Category: Careers

I’m over halfway done with being pregnant, and it’s starting to feel extremely real. At Anime Boston, I didn’t have to tell people I was pregnant for them to guess (though of course, nobody said anything until I said it out loud, because you should never assume). If you ask me to put your hand on my belly, you might feel her kick. She kicks a lot! I feel like a Gundam occupied by a small, angsty pilot. I hope this means she’ll be a protagonist.

Even before I started showing, I started planning out What Happens Next. I have a lot of experience with newborns for somebody who still decided to have a kid anyway. I’m not going into this blind; I know that I’m going to be out of commission for weeks. Survival mode, barely rested, “I put on a clean T-shirt and that’s my work for the day” kind of thing.

In most nations, this is a given and often built into a country-wide healthcare plan. Here, not so much. I covered this last summer when I ghost-wrote How to Survive Unpaid Maternity Leave in America for GoFundMe (you will just have to trust me as my name isn’t on this), and I actually cried frustrated tears while writing it. I interviewed several moms who have been screwed by their workplaces’ leave policies or lack thereof. I was acutely aware that my own plans to start a family would be intrinsically tied to this struggle. Additionally, the central message of this GoFundMe-funded piece still wasn’t a solution I wanted to pursue unless I had to: “Why not use our platform to beg your friends and family for money?”

I’m due in early September, so I’m planning to take that month and October off from work. As I get bigger (and more tired—nobody talks about this!), here are some of the ways I’m getting ready to take all that time off:

Figure out my finances

First off, I have to say that being on John’s insurance and living in a two-income household is a huge help. I hope I’ve never been misleading about how much more I’d have to pay in Virginia if I were responsible for my own freelancer health insurance instead. I’ll say that one of the more affordable options here is eHealth, which is around $300 a month.

John’s healthcare covers my doctor’s appointments (of which there are many), but it does not offer life insurance, which is recommended for pregnant people. I looked into a few policies, but since pregnancy is a “preexisting condition,” it is pricey! So I decided to just go without. John and I joke that he can just order a bargain-rate funeral if something happens to me.

Maternity is not only a preexisting condition but in some cases, also a short-term disability. In Maryland as well as in Washington, DC beginning next year, pregnant people can apply for a short-term disability program, and if they are approved, receive a stipend during their leave. Virginia doesn’t have anything like this, and with another income in my household, it’s difficult to tell if I would qualify for it even if I applied. But I made sure to check anyway. (The answer is no.)

One way I am keeping costs down is by buying a lot of items for the baby secondhand. I joined a Facebook group for parents to reuse and recycle items and have gotten a few items for free or around $10. Since babies are only babies for so long, they quickly outgrow their nursery furniture—and after just a year or two of wear.

Find a replacement

NOTE: I AM STILL LOOKING FOR ONE! If you look at my work and think, “Hey, I could do that,” and are available during Eastern Standard Time, please reach out. Update, July 30: I found one!

When I found out I was pregnant, I told John first, my family second… and my clients third. The good news about being self-employed is that I don’t have to ask for permission; I just let them know I have already decided I will be taking two months off. (The bad news is I have zero job security, and there’s no guarantee anyone will take me back after that time is up.) I usually work a revolving door of gigs in which some clients don’t contact me for a month and then need me a ton the following month, so this won’t be all that different from usual.

How will the world ever survive without me for two months? Just as well as always, I am sure. But one of the clients I work for most often is looking for somebody who can take over my tasks—blog post and press release writing, copyediting, WordPress website upkeep, and PowerPoint presentation generation—while I’m gone. The job is remote, but you’ll need to be available to work during EST business hours, around 9 to 5 EST. If my client is happy with the work, they might keep you around far longer than two months!  

Keep my expectations low

One of my favorite posts on maternity leave is Jen Dziura’s A Not-Very-Relatable Post About Taking Zero Maternity Leave and Doing All the Things and Everything Working Out Just Fine. Obviously, as somebody preparing to take leave, I don’t find it relatable but I do find it impressive! Kudos to Jen for being able to balance her business with literally giving birth. This post, more than any other, reminds me that having a baby is a totally different experience for everyone, and there’s no prescribed process.

