Reflections on a Decade of Day Job Blogging

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Image from the National Library of Wales used under a Creative Commons 4.0 license.

Time brings great changes.

When I started keeping this blog nearly a decade ago, I was at a very different point in my life—I was just out of grad school, trying to get my first novel published, and struggling with the very real conflict of how to both live a creative life and bring in enough money to live on.

At the time, starting the Day Job blog felt like the perfect course of action for many reasons. Not only would it help me develop a web presence, but I needed to mentally sort out some very real conflicts about where my life was going, how writing fit into it, and how to define my identity as an adult on some sort of career path—all topics I went on to write about on this blog.  I’d also been working my own Day Jobs for over a year (first as a greenhouse assistant, then as an online test-grader) while writing MFA Thesis Novel on the side, so I felt ready to share this new route my life was taking.

Once upon a time, I was imagining (and even planning for) writing a nonfiction book (naturally titled But I Also Have a Day Job) about how creative people balance their creative work with keeping the bills paid Continue reading »

Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers: From Point-and-Click Adventure Game to Sort-Of Fantasy Novel (Part 2)

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In Part 1 (which you should totally read first), I talked about how Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers began as a point-and-click PC adventure game I worked on with my best friend and fellow adventure game fan Mike Rushia. The novel version comes out July 22nd, and I’m currently taking pre-orders for the book and bonus postcard set through my webstore. Here’s the second half of the story.

As the years went on, and especially when I moved to Nebraska for grad school and started working more heavily on my first novel about Japan, the Carcrash Parker adventure game just kind of….fell by the wayside.

This is really common for creative projects, I think, and it happens for a variety of reasons.  In our case, Mike and I being busy adults with jobs was definitely a factor, but a bigger reason was that the project itself was incredibly large, intimidating, and went beyond our skill set, especially when it came to the art.

Had we been friends with an art person, or been more savvy about finding illustrators online, this hurdle would have been less formidable. However, for us, at that time, the whole project just felt really insurmountable. Continue reading »

Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers: From Point-and-Click Adventure Game to Sort-Of Fantasy Novel (Part 1)

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Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers Carson's Room postcard

My second (and even more ridiculous) novel, Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers, is available for pre-order through my webstore, where you can get a signed copy and support me financially as an indie author, since when you buy directly from me, a bigger share of the sale goes to the author than if you buy on Amazon.

Today, though, I want to talk about how the novel came to be, why I’ve been working on this story in some form since 2008, and how a single story can take vastly different shapes

 

After College Ended, I Needed a Creative Project to Work On

Let’s rewind alllllllllll the way to summer 2007.  I’d just finished college, and was living at home in New Hampshire, working a temporary internship with a lake protection group.  I’d also just broken up with my girlfriend, a lot of my friends weren’t around anymore, my student loans were coming due, my trusty 1990 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme had to be scrapped due to a rusted-out brake line, and it felt like people were constantly asking me what I was going to do with my life.  When fall rolled around, my internship went from full-time to part-time, and I started spending more time at home.  It was a rough, lonely, and uncertain period in my life. Continue reading »

New Year’s Updates, Future Plans, and How to Navigate Life’s Challenges

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Happy New Year, everybody. I’m writing this two weeks into 2025 after taking some time off for the holidays, spending four days in Connecticut presenting at the in-person university residency where I teach online, and in general, getting oriented to being back at my desk.

It’s been a while since I updated this blog—that’s party by choice (I want to be spending my time on other things), partly by necessity (I’ve been too damned busy), and partly because I’m in transition (working on an updated version of my author page that should be up in a few months).

But I still want to keep people updated, let them know what’s going on, and assure all of you that I’m still moving toward my goals. If I’m being honest with myself, though, I haven’t been moving toward them as fast or as smoothly as I’d like, and I’ve been working on some serious course correction to get myself back on track.

In this post, I want to start by summarizing what I did in 2024 (a continuation of a separate year-end series I used to do), then move on to 2025, what the future holds, Continue reading »

2023 Reflections: What Went Well, and What Didn’t

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I’m not going to lie: 2023 was a rough year.

Though 2023 started off on an optimistic note, and the first half went really well, the second half took a major nosedive as my productivity, organization, and overall mood went WAY down.

So what happened? How did the year spiral downward, how did I handle it, and where does that leave me in 2024?

Let the 2023 reflections begin. Continue reading »

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 »

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 »

To Blog or Not to Blog? Is Regular Blogging Worth It?

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June was a busy month for me: I got back into working on my Secret New Novel draft (which won’t be Secret for much longer!), I had a few editing jobs that needed finishing, and I’m *still* unpacking and organizing after my move back in April.

As a result, I realized that I needed a blogging break, and took the last two weeks of June off.  For several years now, I’ve been blogging regularly every week with very few weeks missed, but during June, blogging felt less important than the other, more urgent matters demanding my attention.

Of course, the world didn’t come to an end because I didn’t blog for two weeks.  Instead, I felt more in control of my workload, and felt like I was prioritizing based on what needed to be done.
Continue reading »

Presenting Yourself Like a Boss (And a Creative Person)

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A few days ago I attended a friend’s wedding in central Pennsylvania, where I also served as the officiant (i.e., the person who conducts the ceremony).  It was a fun time for sure, and I got to meet a lot of new, interesting people while I was there.

The majority of wedding guests seemed to be in their early 30s, though there were a few Gen X-ers there as well.  I also really only knew the bride and groom, so after the ceremony I found myself in a position to sit down at a random table and introduce myself to people I didn’t know.  (All the weddings I’ve been to in the last two decades have been for close friends and family, so this was a relatively new experience.)

As such, when it came time to introduce myself and people asked me the “What do you do?” question, without thinking, I naturally responded with, “I’m a writer.”

And people thought that was really cool. Continue reading »

Side Hustle Highlights: Online University Teaching

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Somebody asked me the other day whether I was still teaching after I left my university job in Japan last year.  However, their actual question seemed to be Are you teaching full-time as your main job? which of course is a solid No.

I thought about the best way to answer, and finally replied with Yes, but not as my main job.

Whille I get most of my income from editing jobs these days, I worked as a teacher for a long time, first as a tutor and substitute teacher in New Hampshire, then at a private school in Japan, then in grad school teaching undergrad essay writing, then again in Japan.  I worked other jobs in between, of course, but over my working life I’ve definitely spent more time teaching than doing anything else.

Teaching is fun and interesting to me because I enjoy tackling the problem of how best to present material to students, and how to help them build their ideas in interesting ways.  The editing and coaching work I do uses a lot of those same principles as I help writers express their ideas in the fullest, clearest way possible, 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 »

A Fond Farewell to My Old Office…

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Last week in General Ian Life News: I moved to a new apartment.

The move itself was a fairly easy one, and one I’d been planning for a long time, to an apartment in the same town close to where I was living before.  The move itself went incredibly smoothly, since I had plenty of help and the new apartment was so close to my old place that we could easily shuttle things over using multiple car trips.  This was in sharp contrast to previous moves, where I’ve had to scramble and dash around to be out of my old place by a firm deadline.

While I’m very much looking forward to having my own place again (especially once everything’s finally set up!), in this post I want to say a warm goodbye to my old office, where I had a lot of good times and did a lot of meaningful work.
Continue reading »