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 »

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 »

What to Do When You Double Book

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Last week, things got pretty fucked.

Okay, to be fair, nothing actually got fucked—I was just REALLY busy juggling different deadlines, appointments, and other commitments that all seemed to fall to the end of April.  To make matters worse, I still haven’t entirely unpacked at my new place, so my office and much of the rest of the apartment is still a mass of boxes and piles.  This meant that when I needed to find something from those boxes or piles, instead of just reaching over and grabbing it, I needed to search for it, which meant I spent a lot of time searching that could have been been spent on other things (like actually unpacking…) Continue reading »

Getting Back on Track After Being Sick…

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For the past few years I’ve found myself getting a nasty sinus cold around the first week of April—two years ago after a long day of exploring a cherry blossom park in Joetsu, Japan, and last year when I was preparing the pre-orders for MFA Thesis Novel.  And this year, the same thing happened again.

I’d been getting a bit of a sore throat in the mornings and at night for a week or so, but it never lasted long.  Last Wednesday, though, I found myself with a bad runny nose that got worse throughout the day, and after crashing hard that night, I woke up the next day too tired to do much of anything.

I write about this in detail not because I want to share a play-by-play of being sick (because not only is that gross, but it’s unnecessary storytelling-wise), but to emphasize that sickesses come up unexpectedly, often at bad times when we have other things going on, creating real repercussions for how we deal with them.  Charging forward with your regular routine even when you’re sick is rarely if ever a good choice: not only will you not be at your best and likely make mistakes, Continue reading »

Giving Up The Dream…

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This week’s post is a really important one.  It’s also a difficult one for me to write, and might hit close to home for a lot of people.  So, fair warning.

When we grow up, we’re surrounded by images of what a friend of mine recently referred to as The Dream—an image of the way our lives are quote-unquote “supposed to” look like.

The exact specifications of The Dream will no doubt look different to everyone, but it usually goes something like this:

 

What is The Dream?

In the way of life I’m calling The Dream, the person has a stable, full-time job they can consistently work without fear of being laid off or having to change jobs.  Said job pays a salary that’s not only enough to live on, but enough to save for retirement and afford amenities of decent quality, including furniture, vacations, late-model cars, and consumer electronics.  The salary from said job also allows the person to buy a house that’s relatively new, relatively large, and has some amount of property (most often Continue reading »

Bad Bosses Blame Their Employees for Mismanaged Workplaces

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A while back, I worked at a Day Job that was really, really busy.  While I was there the workload went up exponentially, though we only had a small increase in staff.  That meant we had slightly more people doing a LOT more work, which meant way more work for all of us.

During that extremely busy time, my boss dealt with the situation by checking in that we were constantly on task and not goofing off.  “Utilize your time well,” was her favorite phrase (complete with pretentious use of the word “utilize”), and she repeated it over and over at meetings.

Years later at a different Day Job, I experienced something similar.  At this particular Day Job I was responsible for waaaaaaaaaaay more work than a reasonable person could do in a 40-hour workweek, which led to a lot of stress and confusion.  To make matters worse, my boss often expected me to be in two places at once, and would regularly add extra tasks on to my already enormous workload.

This time, I tried explaining to my boss that there was simply too much work to do.  However, when I did, he always pivoted and said that I needed to manage my work better, stop wasting time, and learn to prioritize.  Continue reading »

I Used to Lie During Job Interviews: Here’s Why

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The other day I was updating my CV in preparation for a part-time gig I picked up through word-of mouth.  In the opening section I wanted to summarize the work I do, and after some trial and error, I came up with this:

I’m a working fiction writer and editor/writing coach with experience in EFL (English as a Foreign Language). My teaching experience extends to Japan and across cultures, while my editing work extends across both fiction and academic scholarship.

When I think about the work I’ve done, and the work I’d like to be doing in the future, this statement feels really natural to me—as in, it sums up my experience accurately, and isn’t just an exaggerated image I put down so I can get jobs.

That got me thinking more about previous years, when every time I wrote a resume or went to a job interview, I tried to craft an image of myself that the company wanted to hear.