I have no idea what my life will be like as a parent. I haven’t figured out childcare or even decided on a name yet. I am bringing a baby into a terrifying world where unvaccinated morons could make her sick, where kindergarteners carry bulletproof backpacks, where students are demonized as political radicals and saddled with tons of debt. So to keep my sanity I’m just trying to take things a few days at a time. This plan is fairly minimalist for that reason.

One of my most helpful resources has been hearing from freelancer friends about their experiences taking extended leave—and not always family leave, either. I’ve known small business owners who blocked off their client calendars in order to devote a month to writing a book or for international travel. The plus side of freelancing is this freedom to choose how you will budget your income and spend your non-work hours. Everybody does it differently, which is a big reason why I wanted to share my plan: because friends’ stories have shown it is possible to leave for months and come back! I plan to be transparent about what those two months away from work are like, but I’m keeping my expectations so low that I am not even going to promise a blog post during that time. My “work” on leave will be keeping a baby and myself alive.

This is the longest Otaku Journalist post I’ve written this year, but I still have so many thoughts about this topic, and far more questions than answers. If you’ve ever taken an extended leave as a freelancer for any reason, I’d love to hear about it.

Lead photo via Markus Spiske from Pexels

Usually, my name can be found in the byline of an article. But last week, it was in reporters’ inboxes, too.

That’s because I was in charge of sending the J-Novel Club Anime Expo public relations (PR) announcements. I’ve been working with Sam, the J-Novel Club founder, since before he launched the site. I even designed it! I never planned to do PR there, but the role fits surprisingly well. I use my own name and my own press contacts that I’ve built over the years. As a journalist myself, I feel confident writing emails that I think other journalists will find helpful. 

In the past few years, I’ve realized I really enjoy this kind of writing. I got my first taste of PR while writing my own press releases to announce each of my books. I’ve managed publicity for other clients and I’ve also helped friends working on cool projects workshop their own press strategies. The highlight to date was when a young communications student at my alma mater and I had a phone conversation about writing PR that’s earnest and doesn’t suck.

When I was getting my Masters in Journalism, there was this idea that press and PR were polar opposites. One of my classes met in a communications building classroom right after the PR track had met there. We’d laugh at the professors’ obsequious strategies on the board about winning reporters over. At the time, I guessed PR and the press had a combative relationship. PR reps would push me to write glorified ads, I thought, and I would have to push back.

But while I’ve gotten my fair share of terrible press releases on boring or irrelevant topics, public relations point-people have helped me immensely. They send topics right to my inbox so I don’t have to search so hard for stories. They set up interviews with hard-to-reach people. They trust me with news ahead of time so I can publish timely exclusives. They offer to send me free stuff, which I usually refuse unless they send me something I am going to review because as nice as PR contacts are, they are not my friends and nothing they send me is really free.

You’d assume there are more strings attached here, but I somehow maintain good relations with PR contacts even when I write negative stories. I incorrectly called my Amazon Anime Strike piece a bridge-burner, because I used my connections and privilege as a reporter in order to write a negative piece about how much the service disappointed me. But after I sent them a link to the article, the PR contact said they looked forward to working with me again.

Just last week, a PR contact thanked me for my critical article about Cosplay Token. So if there is a string attached, it’s this: if I write anything, they win, because they get attention.

Honestly, I wish somebody had told me this earlier in my career: there’s nothing “brave” about writing negative stories that benefit my readers because no ethical company is going to cut my access because of a legitimate, if negative, story. That would just make them look bad.

The thing that does restrict my coverage? Well, doing PR. I wrote exactly one article about J-Novel Club before I started doing regular PR for them, and even that has a caveat about my ties to the company. I wouldn’t have written an article like that today, because I indirectly benefit.

