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.

Why I Hate the Word “Content”

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A while back, I worked on a project with someone who had a background in graphic design.  The person had done a lot of layout jobs for magazines, websites, and online publications, and the project we were working on was somewhat similar.  In planning what our layout would look like, she often used the word content:

What kind of content are you interested in running?

I think we really have some great content this time.

Can we get any more content?

And so on.  I see similar echoes all over social media, where sites talk about running content, users absorb increasing amounts of content, and buzz surrounds people who are content creators.

And I’m fucking sick of it Continue reading »

My Awesome Work-From-Home Writer/Editor Schedule

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Over the years I’ve held a lot of different Day Jobs, all of which required me to be there during set hours.  As a result, I’ve had to schedule my writing and creative work for whatever time I had left over.

This led to some interesting workarounds over the years: for example, I went from working mostly after dinner when I worked in an office to working mostly in the afternoons when I taught in Japan, as well as sneaking in whatever creative work I could during my free periods.

You might remember, though, that before I moved to Japan I spent about three months without working any Day Job at all, and during that time I had free reign over my time as I revised MFA Thesis Novel and edited a writing anthology.  During this time I set my own schedule of working on the novel in the morning when I felt fresh, taking a long break, then doing whatever other email or editing work I had to throughout the late afternoon and evening Continue reading »

I Finished My Secret New Novel Rough Draft!!!!!!

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The title says it all—last Wednesday at approximately 12:45pm Eastern Daylight time, I, Ian M. Rogers, finished the rough draft of the Secret New Novel I started 20 months ago.

The moment was surprisingly anticlimactic—as in, I wrote THE END, typed out a few notes for later, then turned off the computer and ate lunch.  Writing that last line felt really, REALLY good, but at the same time, in the words of Princess Leia, it’s not over yet, and I’ve got a lot of revising to do.

In the grand scheme, though, the moment was pretty significant.  For me, getting the damned thing down on the computer is the hardest part, and takes the most mental energy.  It’s often when I feel the most intimidated, procrastinate the most, and in general feel the most stress about the writing process Continue reading »

How I Handle Bad Writing Days

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Some days are better than others.  Others, though, straight-up suck.

Since May I’ve been on a spurt of working on my Secret New Novel four mornings a week. That’s four days when I get up, eat breakfast, and then dive into the novel until around lunchtime.  On the one hand, this has helped me get a LOT of words down on the page, but it also causes issues on days when I’m Just. Not. Feeling. It.

I wrote about this a few years back in a post about what I do when I don’t feel like working, but I want to reflect on this problem again because I’ve been spending far more hours a week in the creative realm than I was previously.  Because I’m setting myself up to spend more time writing per week, it’s more likely that a Bad Day will fall on a writing day and interfere with my creative process more than it would interfere with, say, my ability to schedule bill payments or or do a repetitive Day Job task.

These problems arise on days when I’m feeling some degree of depressed, but also on days when I haven’t slept well, I’m worried about something, or Continue reading »

Playing Catch-Up All the Time is REALLY Stressful

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In my trusty Schedule Book, I not only keep a column of To-Do list items I plan to finish in the next 1-3 weeks, I also keep a list of tasks that aren’t quite as high priority.  These tend to be things like miscellaneous writing projects, plans to add to my website or organize my writing life, and things I’d like to research for the future.  I also tend to keep personal projects on there: organize these folders, paint that room, email this person I haven’t talked to in far too long, etc.

Sorting out long-term tasks in separate lists is similar to the Bullet Journal system, where people keep a master list of things they want to accomplish, then use that list to narrow down their goals for the week that they feel they can easily get done.  (You might be using a similar system to sort through your long- and short-term goals already, but if you’re not, I definitely recommend trying one!)

My problem, though, is that because I’m busy, I don’t get to the Long-Term list as often as I’d like—there’s stuff on there from years ago I’d still really like to get to, plus stuff from six months ago I wish I’d been able to make time for much sooner.

Sometimes I look at my Long-Term To-Do List and feel disappointed, stressed, or like my system isn’t working Continue reading »

More Creative People Should Talk About How They Pay Their Bills: Notes on Stephen King’s “On Writing”

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When I started this blog waaaaaaaay back in 2016 I’d just gotten out of grad school, where my focus had been developing myself as a writer and honing my craft.  Back then, I’d been getting a lot of advice on how to be a writer: Write every day, write in the morning when you’re fresh, research agents who’ll want to read your work, find critique partners, revise multiple drafts, and so on.

If you were to follow all of this advice to the letter and make writing the focus of your life, it would certainly add up to more than a full-time 40-hour-a-week job—though no one ever came right out and said it like that.

My problem was that while aspiring writers were ostensibly developing their crafts over this 40-hour-a-week period, how were they supposed to be earning money?  Were they supposed to be independently wealthy, so they didn’t have to work?  Were they supposed to be working a part-time job?  Or were they not actually supposed to be devoting that much time to their craft, and carving out time on evenings and weekends instead? (And if they did it during their evenings and weekends, how would they find the time for family and friend relationships???)
Continue reading »

When Should You Stop Promoting Your Creative Project?

