indoors, never speaking to anyone.  Having a job forces you out of the world of your work, and into the one where you get to observe people: how they speak and move and think.  Yes, you can imagine all this, but as a fiction writer, you can never observe enough the rhythms of how humans move through the world, how they possess their own bodies, how they say and don’t say things.

Continue reading »

Every Job is a Real Job as Long as It Pays Real Money

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I hate it when people use the term “real job” to describe a certain type of employment.  Like, what do people even mean when they say this?  If some jobs are “real jobs,” are the rest of the jobs out there “fake jobs?”  How about “unreal jobs?”  “Pretend jobs?”

I’ve sometimes asked people to describe what they meant by “real job” and each time, without exception, the person found themselves at a loss for words.  Being full-time seemed to have something to do with it, but not all full-time jobs were “real jobs.”  Paying out a lot of money also seemed to make certain kinds of jobs “real,” but that wasn’t the whole story.  Was a “real job” one where you took your responsibilities seriously?  Not really, since I know a lot of people who don’t take their so-called “real jobs” seriously at all.  Or was it a job that leads to a bigger career?  That description falls short too, Continue reading »

Can You Trust Your Coworkers With Your Creative Goals?

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Last week I wrote about how, during a night out with my Japanese coworkers while mildly under the influence, I revealed to one of my superiors that I wanted to be a novelist.  In addition to helping me reflect on my personal goals, the episode got me thinking about the question in the title: when is it OK to talk with your coworkers about your creative goals?

I’ve written at length about how and why I’ve kept my creative goals a secret at my different Day Jobs, but there have also been times when I’ve felt comfortable telling coworkers, and even bosses, that my real goal was to be a writer.  This was usually because I’d developed comfortable relationships with them, so revealing more of who I really was felt natural, and helped strengthen those relationships significantly.

There’s a few things to consider when debating whether to tell your coworkers about your creative goals, so here’s a quick list: 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 »

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 »

How to Deal When Your Day Job Makes You Do Pointless Shit

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We’ve all been there: You’re sitting at your Day Job minding your own business when your boss or some coworker comes up and asks you to attend a boring meeting, fill out a pointless report, finish some useless project, or take on a new task that you know will absolutely 100% never benefit anyone or anything.  It’s times like this when you sit back, throw your clenched fists in the air, and voice that familiar lament we’ve all felt a million times:

Why do I have to do this????

Being handed pointless tasks at work reminds me of being in middle school when a teacher needed to fill a lesson period and would give us some hastily photocopied worksheet that didn’t even try to teach us anything or hone any skills.  Instead, the whole point of the worksheet Continue reading »

Does Your Job Make You Censor Yourself?

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  • Have you ever wanted to post online about something you were involved in but were afraid of how your job would react?
  • Have you ever kept a creative project secret from your coworkers even if you could openly talk about it with everyone else?
  • Do you worry that some aspect of your life outside of work clashes with your at-work persona in ways that could potentially cause a BIG problem?

All of these are feelings I’ve dealt with, and they’re a big deal. Continue reading »

There’s No Google Maps for the Creative Life

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The other day I was meeting with my local writer’s group (small plug for them here), and afterward a younger guy who was finishing a creative writing MFA came up to me.  He was new to the group and had a lot of good ideas, and that night he had a deliberate look in his eyes and an important question he very badly wanted to ask:

“So, what did you do, like, for a job after you graduated?”

The question caught me off guard because it had been so long since anyone asked me that.  It brought me back to when I was twenty-two and my friends and I Continue reading »

Day Job Quandary: Is It Better to Be Bored or Busy?

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I go back and forth on this all the time.

I’ve had workdays where I had thousands upon thousands of things that needed doing, To-Do lists a mile long, people asking me every two minutes to do more things, and a string of deadlines that I absolutely had to get done no matter what.  And it sucked.

But then I’ve had jobs where there wasn’t nearly enough to do (or nothing of any real importance to do) so that I had to stretch out what little work I actually had over hours and hours as I faced near-interminable boredom and a fury of clock-watching that made me feel like I’d be stuck there forever with no escape.  And that sucked too.

This begs the question: Is it better to have a Day Job where you feel busy and overwhelmed, or one where you feel bored and underused? Continue reading »