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.
Big news big news big news!
About a month ago I got accepted to teach with JET, the Japanese government’s international exchange program that places English teachers in public schools across Japan.
Two weeks ago I gave notice at my Day Job, telling them that I needed time to prepare for the move.
Then, last week, I left, and now I’m free. Continue reading
I had a friend in college who used to get really stressed out. He was pretty much a nervous wreck most days because he was always dashing between these huge projects (mostly art projects, but also stuff for his other classes) that required him to work in different studios across campus. Sometimes he forgot to eat, went for days without sleeping, and more than once found himself in trouble because he forgot to turn in his registration paperwork.
I remember one time when he was on the verge of what may have been a panic attack, he said, in a moment of pristine clarity, something I’ve never been able to forget:
“I’d rather have one HUGE project to work on than ten smaller projects, even if the ten smaller projects together took less time to finish than the big project.”
Continue reading
Just a quick update this month, because I’ve got a lot of things to do.
Last month I dove back into actual revisions on the fourth draft of my novel, though as usual, progress has been slow. As of today I’ve revised 40 pages, or about 12% of the manuscript, which is much, much less than I wanted to have done by now.
For the actual revision process I’ve gone back to setting aside entire nights (from 8:00 to 11:00pm) for novel work instead of grabbing an hour here and an hour there, since I work best when I can devote larger chunks of time to writing. Unfortunately, though, a variety of things (i.e., excuses) have kept me Continue reading
I go back and forth on this all the time.
I’ve had workdays where I had thousands upon thousands of things that needed doing, To-Do lists a mile long, people asking me every two minutes to do more things, and a string of deadlines that I absolutely had to get done no matter what. And it sucked.
But then I’ve had jobs where there wasn’t nearly enough to do (or nothing of any real importance to do) so that I had to stretch out what little work I actually had over hours and hours as I faced near-interminable boredom and a fury of clock-watching that made me feel like I’d be stuck there forever with no escape. And that sucked too.
This begs the question: Is it better to have a Day Job where you feel busy and overwhelmed, or one where you feel bored and underused? Continue reading
If you’ve been following this blog for longer than a year then you know that waaaaaaay back when I started in the fall of 2016 I was working at my part-time Secret Work-From-Home Day Job, which served as my main source of income while I edited the second and third drafts of my novel.
At the time I didn’t talk much about my Secret Work-From-Home Day Job on the grounds that revealing too much about my job or my employer could cause some confidentiality issues, or that I’d be found by company Google searches and they’d discover my decidedly noncomformist workplace philosophies. In retrospect, though, the secrecy was probably unnecessary since not actually naming my employer or discussing actual work stuff kept me safe Continue reading
Two weeks ago I talked some pretty big talk about not accepting things as they are and how it’s always better to take steps to change a bad situation, since this is pretty integral to how I live my life. There’s one thing I forgot to mention, though:
Making change happen always comes with risk.
I don’t write about this nearly enough, but Risk is a pretty vital part of the whole Change equation: every time you change something in your life, there’s a Risk that said Change will make things worse or uncomfortable, and that can be a scary thing. (See what I did Continue reading
The title says it all.
Since I started my Secret Office Day Job last June I’ve been saving a lot—the exact amount ranges between 10 and 40% of each month’s income (well, 40% was only once…) depending on my expenses, how many side gigs I have, or how much overtime I’ve worked.
(Luckily I keep a budget each month to track how much I make and where it’s going—and if you click on no other link in this post, check out my piece on the basics of budgeting, because it’s that important!)
My savings routine works like this: at the beginning of every month I track my previous month’s income, pay all my bills, and see how much I have left. I keep $2,000 bucks in my checking account to cover unforeseen expenses (car trouble, computer explodes, bills I’ve forgotten Continue reading
A while ago I was talking to a friend who was having trouble at his job. He felt overwhelmed with work and his manager wasn’t helping, and things were getting worse because of some massive disorganization within his company. He and I talked about his problems on a long car ride, and at one point he heaved a heavy sigh, leaned over the wheel, and said, “But, you know, it is what it is.”
Another time I was helping a different friend make some renovations on his basement. We were doing trim work and cutting two baseboard pieces that met in a corner. The pieces didn’t fit at all and looked so bad that no amount of caulk and paint would hide the gap. My friend looked at the woodwork, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “I’m not too worried about it. It is what it is.”
Then, two nights ago, I went down to my apartment basement to do some laundry Continue reading
If you’ve been following my Novel Updates Series then you already know the story: I’m writing a novel that takes place at a grad school writing program in the Midwest, and for the last year and a half I’ve been buried in the revision process—you know, that part where you go back and edit everything you’ve written until it’s actually turns out good.
Last year I finished pen and paper edits for the third draft, and a few months after starting my Secret Office Day Job I started typing them up, page for page and line for line. Because I’ve been busy, it was taking a REALLY long time, which is why I started posting updates here to keep myself on track.
Well two days ago, at around 11:00pm, I finally finished typing. That’s Continue reading
Warning: Stream of consciousness ramble ahead.
I think a lot about how I spend my time, and how much of that time I should be spending on creative work or other things that move me closer to my goals. I used to think of this as a simple equation: the more time I devoted to creative work, the more I’d get done…though this led to more than a few cases of terrible burnout that weren’t productive at all (which sucks, btw).
That led me to alter my thinking: maybe taking plenty of breaks was the way to go, because if I stayed as rested and stress-free as possible then my mind would be clearer to focus on my writing and other tasks that required focus. I went through a period when I set aside every Saturday as a No Exceptions Day of Rest, and another Continue reading
AWESOME UPDATE: Eikaiwa Bums is out! This post is about how I queried the press and signed the contract, but you can also read about what happened when it actually came out, or cut to the chase and order a copy from my webstore.
So a little while ago I got some REALLY amazing news: in August, Blue Cubicle Press will be publishing my short story, Eikaiwa Bums, as a chapbook in its Overtime series of fiction about work. And just like that, I’ll have a book out.
Though this is hardly my first time getting my writing published, the Eikaiwa Bums chapbook feels like a BIG step because it’s an actual printed book that people can hold in their hand and read, as opposed to reading online or as part of a bigger magazine. (Don’t despair, virtual readers: there’ll Continue reading
A few months back I wrote a piece about American overtime laws and how they set clear boundaries about what kinds of workers need to be paid time-and-a-half for any hours per week they work over forty. These laws were enacted to 1)Create more jobs by giving employers incentive to hire more workers at the regular rate instead of paying their existing workers the time-and-a-half rate, and 2)To help workers maintain a better work-life balance, because working a lot of overtime sucks hard.
The rules are laid pretty clearly in the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, which I first learned about when my old job as a school secretary overloaded me with more work than I could possibly handle in a 40-hour workweek and I started doing some research. While the Continue reading