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The question in this week’s title is especially relevant for me because as of this week, MFA Thesis Novel has been out for three whole months.  For the big publishers, that’s the typical amount of time in a book cycle, where new releases tend to come in 3-month seasonal waves.

In the past three months I’ve been doing a lot to spread word about the novel: in addition to the pre-order and the novel release party, I also contacted local bookstores about carrying the novel, built a new website page to feature it, talked about it on my email mailing list, answered a few author interviews, listed it in my alma mater news, recorded guest appearances on podcasts, and got some of my writer friends to review it, in addition to pitching the novel around to other reviews sites, bookstores, and media outlets.

I’ve also been doing a mini drive to get more Amazon and Goodreads reviews, which are incredibly helpful for helping people find the book.  (By the way, if you liked MFA Thesis Novel and want to help in a super-easy way, consider leaving me an Amazon and/or Goodreads review!)

In the past few weeks, though, I’ve found myself running out of steam, with fewer bookstores to contact, avenues to explore, and hype to generate.  This has gotten me thinking about a really important question: Continue reading »

Every Creative Person Has Their Bad Days—Even Me

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Part of the reason I keep this blog is so I can keep people in the know about when things are going well or I’m working on cool stuff.  But, I also want to be honest about when things aren’t going so well.

In the past few years I’ve become more aware of online performance—as in, that idea that people only put the best version of themselves online to create an idealized narrative of who they are and how things are going.  We all do this to some extent when we post about great stuff (“Hey, look at my awesome vacation/car/girlfriend/boyfriend/new job/house/really cool hobby!” etc.) but don’t post about our not-so great stuff: For example, how many posts about breakups, massive debt, job loss, or lingering malaise have you seen, unless they were deliberate cries for sympathy?

I think creative people can be susceptible to this as well, especially when they shy away from talking about their setbacks online.  In the long run, this can create an idealized version of the creative life, where it seems like everyone is getting life-changing publishing deals and drawing every day and getting roles in movies and putting amazing art into the world, when in reality they also have the same setbacks and low points you do Continue reading »

Bad Bosses Blame Their Employees for Mismanaged Workplaces

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A while back, I worked at a Day Job that was really, really busy.  While I was there the workload went up exponentially, though we only had a small increase in staff.  That meant we had slightly more people doing a LOT more work, which meant way more work for all of us.

During that extremely busy time, my boss dealt with the situation by checking in that we were constantly on task and not goofing off.  “Utilize your time well,” was her favorite phrase (complete with pretentious use of the word “utilize”), and she repeated it over and over at meetings.

Years later at a different Day Job, I experienced something similar.  At this particular Day Job I was responsible for waaaaaaaaaaay more work than a reasonable person could do in a 40-hour workweek, which led to a lot of stress and confusion.  To make matters worse, my boss often expected me to be in two places at once, and would regularly add extra tasks on to my already enormous workload.

This time, I tried explaining to my boss that there was simply too much work to do.  However, when I did, he always pivoted and said that I needed to manage my work better, stop wasting time, and learn to prioritize.  Continue reading »

June 2022 Novel Update: Steady, But Not Slow

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For those of you keeping track, in January 2021 I started a Secret New Novel manuscript that I’d been wanting to write for a long time, and that’s a LOT more complicated than my previous work.  Unfortunately, though, I ran into some snags, then took a long break.  Over a year later, I hadn’t even made it to the halfway point of a rough draft—and that REALLY wasn’t where I wanted to be as a writer.

All that’s changed, though, since I left my busy Japanese university job and came back to the States.  After some readjustment and setup time, I set a firm date to start working consistently on the Secret New Novel again: Tuesday, May 3rd.

It’s been nearly two months since then, so I thought I’d answer a really important question: How has it been going? Continue reading »

Do You Treat Your Creative Work Like a Business?

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I talk a lot about “creative work” on this blog, but what does that really mean?  I guess I can loosely describe it as “anything that has to do with making things or getting those things out into the world.”

In that sense, for me as a writer, creative work would be…

That’s just the actual creative part, though.  There’s also:

The things on the first list are purely about creation: the act of making art Continue reading »

I Used to Lie During Job Interviews: Here’s Why

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The other day I was updating my CV in preparation for a part-time gig I picked up through word-of mouth.  In the opening section I wanted to summarize the work I do, and after some trial and error, I came up with this:

I’m a working fiction writer and editor/writing coach with experience in EFL (English as a Foreign Language). My teaching experience extends to Japan and across cultures, while my editing work extends across both fiction and academic scholarship.

When I think about the work I’ve done, and the work I’d like to be doing in the future, this statement feels really natural to me—as in, it sums up my experience accurately, and isn’t just an exaggerated image I put down so I can get jobs.

That got me thinking more about previous years, when every time I wrote a resume or went to a job interview, I tried to craft an image of myself that the company wanted to hear.

In short: I used to lie about myself and my career goals. Continue reading »