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.
Yep, I’m in Japan.
Quick catch-up for those of you just joining the blog: back in the spring I accepted a teaching job with the JET program in the Japanese public school system, and three weeks ago I waved goodbye to New Hampshire and hello to amazing Toyama prefecture, a mountainous region on the Sea of Japan coast.
What was the transition like, you ask? Well, here’s a rundown of the last 3+ weeks… Continue reading
It’s been a CRAZY few weeks since July started and I realized I had LESS THAN A MONTH before Japan to pack up my entire apartment and finish the novel and cancel all my utilities AND finish up a bunch of miscellaneous writing projects AND bring my Japanese up to par—so yeah, I’ve been pretty busy.
Having so much to do has partly been good, since it’s kept me insanely focused most days and pushed me to get more done…though the downside is that it’s also causing me a lot of stress and led to a lot of mad scrambling as I second-guess myself about what needs to be done and in which order.
So with a week before my flight, here’s a report card-style progress report of Continue reading
Many of you reading this know that I’ve carried the same blue medium-sized style Bic pen in my pocket since high school. It’s hands-down my preferred writing implement for both creative work and all those little notes and lists I tend to write in my daily life (though not for Day Job-related tasks, as I talked about last summer).
I keep a handful of fancier pens I use for special notes or formal occasions, though for regular writing, I just plain feel better using something familiar. I love the weight of these pens, their simple style, the way their blue ink stands out against printed black type when marking drafts, and even the way I can cleanly slide their caps off with one hand. Continue reading
One of my friends recently described this blog as a chronicle of projects I’m trying to get done and how outside problems keep getting in the way.
Yeah, I get that.
If you’ve been following my Novel Update series you might recall that I’ve ALMOST finished a workable Fifth Draft of my novel about grad school life in the Midwest, and that this draft is especially important because it’ll be be the first one that’s finished enough to actually show people. Since I leave for Japan at the end of July, a few weeks ago I set a self-imposed deadline of finishing the Fifth Draft by July 1st so I’d have time to Continue reading
So last week I briefly mentioned that I’d signed on to a week (five and a half days, to be exact) at my old Secret Work-From-Home Day Job grading standardized test essays. The chance to pick up extra hours arrived conveniently in my inbox six or so weeks ago because I’m still on the company’s mailing list, and at the time I figured, what the hell—I could always use the extra cash, and a week of test-grading wouldn’t set me too far behind, right?
*Cue ominous music here* Continue reading
Here’s a list of everything I did today, in no particular order:
So first off…yeah, I picked up some hours at my No-Longer-Secret Work-From-Home Day Job grading standardized test essays, but only for this week, swiping up an opportunity to bring in some extra cash before I leave for Japan. Plus, since I’m able to basically do other work Continue reading
This is one of those entries where I talk about something that happened to me, then relate it to a larger phenomenon so that you, the reader, can have something to reflect on too. Here’s the story:
Yesterday I vowed to finish retyping the edits to the fourth draft of my novel, which I’d been working on slowly over the past two weeks but wanted to finish ASAP in line with my self-imposed deadline of finishing the fifth draft by July 1st. However, accomplishing this mighty goal involved me typing out 140 pages worth of edits (give or take) in the 7 hours I’d set aside.
The math worked out to about 20 pages per hour. Challenge accepted. Continue reading
The other day I was meeting with my local writer’s group (small plug for them here), and afterward a younger guy who was finishing a creative writing MFA came up to me. He was new to the group and had a lot of good ideas, and that night he had a deliberate look in his eyes and an important question he very badly wanted to ask:
“So, what did you do, like, for a job after you graduated?”
The question caught me off guard because it had been so long since anyone asked me that. It brought me back to when I was twenty-two and my friends and I Continue reading
If you’d asked me two years ago to name the biggest factor stopping me from getting my creative work done, I would have hands-down said overuse of social media: I used to spend WAY too much time on Facebook (ugh…) and scrolling through Twitter hoping for that gambler’s jackpot payout of finding something awesome that keeps us all hooked.
Now I use social media a lot less and usually only pull it up at set times of the day, so that doesn’t feel like a problem anymore.
Then if you’d asked me last year about my biggest weakness I would have said lethargic time wasting: sleeping too much, getting distracted between tasks, and taking long breaks when I didn’t really need them. I stopped doing these things in part Continue reading
Amazing how quickly the tables can turn.
My April novel update consisted mostly of a depressed lament about how little I’d gotten done not only in the past month, but the past year—it took me almost nine months to completely finish the third draft of this novel after I went back to full-time Day Job work, and the fourth draft was progressing just as slowly.
Now, though, things are different: two weeks ago I made the final edits to the fourth draft, after working on it every weekday since I left my Day Job. That means it only took 16 working days (chunks of two and a half to four hours from late morning to early afternoon) to finish the last 275 pages Continue reading
(TLDR Version: Money gives you the freedom to make the changes you want in life.)
I haven’t been to any kind of Day Job in over a month…and it feels AWESOME. Instead I’ve been editing the fourth draft of my novel, studying Japanese, working on this blog, finishing a handful of other writing projects, and taking on a few editing projects, which combined total more than a full-time job while paying decidedly less than full-time money. I’m able to do this chiefly for two reasons:
Both the income safety net and the upcoming job make it possible Continue reading
I haven’t been to work in two weeks…and it feels awesome.
For those of you who missed the news, last month I got accepted for an English teaching job in Japan and quit my Secret Office Day Job—partly to focus more on creative work and partly because some sketchy shit was going on there. This means that for the next few months my time is my own, and I’ve got to use it wisely if I want to make any real writing progress.
I left work on a Wednesday, which felt a bit disorienting—I went from spending 47+ hours of my week working, commuting, and eating lunch in the company break room to having a three-month chasm of free time ahead of me…and I won’t lie, it felt a bit overwhelming.
For the first two days I was kind of all over the place—I slept late, watched a bunch of Netflix, got a haircut, took a long walk, and Continue reading