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 »

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 »

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 »

I Told People At My Day Job That I’m a Writer and They’re Totally Cool With It

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One thing I’ve struggled with since the days when I first started working was how to present myself and my goals while at a Day Job.  Should I pretend that I was totally interested in whatever work the company was paying me to do so I could take care of my bills, or should I be honest with my boss and coworkers that my real passion lay with writing and a career where I could do something creative?

Fortunately, in the days when I stocked grocery store shelves or cleaned preschool classrooms as a college student, this wasn’t a problem because everyone realized I was just doing these jobs for spare cash.  They knew I was in college, that I was only doing the job part-time, and that I was majoring in an area that had nothing to do with grocery stores or janitorial work, so we were all on the same page.

The problem was, though, that after college when I went out into the world, I wasn’t sure which direction I wanted to move in, but needed Day Jobs to help me to pay my bills while I figured that out.  And while I was working those jobs, people tended to regard me with suspicion, derision, or just plain view me as incompetent Continue reading »

Don’t Leave Your Creative Teammates Hanging (But If You Have To, Do It With Class!)

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I went through a rough time recently with a Creative Project Whose Name I Won’t Mention Here.  This project is a team effort that requires me to work closely with a few other people toward a common goal. Each person has a job, and we worked together to produce something we’re really proud of.

Until one person jumped ship.

Their leaving was pretty gradual: they started out by citing some personal issues and asking for more time, which we were happy to give them.  However, a few weeks turned into a few months, during which the person started replying slowly and briefly to messages where I asked for updates, then stopped replying at all.

This put the project in a weird state of limbo, especially since we had other collaborators on the line, promises to keep, and at least one financial-based deadline.  Finally, after several weeks of silence, Continue reading »

New Author Photo!!! (and How My Photo Shoot Went!)

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Yep, that’s me.

Above are two cropped versions of my new author photos, superbly set up, photographed, and photoshopped by Toyama-based photographer Kaede Tsuji (@maplens27). We took these photos back in early July on a swelteringly hot Saturday in Kansui Park in Toyama City.  I’ll be using one of them (probably the standing one) for the release of MFA Thesis Novel in April, along with marketing, publicity, social media, and all that good stuff.

This was my second time doing a photo shoot—my first time was back in New Hampshire in 2016 Continue reading »

Companies Treat Their Employees Like Garbage Kind of Often – A Pattern Explored

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A while ago I was talking to a friend who was having trouble at his job.  His company had gone through a merger with another company and was in the middle of a major consolidation/reorganization.  As part of this consolidation/reorganization, some higher-up got on a video call (this happened during COVID) to announce that they were instigating major layoffs, then immediately signed off and declined to comment because he was too cowardly to face the repercussions of what the company was doing.

Man, what a douchebag!

Anyway, my friend was fortunate enough not to be affected by said layoffs, but when the smoke cleared he found that his department was badly understaffed and everyone was overworked.  As a result, he started working a lot of (thankfully paid) overtime and having an overall rough time at work.  My friend had also been promised a raise several months previous, but Continue reading »

How is a Career Different Than a Job?

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I talk about Jobs a lot on this blog—as in, Day Jobs vs. Real Jobs, a Day Job as separate from a job you’re passionate about, a job as a way to establish your credibility, and so on.

What I don’t talk as much about, though, is the idea of a Career, which is something I’ve been overlooking both in my own life and in my philosophy about work in general.

I imagine a Career as a way of defining all the work you’ve done in a way you can be proud of.  A Career is something you’d openly tell others about when introducing yourself at a cocktail party, or something you’d write below your name on a business card.  A career is a way of defining yourself, and it establishes a kind of identity for you as a working person. Continue reading »

Sick Days Are Super-Important, and Don’t You Forget It!

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The title of this post says it all.

Last weekend I came down with a cold—not a super terrible one, but one that had me coughing with a sore throat and made my body ache for a few days.  When I realized what was wrong, I put some unnecessary projects on hold and took it easy for a few hours.  Then, when it was clear that I really feeling well, I called in to work and took a few sick days to recover.

Since I already wrote an entire post about how the national Japanese health care system makes it super-easy to go to the doctor, instead I want to emphasize that because my job as a teacher on the JET program gives me as many sick days as I need, I felt really comfortable calling in and staying home. This is because: Continue reading »

Tools of the Creative Trade: Japanese Campus Notebooks are Awesome

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I’ve written before about my favorite tool of the writing trade, the blue Bic pen that’s been discontinued and that I bought a lifetime supply of on eBay.  Another of my staples is the hardbacked At-a-Glance schedule books I’ve been using since the mid-2010s, but there’s one more essential I discovered after coming to Japan and I’m no longer sure I can live without.

I love plain, simple Japanese Campus notebooks. Continue reading »

Sometimes I Take on Too Much and Then Screw Up

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Let’s get one thing straight: we all make mistakes, whether it’s in our creative work or at our Day Jobs.  If you think otherwise, you’re living on another planet.

For me, the vast majority of my screwups happen because I take on too much and rush through things.

This wasn’t always the case—when I was younger most of my screwups happened because I was inexperienced, or because I wasn’t organized enough and forgot appointments or deadlines.  I improved the former issue by getting better at things I wanted to do well, and solved the latter by implementing a To-List system that’s served me well for the past nine or so years.

Now, though, I notice a different kind of problem: because I have so much going on, and so much of it coming from different directions, I tend to rush through some tasks so I’ll have more time Continue reading »

It’s About Prioritizing: An Interview with Haley Alt

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Haley Alt is a dystopian YA author whose three novels have sold more than 10,000 copies on Amazon under the name H. Alt.  (The first half of her fourth novel, Godless, is available for free on Wattpad.)  She recently moved back to the States after almost eight years in Japan, where she taught English, worked at a travel agency, and promoted sightseeing and did English translation for the town of Tateyama in Toyama.  I met her through my work on the TRAM art and culture zine, and sat down with her at a Starbucks in the suburbs of Toyama City, where we talked about religion, her upcoming move back to America, how scary it is when people actually read your work, and how Tom Cruise helped her sell a lot of eBooks. Continue reading »