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.

Finding Meaning in a Day Job, Career, or Creative Work

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Having a meaningful life is pretty important.

Think about it: If your life isn’t exciting, interesting, stimulating, fun, important, influential, or engrossing, what else is there to look forward to?  Mindless consumption of entertainment?  Repetitive chores and routines?  The empty pursuit of money and material wealth?  Those don’t sound very good to me.

People, I’ve found, find meaning in all kinds of ways.  Many find meaning in family relationships: finding a romantic partner, having kids, raising their own family, or connecting with parents, siblings, or other close relatives.  Society places a lot of value on family too, like how the nuclear family is super important in the West.

A lot of people grow up with the impression that family and romantic relationships are the best way to make a meaningful life (i.e., that family is the most important thing).  As such, many people have the impression that careers and paid work are only important in that they allow you to provide for a family.  In other words: Continue reading »

May 2022 Novel Update: Outlining —–> Drafting

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It’s been a really good month for novel drafting.  But first, a quick rewind….

Since January 2021 I’ve been working on a Secret New Novel Draft that I’ve wanted to start for literally years.  I knew this novel was going to be big—and for a while, I thought it might be too big.  As in, I wasn’t sure if I could do it.

As such, I tried taking time to research and plan the novel first…which didn’t go well, since my research wasn’t focused and much of the story seemed to exist in a murky haze.  I needed to write the story so I’d know what to research, but I also needed to research to write the story.  Augh!!!

So, I decided to jump right into a rough draft and see where it took me with the seat-of-your pants method of writing.  (Writers who do this are commonly called Pantsers, a name I find somewhat ridiculous…)  This allowed me to move forward, and helped me get quite a ways into the draft. Continue reading »

Speedrunning Legend: An Interview with Karl Jobst

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Karl Jobst is a YouTuber and streamer whose channel documenting video game speedrunning has tens of millions of views.  He holds a plethora of speedrunning records in Perfect Dark and Goldeneye 007 on the N64, and was the first to beat the Dam level of Goldeneye on Agent in 52 seconds, surpassing a record that had stood for fifteen years.  His YouTube videos have covered astounding speedrunning feats, new discoveries, investigations into video game market manipulation by Wata Games, and the scandals surrounding gaming personality Billy Mitchell. The last of these videos led to his being sued by Mitchell in September 2021, for which he is currently awaiting trial.

Karl and I first met in 2000 on the GameFAQs.com Goldeneye 007 page when we were both fourteen and writing strategy guides for the site.  We corresponded by email, then fell out of touch for over twenty years until I found his YouTube channel.  I reached out to him as a blast from the past, and over Zoom we discussed classic gaming, positive life changes, and finding the balance between money and passion.

 

Part I: As Soon As We Did It, I Was Hooked

 

But I Also Have a Day Job: How old were you when you first got into video games?

Karl Jobst: Two and a half.  Some of my earliest memories are of playing a computer game, specifically Ultima V.  It’s a very complex game, and I don’t think the modern generation would even be able to play it.  Back then they didn’t really hold your hand and guide you.  It required a lot of proactiveness and investigation.  I probably wasn’t doing it right, because specifically my earliest memory is of me dying in the game. Continue reading »

Freeing Up Your Mental Space is REALLY Important for Creativity

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Sometimes I get burned out or depressed—and when that happens, it’s a whole lot harder to work on a creative project.

I talked about this at length last fall, when a towering workload at my Japanese university job combined with a ninety-minute commute and having to check the final formatting on MFA Thesis Novel left me feeling overwhelmed, constantly pushing myself to the limit, and crashing hard on the weekends when I wanted to work on my secret new novel project.

All told, I felt overwhelmed and too damned busy.

I’ve written about the double downsides of being busy before: the first one’s obvious, but the second one’s something we often forget:
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I Made a Kick-Ass New Website!!! (and Here’s Why!)

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(I mean, a kick-ass new website besides this one, of course ;-)

ianmrogersauthor.com has been online for a few weeks, first in a “Coming Soon!” capacity, but more recently in more substantial form as I added pages and links.  I’m really happy with how it’s come out, people seem to like it, and I can always go back and makes changes later.

I wanted the new author website to have a cleaner, sleeker feel than But I Also Have a Day Job (which I intentionally designed to look like a blog from the late 2000s) and be easier to navigate, ESPECIALLY on a phone.  The plan is to keep the new website as a separate entity from BIAHADJ (which I assure you isn’t going anywhere!) as a way of highlighting both MFA Thesis Novel and my editing work (which I’m doing more of now!).

When people who don’t know me look me up, I’d like the new website to make a better first impression and be a bit cleaner around the edges while still retaining my intentional overuse of words like “awesome” and “totally.”

