Side Hustle Highlights: Online University Teaching

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Somebody asked me the other day whether I was still teaching after I left my university job in Japan last year.  However, their actual question seemed to be Are you teaching full-time as your main job? which of course is a solid No.

I thought about the best way to answer, and finally replied with Yes, but not as my main job.

Whille I get most of my income from editing jobs these days, I worked as a teacher for a long time, first as a tutor and substitute teacher in New Hampshire, then at a private school in Japan, then in grad school teaching undergrad essay writing, then again in Japan.  I worked other jobs in between, of course, but over my working life I’ve definitely spent more time teaching than doing anything else.

Teaching is fun and interesting to me because I enjoy tackling the problem of how best to present material to students, and how to help them build their ideas in interesting ways.  The editing and coaching work I do uses a lot of those same principles as I help writers express their ideas in the fullest, clearest way possible, 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 »

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 »

Writing and Candy Wrapper Fashion: An Interview with Timothy Schaffert

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Timothy Schaffert is the author of six novels: The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters (2002), The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God (2005), Devils in the Sugar Shop (2007), The Coffins of Little Hope (2012), The Swan Gondola (2014), and most recently, The Perfume Thief (2021), in addition to being a professor of creative writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  He’s also an illustrator whose candy wrapper fashion series (selections from which appear throughout this interview) appears regularly on his Instagram and Twitter.

I first met Timothy in 2014 when I took his graduate-level fiction workshop at UNL and attended the Omaha Lit Fest, which he founded in 2005, and directed until 2015.  More recently, his candy wrapper fashion drawings caught my attention, so we sat down over Zoom to talk about MFA fiction workshops, finding the time to write, and how exactly he gets those candy wrappers to stick to the page.

[Cover photo: Candy Wrapper Fashion #356: The Ladies of Beverly Hills 90210] Continue reading »

Shoe Leather Hustling: An Interview with Writer Sean Doolittle

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Sean Doolittle is a crime, suspense, and horror novelist and the author of seven books: Dirt (UglyTown, 2001), Burn (UglyTown, Bantam Dell, 2003), Rain Dogs (Bantam Dell, 2005), The Cleanup (Bantam Dell, 2006), Safer (Bantam Dell, 2009), Lake Country (Bantam Dell, 2012), and most recently Kill Monster (Audible Originals, Severn House, 2019).  Originally from southeast Nebraska, his books have won the ITW Thriller Award, the Barry Award, and many others.  He’s also worked full-time throughout his writing career.

I first met Sean in 2014 when he taught a graduate-level fiction writing workshop at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he gave me some instrumental feedback on my first novel and wasn’t afraid to make pop-culture references in class.  We kept in touch, and earlier this year sat down over Zoom to talk about getting his work out there, his mid-career slump, and finding time to write when you have a day job. Continue reading »

Once in a While I Get Really Depressed, and That’s OK

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I went through a pretty rough patch a few weeks ago—like, stay in bed until four o’clock on a Sunday rough, stomach’s so upset you can’t finish your lunch rough, harboring doubts about your entire life’s direction rough.  The worst of this miserable cesspool overcame me for two and a half days (about 54 hours by my count), but its effects lingered for the next two weeks as smaller problems that wouldn’t normally bother me started hitting me hard—and that was all kinds of not fun.

I’d rather not share the specifics of what set off this depressive episode, though in retrospect I’ve realized that it was caused by a lot of different factors, including Day Job problems, personal issues, Coronavirus risks, the fact that it’s fucking cold and murky during the Toyama winter, and Continue reading »

Working on New Stuff Always Gets Me Excited: Miranda Reeder of Minyan/Harlevin Visual Novels

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Miranda Reeder writes and draws visual novels (kind of like graphic novels, except you play them on the computer) under the name Minyan and the label Harlevin, where she has over 1,400 followers on Itch.io.  Her VNs include Arena Circus, The Pretenders Guild, Mnemonic Devices, and Lilith Hall, and her current project with Fablesoft Studios, Twisted: A Dark Fairytale, raised over $2,300 on Kickstarter in October 2019.

