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.

Go Outside. Every. Single. Day.

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Family with old car in city

When I was younger and thinking about my path to a creative life, I used to worry about being stuck at home.  If I was working on novels and desk work all day, I reasoned, I’d be tied to my desk at home, which meant I’d be cooped up never seeing anyone.  That sounded pretty lonely.  And depressing.

Part of this fear, I think, stemmed from a rough patch I went through after college where I wasn’t working regularly. During that year I spent a lot of time at home, sleeping late, taking care of my mother’s hyper-energetic dogs, and in general not doing much of anything because I didn’t have a work routine or good work habits yet.

After I entered the Day Job world, though, I realized that Day Jobs provided a way to get out of my house, accomplish set goals, and in general provide structure to my life.

I stayed in this mindset for a long time, easing out of it only when I had my first work-from-home job, and later in Japan during COVID-19 restrictions, when I also spent a lot of time at home.

Now that I structure my own writing and editing life, though, I have almost the opposite problem: I’m so comfortable with my at-home working routine that I get sucked into it, doing so much at my desk and around the apartment that before I know it 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.
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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: Language Teaching

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Last week I talked about my adjunct job mentoring students in an online MFA program, where I work with students during the Fall and Spring semesters to show them the ropes of what an editor does. It’s a cool job that pays decently, and it’s helped me grow as a teacher and professional while also helping me make some good contacts.

This week, though, I want to highlight two of my other side hustles: teaching English as a Second Language online, and teaching Japanese in person. Both are steady sources of income that help me sustain my freelance lifestyle, and both help me use my teaching skills in ways I find interesting and stimulating.

So, without further ado, here’s how the side hustle teaching game works:
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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 »

Funding Your Projects with Kickstarter: A Micro-Interview with Miranda Reeder of Harlevin Visual Novels

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Today I want to talk about Kickstarter, which I don’t have a ton of (read: any) experience with, so I turned to fellow writer, artist, and friend of But I Also Have a Day Job Miranda Reeder.  Under her online handle Min, Miranda runs Harlevin Games, a visual novel studio whose releases can be found on Steam and Itch.io.

What’s a visual novel, you ask?  Think of it like an interactive novel that you play through like a video game, where you can choose your own path through the story.  Visual novels can include images, music, and voice acting, and many allow you to customize your own characters.

Overall, they’re a cool way of taking stories to the next level in ways that traditional books and graphic novels can’t quite do, without the investment needed in a full video game experience.

Miranda and I spoke waaaaaaaaaay back in 2020 about her path to making visual novels like Arena Circus and The Pretenders Guild, but her new project is far more ambitious, involving collaborations with other artists, musicians, and voice actors.  She and her collaborators at Fablesoft Studios did a Kickstarter for their dark fairy tale game Twisted several years back, but her new project, Celestial Crowns, is an even bigger step forward.  (You can check out the trailer below!)
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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.
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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 »

The Freelance Life vs the Employee Life Part 2: The Drawbacks

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Last week I dove into the differences in mindset that separate freelance workers from regular full-time employees: things like how you view your job, how you schedule your time, and how you relate to coworkers. (If you missed that post, definitely check it out before you read this one!)

I had a lot to say (and the post title definitely grabbed people’s attention!), but I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about the negative aspects of working for yourself as well, since it’s not all wine and roses.

Interestingly, when I talk to full-time employees about differences in our working lives, a lot of them are quick to point out the cons of self-employment, which they’ve clearly given a lot of thought to.  In some cases, though, I think they focus on the cons because they don’t know how they would handle them if they were working for themselves.

I recently heard an entrepreneur on a podcast say that even though starting a business in the internet age is easier and involves less risk than at any point in history, people still feel scared to try it.  That’s because they’re stuck in a pre-internet mindset, where working for yourself involves a lot of start-up capital and could cause you to lose everything Continue reading »