In short: I used to lie about myself and my career goals. Continue reading »

Finding Meaning in a Day Job, Career, or Creative Work

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Having a meaningful life is pretty important.

Think about it: If your life isn’t exciting, interesting, stimulating, fun, important, influential, or engrossing, what else is there to look forward to?  Mindless consumption of entertainment?  Repetitive chores and routines?  The empty pursuit of money and material wealth?  Those don’t sound very good to me.

People, I’ve found, find meaning in all kinds of ways.  Many find meaning in family relationships: finding a romantic partner, having kids, raising their own family, or connecting with parents, siblings, or other close relatives.  Society places a lot of value on family too, like how the nuclear family is super important in the West.

A lot of people grow up with the impression that family and romantic relationships are the best way to make a meaningful life (i.e., that family is the most important thing).  As such, many people have the impression that careers and paid work are only important in that they allow you to provide for a family.  In other words: Continue reading »

The Stable Life vs. The Creative Life

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In my English courses with Japanese students we discuss a variety of topics.  A few weeks ago I posed them a question I was genuinely curious about: What is your Dream Job?

Part of why I like teaching abroad is that it gives me an insight into another culture and how Japanese people think, which in turn helps me understand my own culture.  I had no idea what kind of dream job a bunch of twenty-year-old Japanese English majors might have.  Teacher?  Hotel clerk?  Translator?  Lawyer?  Generic office worker with an important-sounding job title?

The notion of knowing your dream job is interesting to me because it implies that you have some passion for something you really want to do.  My dream job, of course, is being a full-time novelist, though when I was twenty I don’t think I really understood that yet.  Maybe when you were twenty years old you had a job you wanted to do more than any other, or maybe now you still have a job you’re aspiring to—don’t give up yet!

Anyway, I posed the dream job question several times Continue reading »

Do You Use Your Day Job to Find Emotional Stability?

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This topic hits pretty close to home for me.

When I was 22 and just out of college, I worked a few temporary jobs and side projects, but had very little stability.  I was still living at home, didn’t know where I wanted my life to go, and didn’t have any real creative goals.  I spent a lot of time reading, sleeping, and meeting up with friends who were in similar boats as me now that they were out of college too.  Most days it seemed like the path I’d been on for the past 17 years from kindergarten until college had flipped off the tracks and derailed.  I felt stuck.

During this time I suffered from some pretty bad anxiety and depressive episodes that I had trouble talking to people about.  I felt embarrassed that I was having these problems, and it really hurt knowing that several of my closest friends had left New Hampshire to find new jobs and start exciting new lives where they had plenty of spending money and didn’t have to live with their parents.

I felt like I had a lot of energy to do things, but no focus, Continue reading »

Don’t Leave Your Creative Teammates Hanging (But If You Have To, Do It With Class!)

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I went through a rough time recently with a Creative Project Whose Name I Won’t Mention Here.  This project is a team effort that requires me to work closely with a few other people toward a common goal. Each person has a job, and we worked together to produce something we’re really proud of.

Until one person jumped ship.

Their leaving was pretty gradual: they started out by citing some personal issues and asking for more time, which we were happy to give them.  However, a few weeks turned into a few months, during which the person started replying slowly and briefly to messages where I asked for updates, then stopped replying at all.

This put the project in a weird state of limbo, especially since we had other collaborators on the line, promises to keep, and at least one financial-based deadline.  Finally, after several weeks of silence, Continue reading »

Companies Treat Their Employees Like Garbage Kind of Often – A Pattern Explored

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A while ago I was talking to a friend who was having trouble at his job.  His company had gone through a merger with another company and was in the middle of a major consolidation/reorganization.  As part of this consolidation/reorganization, some higher-up got on a video call (this happened during COVID) to announce that they were instigating major layoffs, then immediately signed off and declined to comment because he was too cowardly to face the repercussions of what the company was doing.

Man, what a douchebag!

Anyway, my friend was fortunate enough not to be affected by said layoffs, but when the smoke cleared he found that his department was badly understaffed and everyone was overworked.  As a result, he started working a lot of (thankfully paid) overtime and having an overall rough time at work.  My friend had also been promised a raise several months previous, but Continue reading »