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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

Networking Is NOT a Dirty Word

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Last Saturday I went to the New Hampshire Writer’s Project yearly writer’s conference, the largest writing conference in my area.  It was a chance to hear a keynote speaker, participate in writing workshops, and learn more about marketing and promotion.

All that stuff was pretty useful, I guess (read: it was a lot of stuff I already knew), but one thing about the conference made me really, REALLY glad I went: the chance to meet people.

I wrote last week about how you present yourself as a creative person when you’re meeting people in social situations like weddings.  This applies even more in professional situations, where people actually WANT to know about your creative work and expect you to present yourself as a creative professional.  These situations can be even easier, I think, because in these situations, people are actively interested in learning about the work you do, since it’s potentially in the same realm as what they do.

In this post I want to talk a bit about how I’ve tackled networking and conference-type situations over the years, what I’ve learned, and where I screwed up.
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 »

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 »

Anti-Email and Phone Checking Challenge: How Am I Doing?

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Ever since the birth of this blog I’ve been grappling with how best to avoid electronic distractions, since it comes with the territory of managing a creative life.

In a damning scourge of anti-productivity, the same laptop, smartphone, browser window, and email account that we use to take care of productive work tasks also lead to horrible distractions.  How many times have you gone on Facebook to check the spelling of someone’s name and ended up poring through old photos?  How many Wikipedia rabbit holes have you wandered down when pausing for a quick fact check?  And worst of all, how much time have you burned through watching YouTube videos during work time because the algorithm 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 »

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 »

Fixed Mindsets vs. Growth Mindsets: A Way of Looking at the World

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Have you ever noticed how some people tend to persevere through challenges by doing their best, while others see challenges as beyond their reach and give up?

Think about the last bad day you had.  Maybe you got chewed out at work, something went wrong with your computer, you made a mistake at home, or you had a fight with a friend.  Maybe you found yourself in a situation where there seemed to be no way out, or where a solution seemed completely outside your reach.

When the bad day was over, did you think about ways that you could actively work to improve your situation?  Or, did you simply accept what happened as inevitable, as being completely outside of your control?

The difference between the two lies in Fixed Mindsets and Growth Mindsets, a concept pioneered by Stanford social scientist Carol S. Dweck about how ingrained patterns of thinking affect our ability to deal with challenges Continue reading »