The Day Job Blog

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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.

Using Your Day Job as a Cover Story

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Think about the last time you were at a social gathering with people you didn’t know.  Think about the last time one of them approached you, or you approached them—and whether the person was older or younger than you, whether they were more established, whether they were an imposing authority figure like a boss, or whether they were a cute guy/girl you were interested in.

Now think about the things you talked about: where you were from, your hobbies, some observation about the gathering.  There’s a lot you might have talked about, but there’s one imposing question that comes up over and over in this situation, and it’s one that’s caused an insane amount of stress for me as well as for other creative people:

What do you do? Continue reading »

I’m Not Using Amazon This Christmas—Here’s Why (and How!)

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‘Tis the season to be incredibly freakin’ busy.

December’s always been a hectic time for me.  I tend to start a lot of projects in the fall that are still on my plate at the end of the year, plus I always have a lot of friends to see, and two years ago I got stuck with a ridiculous amount of holiday overtime.  On top of all that, there’s a pretty important holiday in there somewhere.

Ever since I was a kid, Christmas has mattered—a lot.  My family and I still do big gift exchanges, even when I’m away (I call in via Skype on Christmas morning) and during the holidays I also reach out to friends I don’t see that often, which means writing Christmas cards, mailing gifts, and a plethora of holiday texts.  I don’t mind working hard to create special holiday moments for the people I care about, but this tends to take a lot of energy—and when it comes down to the wire, I’m always looking for ways to make December easier. Continue reading »

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 »

A Quick Thought: Day Jobs as a Way of Engaging With the World

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When I read or watch or listen to things, I always keep an eye out for insights into the creative life—the kind of life I write about on this blog, and the one I most want to forge for myself. Last week I read an old interview with the novelist Hanya Yanagihara in conversation with Alexis Cheung in the Oct./Nov. 2017 issue of The Believer, and while the whole interview provided excellent food for thought, I found myself most drawn to Yanagihara’s thoughts on why she still keeps her day job as editor of T: The New York Times Style Magazine:

Writing is essentially interior work, and many writers are interior personalities.  If I didn’t have a job, I know I’d spend virtually all my time indoors, never speaking to anyone.  Having a job forces you out of the world of your work, and into the one where you get to observe people: how they speak and move and think.  Yes, you can imagine all this, but as a fiction writer, you can never observe enough the rhythms of how humans move through the world, how they possess their own bodies, how they say and don’t say things.

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 »

Sometimes I Have Adventures in Japan – Series 9

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As many of you know, I love board games with a passion that far outweighs my skill at playing them, though sadly the board game craze hasn’t taken off in Japan like it has in the States. In the toy section at a bigger department store I found this Japanese version of Settlers of Catan with alternate cover art (the three Japanese characters in the title literally spell Katan), plus Japanese versions of Pandemic and Azul you can see on the left. I love the random black dude playing with the Japanese family in the lower right.

If you’re just joining in, Sometimes I Have Adventures in Japan is a monthly series where I post random pics from Japan (many of which are also on my Instagram) with commentary.  It’s easy to forget sometimes that I live in a cool foreign country with lots of amazing things to see, so I try to keep my eyes open and camera ready rather than staying in my apartment working ;-) Continue reading »

Every Job is a Real Job as Long as It Pays Real Money

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I hate it when people use the term “real job” to describe a certain type of employment.  Like, what do people even mean when they say this?  If some jobs are “real jobs,” are the rest of the jobs out there “fake jobs?”  How about “unreal jobs?”  “Pretend jobs?”

I’ve sometimes asked people to describe what they meant by “real job” and each time, without exception, the person found themselves at a loss for words.  Being full-time seemed to have something to do with it, but not all full-time jobs were “real jobs.”  Paying out a lot of money also seemed to make certain kinds of jobs “real,” but that wasn’t the whole story.  Was a “real job” one where you took your responsibilities seriously?  Not really, since I know a lot of people who don’t take their so-called “real jobs” seriously at all.  Or was it a job that leads to a bigger career?  That description falls short too, 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 »

When You’re Busy, You Get More Done

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This week’s post is going to seem obvious, but it’s actually worth some thought.

Last week I had a few things to do, but not too much—my To-Do list was nice and short with no looming deadlines and plenty of time to work on long-term projects.  As a result, I took my evenings at a slower pace, didn’t work any late nights, and read a few hundred pages of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (a badass novel full of savage beatings and do-it-yourself abortions that makes The Grapes of Wrath look like a kids book).

It was a pretty chill week, and as it went on I found myself taking longer breaks, scrolling through more social media, and just plain staring into space when I could have been working—or at least doing something I enjoyed. Continue reading »

How I Think About Money Now That I’m Out of Debt

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Last week something happened that should have been a momentous, once-in-a-lifetime experience.  It should have led to endless celebrations and singing from rooftops and cavorting drunkenly naked through the streets in ecstatic glee at this thing I’d been looking forward to for well over a decade and a half.

I am now completely debt free.

Paying off that final loan should have caused me to get really excited, but it didn’t—it just felt like making a regular bank transfer.  Maybe the anticlimax was partly because I won’t get to mark the big zero down on my net worth spreadsheet until next month, or maybe it was because I made the payment Continue reading »

Sometimes I Have Adventures in Japan – Series 8

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Yep, that’s a whole lot of snow.

Last April the Japanese Heisei emperor stepped down from the throne, the first time in over two hundred years a Japanese emperor has abdicated.  This was momentous for a few reasons, one of which was that it occurred during the Golden Week holiday season, with the extra holidays from the emperor’s abdication giving everyone in Japan ten consecutive days off.  Score!

I spent part of the vacation traversing the Tateyama-Kurobe Alpine Route, a mountain route connecting Toyama prefecture (where I live) with Nagano prefecture in the southeast. Normally the only way to reach Nagano is by traveling north around the massive Hida Mountain range that separates the two, but the Tateyama Alpine Route connects them more directly via a series of cable cars, buses, electric trolleys, and a brief walking route, shown on the map below. Continue reading »

Six Factors I Consider When Prioritizing My Worktime

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In the real world of getting things done, we all have to make tough decisions about how we spend our time.  This involves sorting through a shitload of tasks, which I do by making To-Do lists and using my kick-ass new whiteboard system, and that others do by keeping Bullet Journals or using other systems.

Every workday, as part of my morning routine I make my bed and then write out a list of what I’m going to do that day, in the approximate order I’m going to do it in.  I’ve talked about this process many times on this blog, but there’s one crucial thing I haven’t yet addressed: how exactly do I decide what goes on the list???

More and more, I’ve noticed several distinct factors that affect how I choose to spend my time. Continue reading »