I’m not going to lie: 2023 was a rough year. Though 2023 started off on an optimistic note, and the first half went really well, the second half took a major nosedive as my productivity, organization, and overall mood went WAY down. So what happened? How did the year spiral downward, how did I handle it, and where does that leave me in 2024? Let the 2023 reflections begin.   In 2023, I Made Clear, Simple Resolutions I started off the year with two simple goals: to finish Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers (my novel-in-progress) and clean up my long-term To-Do list, which consists mo ..read more

Last week, things got pretty fucked. Okay, to be fair, nothing actually got fucked—I was just REALLY busy juggling different deadlines, appointments, and other commitments that all seemed to fall to the end of April.  To make matters worse, I still haven’t entirely unpacked at my new place, so my office and much of the rest of the apartment is still a mass of boxes and piles.  This meant that when I needed to find something from those boxes or piles, instead of just reaching over and grabbing it, I needed to search for it, which meant I spent a lot of time searching that could have b ..read more

Last week in General Ian Life News: I moved to a new apartment. The move itself was a fairly easy one, and one I’d been planning for a long time, to an apartment in the same town close to where I was living before.  The move itself went incredibly smoothly, since I had plenty of help and the new apartment was so close to my old place that we could easily shuttle things over using multiple car trips.  This was in sharp contrast to previous moves, where I’ve had to scramble and dash around to be out of my old place by a firm deadline. While I’m very much looking forward to having my ow ..read more

For the past few years I’ve found myself getting a nasty sinus cold around the first week of April—two years ago after a long day of exploring a cherry blossom park in Joetsu, Japan, and last year when I was preparing the pre-orders for MFA Thesis Novel.  And this year, the same thing happened again. I’d been getting a bit of a sore throat in the mornings and at night for a week or so, but it never lasted long.  Last Wednesday, though, I found myself with a bad runny nose that got worse throughout the day, and after crashing hard that night, I woke up the next day too tired to do muc ..read more

Last week I dove into the differences in mindset that separate freelance workers from regular full-time employees: things like how you view your job, how you schedule your time, and how you relate to coworkers. (If you missed that post, definitely check it out before you read this one!) I had a lot to say (and the post title definitely grabbed people’s attention!), but I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about the negative aspects of working for yourself as well, since it’s not all wine and roses. Interestingly, when I talk to full-time employees about differences in our working lives, a lot of the ..read more

Since coming back to the US last year after three-plus years of living abroad, I noticed a lot of things had changed.  And one of those things was the people around me. More specifically, I noticed a lot of my friends complaining about their jobs.  They talk about problems with their bosses, suffering through boring meetings, dealing with checked-out coworkers, and even worrying about layoffs.  My friends who work for big companies in particular talk about things like salary negotiations and jumping ship to make more money at a different company.  They also talk about retir ..read more

One of my all-time favorite blog posts is about how much I hate commuting—both because of the cost of the gas and the time spent on the road that basically counts as unpaid worktime.  I felt this most painfully back in 2011, when I was working an office job and driving 46 miles per day round trip.  When I did the math, I found this was costing me $33.50 in gas per week, which came out to 84 cents per hour, or 7% of my total paycheck.  Yikes! There was also the matter of time: because I was going in early to beat rush hour, my 8 hour workday turned into a 9.5 hour day total, addi ..read more

I’m writing this from a coffee shop in my town where I sometimes go to do work in the afternoons. For the price of a small (or sometimes large) drink, I can grab a table, set up my laptop, and work on editing, emails, miscellaneous tasks, or even this blog, like I’m doing right now.  Sometimes it’s crowded, but usually it’s not, so I can work in a relatively quiet atmosphere. But an ideal workspace for me is about more than just quiet: sometimes I like being around other people, and I need to change up my surroundings to freshen my outlook. I wrote about this in an earlier post about work ..read more

I’m writing this post on Saturday (yeah, I tend to schedule these posts in advance, EPIC SHOCK), where I woke up at my usual time, made breakfast, wrote out a to-do list, and sat down to finish a lot of things I didn’t quite have time for this week, including drafting this post. Now, just to be clear, I don’t normally work a standard day on the weekend.  Usually I use my weekends for seeing friends, reading, doing physical chores, and in general, relaxing and de-stressing from my creative and editing work to put me in a refreshed state of mind for the week. The problem is, though, that so ..read more

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 pr ..read more