For Creative People Who Have to Keep the Bills Paid
Are you hard at work on projects that bring you tremendous fulfillment but don’t exactly pay in folding money? Do you face the ever-harrowing struggle of balancing creative work with life’s other responsibilities? Is the job where you spend a substantial portion of your time not what really drives you, even though you do it anyway?
Then you’ve come to the right place. We all gotta keep the bills paid.
Every time you create something, it makes a positive change.
Every time you share a new idea with at least one person, that creates a positive change too.
And every conversation, every group gathering, every hangout, every project, report, blog post, tweet, journal entry, game, cooked meal, video chat, jigsaw puzzle, and inspirational meme makes a positive change too, because you’ve created something that didn’t exist before.
Now, think about this: Continue reading
I can’t drive a car in Japan and I don’t miss it at all.
When I first got to Japan I planned on walking and taking the train to get where I needed to go. Cars are expensive, and learning to drive on the left seemed like a real pain, in addition to the difficulties involved with buying a car and dealing with foreign vehicle registrations. Screw all that
…except that things in my suburban small town can be pretty far apart, which makes for a LOT of walking, not to mention tired feet. So when my coworker suggested I invest a few hundred bucks in a decent road bike, I decided it might be a good idea. Continue reading
Quick Recap: The Coronavirus pandemic hasn’t hit Japan nearly as hard as most other countries, and in my region of Toyama there’s only been 227 cases since COVID-19 came here in late March. Still, schools in my city were closed for most of March, all of April, and the first three weeks of May. During that time I mostly stayed home, running a schedule that mixed creative work and Day Job work, where my coworkers and I made English movies for the kids to watch at home.
But that’s all changed now—schools in my city opened on May 21st, and as of June 1st the foreign teachers are back to work too.
Since most schools in the US are still closed, Japan’s school openings…may seem surprising to some of you. Going to school naturally involves a lot of people being close together indoors for long periods of time, Continue reading
I haven’t caught the Coronavirus, nor do I know anyone who has. I also still have a job, got a $1,200 stimulus check from the US government, and I’m going to get another ¥100,000 yen stimulus (just under $1,000) from the Japanese government in a few weeks. My part of Japan has had relatively few cases, and almost everywhere in my city has stayed open except for schools—which has given me a lot of extra creative work time. I also got a haircut yesterday—the barber wore a mask, and since not many people go to that particular barbershop, I felt pretty safe.
In the grand scheme of things I shouldn’t feel sad at all, since there are other people out there who have things way worse than me—but still, I often feel down in the dumps.
If you’re like me and don’t have any of the more serious problems I listed in the opening paragraph, maybe you’re feeling guilty that the comparatively minor problems you do have are getting you down Continue reading
Before starting this post I responded to a text someone had sent me and then put my phone away on silent so I wouldn’t be tempted to look at.
Why? Because I HATE getting distracted by texts when I’m trying to work on something.
My usual mode of working involves disconnecting from my phone and all the distractions that come with it when I’m trying to get something done. This normally works pretty well…except when I’m feeling down, or having trouble with my work, or waiting for something important. In these cases I’ll intermittently pick up my phone hoping for a new message that’ll boost up my energy,.
That kind of compulsive phone-checking is…not good, and I don’t like that it invades my work habits. At best, these microchecks distract me even further Continue reading
In this occasional series, I’ll be looking at some non-creative, non-work things I do that both relax me and mentally prepare me to start back on creative work. Work stuff is important, but non-work stuff matters too.
When I was a kid I did jigsaw puzzles I assembled on a sheet of plywood under my bed. This was between late elementary school and early high school, when I got good enough to put together the 500- and 1000-piece landscapes and illustrations my family had amassed over a generation, and that I regularly got for Christmases and birthdays. I’d assemble each puzzle over a period of weeks (or, as I got busier, months), working for stretches of an hour or two while listening to music.
Over the years I honed the steps necessary for doing puzzles quickly and efficiently: browsing through the box to find the edge pieces, trying likely matches first, putting together Continue reading
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
Haley Alt is a dystopian YA author whose three novels have sold more than 10,000 copies on Amazon under the name H. Alt. (The first half of her fourth novel, Godless, is available for free on Wattpad.) She recently moved back to the States after almost eight years in Japan, where she taught English, worked at a travel agency, and promoted sightseeing and did English translation for the town of Tateyama in Toyama. I met her through my work on the TRAM art and culture zine, and sat down with her at a Starbucks in the suburbs of Toyama City, where we talked about religion, her upcoming move back to America, how scary it is when people actually read your work, and how Tom Cruise helped her sell a lot of eBooks. Continue reading
I talk a LOT about work on this blog, so to switch things up I’ll be talking about some non-work stuff that impacts the work stuff in different ways. In this ongoing series I’ll go in-depth about some distinctly non-work stuff I do to enrich my life and de-stress—things that put me in better shape for when it’s time to sit down and do the work stuff again.
Let’s get one thing straight: I love Bob Ross.
I used to watch The Joy of Painting as a kid on weekend afternoons, when I’d flip through the channels and always catch episodes at the halfway point. (As a result, I don’t recall ever seeing Bob Ross actually paint a sky.) I was fascinated by Bob’s soft, gentle voice, and his amazing landscapes: the sharp mountains cutting into the sky, the puffy evergreen trees, the reflective lakes, the multicolored rocks, and even his red-roofed shacks. Continue reading
If you’re like me, you’ve been spending a lot more time at home lately, which is both a good and a bad thing.
It’s bad because we’re missing out on a lot of cool stuff, including events, vacations, hangouts with friends, and even the simple pleasures of being in public spaces like restaurants, coffee shops, or (for me) the town library. Being cooped up inside for too long can also have some pretty nasty effects on our mental health, and that’s not cool either.
On the flip side, more time at home is good because it gives you a lot more of that precious commodity known as Time. Even if you’re working from home and telecommuting keeps you just as busy, you’re still eliminating your actual commuting time, which adds up fast. So that should mean that Continue reading
In the words of every SNL host ever: What a week it’s been.
This week I was planning on posting some really Good News…that’s since turned into Bad News.
The Good News is that two months ago I got an email from one the small presses I’d sent MFA Thesis Novel (my novel about grad school life) to. The email said they enjoyed my book and wanted to publish it. The email was really short, so at first I wasn’t sure if I’d understood it correctly—but when I realized they were serious, I fell into a state of cautious ecstasy for the next few days. The email came in the middle of some other life shit I was dealing with that month, so the uncertainty of those first few emails added a lot of extra stress to an already difficult time.
Eventually the press sent me a publishing contract, Continue reading
I live in rural Toyama, Japan, where as of this writing there still haven’t been any confirmed cases of Coronavirus. All the stores, restaurants, and other businesses are open as usual, with the exception of special events and large gatherings. The rest of the world, though, doesn’t have it so lucky.
Back in the States, as I’m sure you’re aware, a lot of stuff is closed, and is expected to stay closed for a while. And while the government’s approved a $2.2 trillion dollar economic package to help out just about every sector of the economy, a fair amount of that money is actually going to huge multibillion dollar corporations. Even with the extra help, small businesses and independent contractors are still going to have a rough time.
The Great Recession that happened after 2008 was a rough time for a lot of people, including me—I needed a full-time job when I got back from Japan and had a lot of trouble finding one. Then, when I finally got one, the pay was pretty mediocre, and it was hard for me to Continue reading