I also wrote a short humor piece especially for the website: Imaginary Hate Mail I’ve Received About MFA Thesis Novel.  I wanted a fun, absurd piece that was a spin-off of the novel Continue reading »

April 2022 Novel Update: My Writing Hiatus is Almost Over…

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As many of you know, it has NOT been a good few months for writing…

When I last checked in on my novel progress back in November, I was facing an avalanche of pressures at my university teaching job in Japan, not to mention a busy few weeks working with Vine Leaves Press getting MFA Thesis Novel ready for publication.  For all of November to December I felt overworked, exhausted, and in a disconnected state of mind.

Then in January and February I spent a LOT of time prepping for my big move from Japan back to the States—mailing boxes home, cleaning out my apartment, and doing a whole lot of packing…which then turned into a whole lot of unpacking, plus dealing with jet lag and social readjustment when I got back to New Hampshire.

March and April, meanwhile, were REALLY big months for MFA Thesis Novel as I set up the pre-order and prepared for the novel launch.  This was a HUGE project Continue reading »

MFA Thesis Novel Launch Party Recap!

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MFA Thesis Novel was released last Tuesday (wooooooooo!), though for me, the real release day felt like last Saturday, when I held the novel launch party at Main Street BookEnds in my hometown of Warner, New Hampshire.

This was a BIG day for me—as in, I wanted it to be as big as I could make it.  It was also my second time doing a reading at BookEnds (the first was back in 2019 when I released Eikaiwa Bums), and because this reading was for an actual novel, I wanted it to be even better.

 

Preparing

I did a fair amount of promotion for the event beforehand: besides getting it up on the BookEnds website, I put up flyers around town, mentioned it in some blog posts, sent out a message on my email list, made a Facebook event, sent it to the town email newsletter, and Continue reading »

The MFA Thesis Novel Pre-Order is Done!!!

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MFA Thesis Novel launches TOMORROW (!!!) and I spent most of last week shipping out copies from the Special Pre-Order period.  I was no stranger to bulk mailings from the Art Swap days, but this was my first time tackling a mailing this big.

After the pre-order period I crunched some numbers and realized that with all the pre-orders, copies I’d need for future events, and probable future webstore purchases, it made sense to order 250 books and get an extra 10% bulk discount on top of the regular discount.

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Patience and the Long Game are REALLY Important for Creative Careers

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Whenever I hear the phrase “Be patient!” I think of The Empire Strikes Back when Yoda and Obi Wan are talking about Luke’s training:

Luke: We’re wasting our time!

Yoda: [looking away] I cannot teach him. The boy has no patience

Obi-Wan’s Voice: He will learn patience.

It’s crazy to think that these lines were written over forty years ago, when my parents’ generation was young, before the internet, Twitter, streaming television, or Amazon two-day delivery.  Instant gratification, it seems, has been a staple of youth for a long time—even in a galaxy far, far away.
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Does Getting Enough Sleep Every Night Help You Stay Focused?

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Yes, yes it does.

I’ve been back from Japan for nearly two months now (!), and I’ve been getting adjusted to my Self-Directed Work Schedule, where instead of having a Day Job, I plan my own time and work on my own projects at my own pace.  As of now, my main focus has been preparing for the release of MFA Thesis Novel, working on my freelance editing jobs with different clients, and getting back into a writing groove with my new novel, which has been unfortunately stalled for the past few months (. . .).

One of my big worries about not having the structure of a Day Job to guide me through the week was that working from home without external motivation would cause me to get distracted, start feeling like my work wasn’t taking me anywhere, or even get depressed.
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Novel Events: Come See My Online Readings in March and the MFA Thesis Novel Launch in April!

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It’s that time!  I’m kicking off an actual, for-serious book tour promoting MFA Thesis Novel (!), with events both online and in person!  This includes the actual novel launch party (!!!!!!) that’s sure to be an amazing time:

Interested in coming to see me?  Read on for the event descriptions, plus some info at the end about how I got involved with each one…. Continue reading »

Guest Post: Is Paid Work Legit and Unpaid Creative Work a Hobby?

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Ian here—Martha Engber is a writer and personal trainer whose books include Winter Light from Vine Leaves Press (2021 IPPY Gold Medal Winner in Young Adult Fiction), The Wind Thief, and Growing Great Characters From the Ground Up.  Martha and I met during the 2021 Vine Leaves Press online reading for the SMOL Small Press fair, and here she explains how her revelations during the COVID pandemic helped her balance her paid work with her largely unpaid creative work.

In December 2019 I was helping my sister babysit her new granddaughter in Houston, Texas when I received an email acceptance to publish my novel, Winter Light.

I allowed myself a full day of inner quiet to fully enjoy the achievement. At the same time, I’d already had two books published and understood that the moment I signed a contract, I’d spend the next eight months working hard to set up marketing for the book.

Once I signed the contract, the panic set in. I say panic because at the time I was working 45 high-energy hours a week as a fitness instructor and personal trainer at a corporation in Silicon Valley. Continue reading »