I Edited (Another) Writing Anthology!

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So here’s another cool project I was involved in.

As some of you may remember, last year I spearheaded and edited an anthology of short stories, essays, and poems for the Concord branch of the New Hampshire Writers’ Project in my home state.  After we decided as a group to assemble a writing collection, I asked people for submissions, worked with the individual writers to polish their work, and assembled the manuscript, which Gary Devore finalized and reformatted for eReaders and paperback copies.

The anthology was fun and super-rewarding to work on, and the group was so happy with how it came out that we decided to do another one. Continue reading »

Here’s What I’m Working on RIGHT Now (Fall 2019 Edition)

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It helps me a lot to sit down and write about my current projects and creative goals (as opposed to just thinking about them), as well as what kind of progress I’m making toward them. This is a lot more helpful than keeping them in my head, where they swim around in the nebulous stormcloud that is my creative work life so I can’t see them with the proper perspective.

I try to be honest about my progress and setbacks on this blog because I don’t want to fall into a trap of pretending that I’m doing a kick-ass job if that’s not really the case. Pretending you’re doing better than you are is pretty unhelpful because 1) It alienates you from other people you can’t be open with, and 2) It hinders you from actually improving the way you organize your time because you’re living out a kind of fantasy where everything’s going just peachy.

Anyway, enough with the intro: here’s what I’m working on RIGHT NOW: Continue reading »

When You Do Creative Work With Your Friends, Everyone Wins

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When I was in the fifth grade my best friend and I recorded five double-sided cassette tapes worth of radio shows in my bedroom.  I had my own boom box (which was pretty much the coolest shit ever back then) with a six dollar Radio Shack microphone, and the two of us made jokes, ridiculous skits, and character impersonations we improvised on the fly.  I’ve still got them in a box somewhere as a time capsule of my earliest creative work.

Unlike the stories and comics I used to make as a kid, though, the radio shows were significant in that they were my first time making creative work with another person, as opposed to working alone.  That shit matters—a lot. Continue reading »

New Erochikan Zine Available! Plus Thoughts on Satire and Putting Out Your Own Work

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Combatting Life’s Challenges Through Learned Helplnessness: A User’s Guide is the third zine I’ve put together for the Erochikan collection, and it’s now available in my webstore.  This 18 page guide shows readers the many advantages to giving up on your aspirations and finding complacency with your current, mediocre life.  It’s illustrated with a selection of superficially appealing stock photos to help you visualize the surface-level happiness that awaits you!

For those of you not in the know, the Erochikan Zine project is something I started a few years ago for the now on-hiatus Art Swaps.  I had fun making them and people really liked them, so when I opened my webstore I printed some more copies and started selling them along with my Eikaiwa Bums chapbook, where they got even more positive responses.  (BTW, thanks to everyone who bought copies, either online, or at my reading back in August—you’re all awesome.)

The name Erochikan comes from the ero in erotic and the Japanese word chikan, a pervert who gropes women on crowded subways.  The fictitious company Continue reading »

Good Work Will Find Its Way: An Interview with Author Jonathan Face

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Jonathan Face is a computer programmer by day and the author of Catharsis, a horror novel set in a small New Hampshire town, which has over 28,000 downloads on Amazon. He’s also the author of The Remnants Part I and II, and most recently, Odd Tales, a collection of short fiction.  We grew up in the same small town of Warner, New Hampshire, and he graduated from the same high school as me a few years before I got there.  We met for the first time when I was back in the state and sat down at his parents’ dining room table to talk about minimum wage jobs, self-publishing, job security, and being open with your coworkers about your writing life. Continue reading »

New Hampshire Folks: Come Hear Me Talk About Life in Japan!

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Hey all,

No post this week since I’m back in New Hampshire enjoying some much-needed time off and doing a whole bunch of things I haven’t been able to do for the past 12 or so months.  In no particular order, here’s a quick list:

Continue reading »

Eikaiwa Bums is in a Brick and Mortar Bookstore!!!!

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The pictures don’t lie—that’s my chapbook short story, Eikaiwa Bums, on the shelf with the other authors at MainStreet BookEnds in Warner, New Hampshire.  The shelf price is a mere $3.00, with proceeds supporting both the author and a super-cool independent bookstore that’s been a staple of my hometown for over twenty years.

Here’s the coolest part—on Sunday, August 18th I’ll be at BookEnds giving an in-person reading and talking about what it’s really like to live and work in Japan.  The reading is totally FREE and will also be a good chance to catch up with me while I’m back in the States for summer break.  Watch for more updates closer to August…

It honestly feels pretty incredible to have something I wrote for sale in an actual bookstore and to have earned a place (albeit a very small one) among the writing community in my home state.  More than that, though, 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 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 »

Eikaiwa Bums Chapbooks Now Available! (Plus Thoughts on Webstore Mechanics and Why Personal Touches Matter)

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The big moment’s here!!!!!!!!!!111

The actual, printed copies of my chapbook, Eikaiwa Bums, got to Japan this week and are ready to order.  I’m not going to lie—opening that envelope and seeing them stacked up was all kinds of exciting, and it was something I’ve been looking forward to for a long time :-)

Quick catchup in case you’re just joining in: Eikaiwa Bums is a 20-ish page short story about life at a for-profit English conversation school in Japan.  It’s based on some themes from my Japan novel that I pitched to the good folks at Blue Cubicle Press and that they published last month as part of their Overtime series of chapbooks about work.  (If you’re interested in how the story went from novel draft to Blue Cubicle chapbook you can read all about it here.)

I’m sure a lot of you out there are asking the same question: How can I get a copy of this fine piece of writing? Continue reading »

I Signed a Book Contract!!! (Here’s How it Happened)

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AWESOME UPDATE: Eikaiwa Bums is out!  This post is about how I queried the press and signed the contract, but you can also read about what happened when it actually came out, or cut to the chase and order a copy from my webstore.

So a little while ago I got some REALLY amazing news: in August, Blue Cubicle Press will be publishing my short story, Eikaiwa Bums, as a chapbook in its Overtime series of fiction about work.  And just like that, I’ll have a book out.

Though this is hardly my first time getting my writing published, the Eikaiwa Bums chapbook feels like a BIG step because it’s an actual printed book that people can hold in their hand and read, as opposed to reading online or as part of a bigger magazine. (Don’t despair, virtual readers: there’ll Continue reading »