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.

A Short Reminder About What It Means to Prioritize Your Creative Work

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Sometimes I get stressed, worried, confused, or preoccupied with things that aren’t my creative work.  Or, I waste a lot of time that I could be using for creative work doing….things that aren’t creative work.

That’s because I often forget that doing creative work means prioritizing creative work over other things.

To be clear, I’m not talking about essential functions like food, sleep, or staying healthy.  I’m also not talking about maintaining relationships with friends, family, or significant others, which can bring us fulfillment in very important ways.

No, I’m talking about other things. Things that matter less than your creative work.

One trap I often fall into is thinking about things I’d like to have because because the people around me have them.  Or, I think too much about the life I’m “supposed” to have, rather than Continue reading »

November 2022 Novel Update: Thanksgiving Writing and a New Year’s Deadline

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Heads up for New Hampshire folks: This Saturday, December 3rd I’ll be at Main Street BookEnds in Warner from 12:30 to 2:00pm signing books, talking to customers, and in general just hanging out. The awesome local children’s authors David Elliot and Matt Forrest Esenwine will also be there throughout the day as part of Warner’s Hometown Holidays event.  Click here for more details, and if you’re around, stop by and say hi!

Novel revisions have been going well, which has me in a really good mood.

In late August I finally finished the rough draft of my Secret New Novel, took a week off, then began second draft revisions.  Writing the second draft is eons easier than writing the first draft because I’ve already got a scaffolding of what the novel will look like, and I know the characters and story a lot better than I did at this time last year.  So, sitting down to write every day has been much, much easier.

Still, it’s not all a walk in the park: several chapters, particularly near the beginning, needed to be 90-95% rewritten, and for most of the others I’m still changing 50-70% of what’s on the page from Draft 1.  Fortunately, though, the revision process has gotten easier Continue reading »

Creative Communities Are REALLY Important

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A lot of creative people harbor this myth of the artist who works alone (usually in an attic or secret studio someplace), slaving away at their life’s masterwork in secret.  “This will be my Great American Novel when it’s finished!” they might cry, or “I’ll show my paintings to the public when they’re ready!”

Here’s the thing, though: while a lot of artists definitely work alone (hell, I wrote an entire novel about this idea), rarely do they work in isolation.

That’s because, for a lot of creative people, while the actual creation process takes place alone (the writing, the painting, the composing, etc.), they still have communities of other creative people they can engage with Continue reading »

Should You Shift Your Sleep Schedule with Daylight Savings Time?

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Yesterday was Daylight Savings Time, where everyone in the US turns back their clocks an hour and reverts to Standard Time. While recent bills passed by both the Senate and numerous states suggest it’s likely that our years of changing the clocks are numbered, the tradition is here to stay for at least a while longer. Meanwhile, changing the clocks has gotten me thinking about my sleep schedule, and what sleep habits are best for me as a creative person who makes his own work schedule.

Quick rewind: I spend kind of a lot of time talking about sleep on this blog.  One of my most popular posts chronicles what happened when I went to work on two hours of sleep (Spoilers: It sucked), and more recently I’ve realized that spending the time it takes to get enough sleep is a great investment if it means I can use my remaining time productively.

More importantly, when I consider what kind of daily schedule I want to keep, first and foremost is the idea of when I’d like to be getting up and when I’d like to be going to bed Continue reading »

October 2022 Novel Update: Organizing Big-Picture Edits

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Happy Halloween, everybody—it’s been a pretty good month for novel writing.

For those who haven’t been following, I finished the rough draft of my Secret New Novel in August, and since then I’ve been revising the draft, printing out each chapter and making changes directly on the page with a pen, after which I type up the edits to make a new digital draft of each chapter.  The process helps me to more easily find areas that need to be cut or changed, but also to look at the novel with fresh eyes when it’s on the page instead of a screen.

Despite my taking a week off from writing in mid-October when some friends visited, I’ve made substantial editing progress this month compared to last month.  That’s party because the first four or so chapters of the draft were in MUCH rougher shape than the rest of the novel.  That meant that when I hit Chapter 5, I suddenly found myself revising faster, finding less to fix, and making more smaller-scale edits than drastic rewrites.

In short, this translates into more pages revised per day Continue reading »

Feeling Overwhelmed? Make an Emergency To-Do List!

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When I was in middle school, every once in a while I found myself home on a weekend with too many things to do: I had homework to finish, a school project to start, chores to do, my own projects to organize, and probably a phone call or two to make and a letter to mail.  I used to worry about getting all of these things done and would tackle them haphazardly, doing whichever one seemed most urgent, or that I felt like doing at a given moment.

Then I discovered To-Do lists, and everything changed.

Instead of dashing around throughout the day, I’d take a scrap of paper about 5½ inches by 4¼ inches (my family used to tear used pieces of paper into quarters, then use the blank side as notepads) and write down all the things I wanted to do that day, in the approximate order I wanted to do them in.  I felt relieved getting all of those tasks out of my head so I didn’t have to think about them anymore, but more importantly, having the list in hand gave me a tangible plan for making my way through the maze of a day when I had so many varied things to do.