Still, I would be comfortable with say, being a whistleblower if I learned about bad practices there (fortunately, I have not). I feel the same way about basically anywhere I work. Even though I’ve been writing at Anime News Network for four years, I’ve spoken publicly about being disappointed with CEO Chris Macdonald’s decision to join the Otaku Coin board (and following that up with how glad I was when he backed out of that).

You see, none of the places I work really need me. I am not an employee of anyone. A fellow freelancer recently shared a story on Facebook about these tenuous connections: after a year of turning in well-received work, she got pneumonia and was two days late on a deadline. The company paid her promptly as usual, and never contacted her again. It was perfectly legal. Anyone I work for could just as easily sever ties with me.

But there’s a kind of freedom in that, too. I don’t have one master. No one outlet has so big a vise on my wallet that I can’t up and leave. If one of them does something so poisonous that I don’t want to be associated with them anymore, it’s not a major financial hardship for me.

Lives and careers are messy. Even if I never did PR, this would be the case. My articles are full of editor’s notes: “I donated to this Patreon,” or “I met this founder at a con.” I have a lot of allegiances, sure, but my sense of right and wrong is stronger. Ultimately, my most powerful relationship is to my readers, without whom I wouldn’t have anything. As long as I feel like I’m doing right by them, I can sleep well at night.

First off, I wanted to let you know I’m giving a talk at the Japan America Society this Friday. You can still sign up for it here. I’ve been a member and language student there for four years, so when they asked me if I would volunteer to give this talk, it was a no-brainer.

This talk is coming two weeks after I gave an earlier version of it as an AnimeNEXT panel. It was one of four panels I gave at AnimeNEXT with John. Five if you count our participation on the AnimeCons TV panel, in which we talked about supporting the next generation of anime fans, something I have a lot of opinions on. 

With these speaking events combined, I feel like I’ve been doing a lot of resting on my laurels lately. I’ve been giving talks about things I have done in the past, without really having anything in the works at present.

Somebody asked me what happened to Anime Origin Stories. I stopped putting these up regularly right after a friend of mine passed away, and never got back to them. I haven’t posted any since November 1, and I still have 100+ stories waiting to be followed up on.

Also in November, I wrote a novel, which I’ve been meaning to edit. But I’ve only sat down with it once since then. That hardly counts as “in the works.”

I wanted to investigate more serious stories about fandom. Now that actually is something I’ve got in the works but no thanks to my own efforts—I found a place interested in assisting me with the resources I need to do this, so uh, stay tuned on that.

I’ve been letting Tom Aznable do the lion’s share of work for Gunpla 101.

Then there’s that blog series I said I was starting in March and stopped after one post. Nobody’s asked about it, but it still grates at me that I haven’t added anything new to it.

What have I been doing? I’ve had a lot of client work lately that’s not fandom related (unless you count writing about niche topics for niche audiences fandom, which I sometimes do). I’ve been doing my work for clients as thoughtfully as I know how and then logging off for the day. I’ve been going on a lot of walks. It’s a little like summer vacation.

We’re halfway through 2018, so I thought I’d give you a status update by writing this. Maybe it’s comforting to see that other people don’t have anything figured out, either? It’s weird not to be working toward a goal right now. It feels like standing still. This isn’t burnout. This is just a blank space in my career, in which I’m not sure yet where I want to refocus my daily work.

Habits are hard to form. It takes 30 days, experts say, for a repeated task to become a habit. And yet, they are so easy to break. Take Otaku Links, my Friday column for years. For the first few weeks, I didn’t post them, I felt like I was forgetting something. It felt weird, but not for long. Now weeks go by without me remembering that column ever existed. I know that in order to break out of this uncertainty, I just need to decide on a goal and start chipping away at it a little each day. But which goal?

The logical way to conclude this post would be to tell you how I’m going to break the cycle. But right now, I’m not sure what comes next for me. As I keep writing here every Monday, I’m going to continue to evaluate what matters most to me each week, and see if it forms a theme.

It’s all a long way of saying, watch this space! I’ll talk to you next week.