Thoughts on Hyping Your Shit

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I think a lot about promotion, and how a lot of creative people don’t like doing it.  I hear from a lot of creative people that they want to be in a position where they can handle the actual making-stuff part and leave the selling and the hyping and the getting-the-word-out-about-the-stuff-they-made parts to someone else who’s doing it as a separate job.

For whatever reason, this attitude seems especially prevalent among other writers I meet, who find the idea of promotion distasteful.  Maybe I notice this because I also used to feel awkward about promoting my work, especially after having jobs where I had to sell shit I didn’t care about.  The selling at these jobs sucked so bad that I began to hate the entire idea of selling anything, especially if I was doing it to make money for some super-impersonal corporation somewhere.

Selling things for other people made me feel unclean because I was usually repeating a script someone else had written Continue reading »

Don’t Just Say “It Is What It Is”

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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 »

The Day Job Life à la Clark Kent

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I think a lot about how certain stories stick around through the generations because they reveal universal truths: Romeo and Juliet says a lot about first love, Gulliver’s Travels satirizes mankind’s stupidities, and 1984 explores totalitarian societies across all time (hence the novel’s sudden spike in sales after Trump’s election).

The best superhero stories do the same thing.

I have a friend who can school me in all things Batman and comic book hero-related (Hi Dan), but today I want to talk specifically about Superman, the precursor of them all.  Or, as this entry’s title suggests, I want to talk about Clark Kent. Continue reading »

Why I Keep My Day Job a Secret Online

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I get asked about my Secret Work-From-Home Day Job a lot.  Like, a LOT.  I think it’s because people are curious about how I keep the bills paid, but there’s also a fair amount of mystification: What kind of job could possibly be so important that Ian feels the need to hide it with such exaggeration?

First off, my Day Job’s nothing special or important—it’s actually pretty boring.  But I still don’t talk about it online because I think it’s bad form for anyone (creative person or otherwise) to talk about their Day Jobs online in ways that aren’t pertinent to their professional lives.  It’d be one thing if I were starting an amazing new job Continue reading »

Don’t Obsess About Your Work Being “Legitimate”

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I have a friend who’s working on a novel in her spare time.  It’s an ongoing project that she devotes an hour to every so often in the evening or on a weekend, and she has a lot of fun working on it when she can.

Sometimes the two of us discuss writing and she talks about her novel in a passionate, excited way that makes me excited too.  Other times she’ll talk about problems Continue reading »

How to Show People You’re Serious About Your Creative Work

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A couple years ago, I had a Day Job where sometimes I had to go to parties with my coworkers and other people involved with where I worked.  These parties were usually pretty awkward because I was the youngest one there and didn’t have much in common with the people around me.

At one of them, though, I met a guy a few years older than me who was pretty interesting, and I told him that I’d lived in Japan and was working on a novel about the lives of foreigners there. Continue reading »