Now I’m an adult who also has a lot of varied things to do: some writing-related, some business-related, some housework-related, and some random things Continue reading »

How to Take Time Off On Your Own Terms

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One of the best perks about working in Japan was the incredible number of paid national holidays I had: 16 per year to be exact, and they were pretty evenly spaced so that almost every month had one.  Combine that with school vacations and slow periods when classes were out of session, and I had a pretty sweet yearly calendar with a lot of paid time off.

Now fast forward a year: I’m back in the States, where I divide my time between finishing my Secret New Novel and doing freelance editing work to keep the bills paid.  Much of my editing is flexible (as in, I can work on it when I want to), but I also do scheduled video calls with clients where we talk through issues they’re having.  Some weeks, all of this work combined can make for a pretty tight schedule.

This begs a really, really important question: How is someone working a schedule like mine supposed to take time off? Continue reading »

Do You REALLY Need an MFA to Become a Writer?

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Do You Really Need an MFA to Become a Writer

Instead of a full post this week, I thought I’d link to an article I just had published on how writers gain the skills they need to succeed, and how grad school is just one way of building a writing career (though there are other benefits to grad school too!).

The article was for the email newsletter Spill It! put out by Vine Leaves Press, which sends out monthly articles on thought-provoking topics.  (You can check out the Spill It! newsletter here.)

Plus, this article was a paid writing gig, which is always nice ;-)

I’ve written on this blog about my own grad school experiences and how, while I learned a lot there, it was an incredibly rough experience and I wished the environment had been more positive. (But hey, it also gave me plenty of material to work into MFA Thesis Novel, which I’m super proud of and hope will help make these programs better!) Continue reading »

September 2022 Novel Update: Second Draft Revisions in Progress!

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Quick recap: When I last posted an update about my Secret New Novel, it was an exciting one. After a year and a half of methodical research, scheduling writing time, agonizing over plot details, and stepping away for one reason or another, I finally, at long last, finished the first draft!!!!!!!!!!11

While the novel still has a LONG way to go, finishing the first draft was a HUGE deal for a number of reasons:

The first is that, for me, drafting an initial story from nothing is the most agonizing part of the process, and by far the most difficult.  On days when I have to draft something more complicated than a blog post, I tend to spend a lot of time putting off writing and getting warmed up, which translates into less time at the computer actually putting words on the page.  Revising what I’ve already written, in contrast, is far easier, and when I sit down with an earlier draft in front of me that I can look at and improve, I feel less stress and more confidence.

The second reason is that with finishing this first draft, most of the really intense mental brainstorming and creation have already been done Continue reading »

Reflections on Six Years of Blogging

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Hard to believe that I started working on the But I Also Have a Day Job blog six (!) years ago this week.  At this time in 2016 I was testing designs and playing with WordPress formatting while I drafted the very first posts on Day Job Basics, and from there, it was off to the races.

This blog represented a really big step for me: back in 2016, I’d finished grad school, was trying to sell one novel and finish another, and made a major life change by moving out of Nebraska, where I’d gone to grad school and stayed an extra year working in the Agriculture department.

I knew I had to start taking my writing more seriously and figuring out my next steps, and the But I Also Have a Day Job blog was a HUGE step in clarifying the direction I wanted to take my creative work and my life in general.  Before this blog, I didn’t have much of an online presence at all, had very little published work, and it felt like I was just barely starting out.

Fast forward to six years later, and I’m…pretty satisfied with how how far I’ve come.  I haven’t done as much as I’ve liked, but I’m overall Continue reading »

Giving Up The Dream…

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This week’s post is a really important one.  It’s also a difficult one for me to write, and might hit close to home for a lot of people.  So, fair warning.

When we grow up, we’re surrounded by images of what a friend of mine recently referred to as The Dream—an image of the way our lives are quote-unquote “supposed to” look like.

The exact specifications of The Dream will no doubt look different to everyone, but it usually goes something like this:

 

What is The Dream?

In the way of life I’m calling The Dream, the person has a stable, full-time job they can consistently work without fear of being laid off or having to change jobs.  Said job pays a salary that’s not only enough to live on, but enough to save for retirement and afford amenities of decent quality, including furniture, vacations, late-model cars, and consumer electronics.  The salary from said job also allows the person to buy a house that’s relatively new, relatively large, and has some amount of property (most often Continue reading »

5 Advantages of a Flexible Work Schedule

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A few weeks ago I shared my Awesome Work-From-Home Freelance Writer/Editor schedule and talked about how I structure my workdays in a way that makes sense to me.  Writing in the morning, handling email and admin around midday, and working on editing and marketing in the afternoon has helped me create a really useful workflow that makes me feel comfortable during my workday and get more done.

There are a ton of other advantages to being self-employed, of course: not having to deal with horrible bosses, navigate toxic coworker relationships, deal with pointless Day Job shit, or fight the pressure to care about your company when you really don’t.  Avoiding these downsides is pretty awesome, and it’s helping me feel better about my creative work/paid work balance.

One HUGE advantage, though, is that when you work for yourself, you have a flexible schedule.  That means you can schedule your own work when you want to, as long as it gets done Continue reading »