How to Take Time Off On Your Own Terms

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One of the best perks about working in Japan was the incredible number of paid national holidays I had: 16 per year to be exact, and they were pretty evenly spaced so that almost every month had one.  Combine that with school vacations and slow periods when classes were out of session, and I had a pretty sweet yearly calendar with a lot of paid time off.

Now fast forward a year: I’m back in the States, where I divide my time between finishing my Secret New Novel and doing freelance editing work to keep the bills paid.  Much of my editing is flexible (as in, I can work on it when I want to), but I also do scheduled video calls with clients where we talk through issues they’re having.  Some weeks, all of this work combined can make for a pretty tight schedule.

This begs a really, really important question: How is someone working a schedule like mine supposed to take time off? 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 »

September 2022 Novel Update: Second Draft Revisions in Progress!

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Quick recap: When I last posted an update about my Secret New Novel, it was an exciting one. After a year and a half of methodical research, scheduling writing time, agonizing over plot details, and stepping away for one reason or another, I finally, at long last, finished the first draft!!!!!!!!!!11

While the novel still has a LONG way to go, finishing the first draft was a HUGE deal for a number of reasons:

The first is that, for me, drafting an initial story from nothing is the most agonizing part of the process, and by far the most difficult.  On days when I have to draft something more complicated than a blog post, I tend to spend a lot of time putting off writing and getting warmed up, which translates into less time at the computer actually putting words on the page.  Revising what I’ve already written, in contrast, is far easier, and when I sit down with an earlier draft in front of me that I can look at and improve, I feel less stress and more confidence.

The second reason is that with finishing this first draft, most of the really intense mental brainstorming and creation have already been done Continue reading »

Reflections on Six Years of Blogging

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Hard to believe that I started working on the But I Also Have a Day Job blog six (!) years ago this week.  At this time in 2016 I was testing designs and playing with WordPress formatting while I drafted the very first posts on Day Job Basics, and from there, it was off to the races.

This blog represented a really big step for me: back in 2016, I’d finished grad school, was trying to sell one novel and finish another, and made a major life change by moving out of Nebraska, where I’d gone to grad school and stayed an extra year working in the Agriculture department.

I knew I had to start taking my writing more seriously and figuring out my next steps, and the But I Also Have a Day Job blog was a HUGE step in clarifying the direction I wanted to take my creative work and my life in general.  Before this blog, I didn’t have much of an online presence at all, had very little published work, and it felt like I was just barely starting out.

Fast forward to six years later, and I’m…pretty satisfied with how how far I’ve come.  I haven’t done as much as I’ve liked, but I’m overall Continue reading »

Giving Up The Dream…

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This week’s post is a really important one.  It’s also a difficult one for me to write, and might hit close to home for a lot of people.  So, fair warning.

When we grow up, we’re surrounded by images of what a friend of mine recently referred to as The Dream—an image of the way our lives are quote-unquote “supposed to” look like.

The exact specifications of The Dream will no doubt look different to everyone, but it usually goes something like this:

 

What is The Dream?

In the way of life I’m calling The Dream, the person has a stable, full-time job they can consistently work without fear of being laid off or having to change jobs.  Said job pays a salary that’s not only enough to live on, but enough to save for retirement and afford amenities of decent quality, including furniture, vacations, late-model cars, and consumer electronics.  The salary from said job also allows the person to buy a house that’s relatively new, relatively large, and has some amount of property (most often Continue reading »

5 Advantages of a Flexible Work Schedule

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A few weeks ago I shared my Awesome Work-From-Home Freelance Writer/Editor schedule and talked about how I structure my workdays in a way that makes sense to me.  Writing in the morning, handling email and admin around midday, and working on editing and marketing in the afternoon has helped me create a really useful workflow that makes me feel comfortable during my workday and get more done.

There are a ton of other advantages to being self-employed, of course: not having to deal with horrible bosses, navigate toxic coworker relationships, deal with pointless Day Job shit, or fight the pressure to care about your company when you really don’t.  Avoiding these downsides is pretty awesome, and it’s helping me feel better about my creative work/paid work balance.

One HUGE advantage, though, is that when you work for yourself, you have a flexible schedule.  That means you can schedule your own work when you want to, as long as it gets done Continue reading »

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 »