I first met Miranda in Toyama, Japan, where she spent three years in the JET program teaching English.  After leaving Japan she returned to Ohio to pursue a master’s in Japanese translation at Kent State University, and over winter break we talked via Skype about staying motivated, balancing creativity with Day Job work, and sharing her passion with her family. Continue reading »

An Honest Post About Mental Health and the Academic Life

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Last week a woman I went to graduate school with killed herself.  After graduation she’d gotten a tenure-track job as an assistant professor at a large university, and it was there that she threw herself off one of the buildings on campus.  In a majorly bad move, the university where she worked neglected to cancel classes the next day, and students had to attend class in the building she’d jumped from.  Not cool, guys, not cool.

My former classmate and I hadn’t spoken in nearly four years, though there was a time when we were very close and confided in each other about a lot of things.  We talked about the difficulties that we were going through as grad students, our fears for the future, our frustrations with how the system was run, and the difficulties we faced teaching first-year composition to undergrads in Nebraska.  She was one of a small handful of people I could be open with about my insecurities, and she in turn was open with me.

Our falling out wasn’t a dramatic one, but it was a falling out nonetheless.  After I graduated and stayed in the city to work an editing/greenhouse assistant job in the university’s agronomy department, my skepticism Continue reading »

Good Work Will Find Its Way: An Interview with Author Jonathan Face

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Jonathan Face is a computer programmer by day and the author of Catharsis, a horror novel set in a small New Hampshire town, which has over 28,000 downloads on Amazon. He’s also the author of The Remnants Part I and II, and most recently, Odd Tales, a collection of short fiction.  We grew up in the same small town of Warner, New Hampshire, and he graduated from the same high school as me a few years before I got there.  We met for the first time when I was back in the state and sat down at his parents’ dining room table to talk about minimum wage jobs, self-publishing, job security, and being open with your coworkers about your writing life. Continue reading »

There’s No Google Maps for the Creative Life

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The other day I was meeting with my local writer’s group (small plug for them here), and afterward a younger guy who was finishing a creative writing MFA came up to me.  He was new to the group and had a lot of good ideas, and that night he had a deliberate look in his eyes and an important question he very badly wanted to ask:

“So, what did you do, like, for a job after you graduated?”

The question caught me off guard because it had been so long since anyone asked me that.  It brought me back to when I was twenty-two and my friends and I Continue reading »

How the Republican Tax Bill Affects Grad Students (Spoilers: Not in a good way!)

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I don’t often talk politics on this blog because that’s not what it’s for, but in rare cases I come across a political topic like the Republican Tax Bill that affects not only creative people with Day Jobs, but all of us who don’t quite fit the Traditional Middle-Class Mold of going to college, getting a high-paying job, and working that high-paying job until retirement.

For the past few weeks President Trump’s been talking about a new tax bill that he and others have touted as a way to bring tax relief to the middle class, in addition to reducing paperwork and loosening restrictions on businesses to make them more competitive.  Though the exact rhetoric around the bill has been mixed, the White House has been careful to plant the seed that the bill isn’t designed to help the wealthy, and Continue reading »

Confession: I Haven’t Worked on My Novel in 3 Months

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I’m absolutely ashamed to admit this, but it’s true.

According to my Daily Schedule Log, I last put in actual writing time on my new novel on June 1st, the day I finished editing the final chapter of Draft Three.  Since I’m drafting this entry on Labor Day to schedule for next week, that means my No-Novel period’s run just over three months, and that’s a long time.

To my credit, it’s definitely been a busy three months since I started my new Office Day Job.  This is partly because I’ve actually been working more hours and was dealing with a nasty commute for the first few weeks, but also because of the general life upheaval that came with the new job throwing off my old writing schedule.  Having to deal with a lot of new surroundings, routines, and habits made it harder for me Continue reading »