Fashion advice from a freelancer who likes bright colors and saving money

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I decided to go back to work in November to improve my web development skills by working as part of a team. As the initial elation of getting the job faded, it was replaced by a feeling of dread: “My god, I’m going to have to start wearing pants again.”

aoba-and-kou-new-game

Aoba and Kou at the office. 

When I got my first office job out of graduate school, I dressed a lot like Aoba from New Game! I had a bunch of skirts and suit jackets left over from my days on the high school debate team: every day the same button-down shirt, unflattering below-the-knee skirt, and tummy-pinching tights with low heels. I hated it but the dress code was strict—after I broke my foot, I had to get a doctor’s note to explain why I would be wearing sneakers instead of heels during my recovery.

After I began working from home, I was free to explore my own sense of fashion instead of what I thought a company wanted me to wear. This wore off quickly though, since I spent most days at home. Usually I wore exercise clothes full time, the better to get a workout in between assignments. Any nice clothes I had were birthday gifts or hand-me-downs from my mom and younger sisters, who luckily all wear the same size. This is how I got away with just supplementing clothes I bought in college (or worse, high school) all through my twenties.

My existing wardrobe of workout leggings, oversized tech conference t-shirts, and hoodies was fine for my new office’s casual dress code in winter. But as the humidity crept up, I realized there was no way I could wear pants into summer. Shorts, even here, were out of the question. It was time to come up with a summer office wardrobe I wouldn’t hate.

I ended up dressing less like Aoba and more like her manager, Yagami Kou. You can find both me and Kou in flowy skirts and comfortable tops (and without pants whenever possible).

two-looks

As we all know from fashion magazines, all women have body shapes based on various fruits. My style direction is to dress so you can’t tell which one.

I spent less than $100 to build a summer wardrobe. Here are two outfits I wear nearly every week. I got the shirts for $10 from the Gap, the neon skirt for $20, and the purple skirt in Harajuku for $25. Each pair of flats was $15 from the Gap, and I bought the same ones in two colors, just like I did with the shirts. I am a big fan of duplicates if they’re comfy. One scarf was a hand-me-down from Mom, the other was a Nordstrom Rack bargain. (Yes, you’re taking style advice from a person who wears scarves in the summer.)

As you can see, I am not a very fashionable person. I like bright colors and saving money and those are my priorities. But since I’ve been working from home and have pared down my clothing selection for years, I’ve been able to create a small but versatile wardrobe where everything I own matches everything else, summer or winter.

I’ve kept a very sporadic fashion diary since college, and you can see me wearing some of the same pieces frequently over nearly a decade. Not having to wear anything fancier than exercise clothes for weeks, and not wanting to spend money on clothes nobody will see but me meant I could be very choosy when it came to picking stuff I wanted to wear forever. To the point that, when I decided to buy some office clothes, I could get away with 2 skirts and 3 shirts and end up having enough to wear every work day all summer. (I mean, I do have to do laundry every week as opposed to every two in winter, but in DC humidity, who doesn’t?)

Here’s my advice for freelancers who still go out sometimes and need to wear clothes:

1) What’s your favorite color?

in-my-purse

Here’s an unedited look at all the stuff I bring with me every time I leave the house. Clockwise from bottom: my keys and Metro card, wallet, Altoids, foldable shopping bag,  FitBit, 3DS, fan (for hot Metro trips), handkerchief (scented with essential oil, for smelly Metro trips), coin purse, and phone.

Altoids aside, you can see a pattern emerging here. I really like teal, pink, and purple. So I buy clothes in these colors, or in colors that match (like coral, navy, and yellow). I don’t even own a black purse, because when everything matches a color, that color is your neutral.

2) Accessories are cheap and add variety

look-and-closet

Left: a cheap old Target sundress and hand-me-down jacket modernized with a scarf. Right: Everything in my closet matches everything else. Also, every one of those boxes you see is where my money really goes—Gunpla. 

Want nobody to notice that you have a limited wardrobe and often repeat outfits? Work with a team of men, like me (ha ha). If that’s not an option, let’s talk about accessories.

I friggin’ love scarves. I can update an entire outfit by changing the scarf. They also keep you warm, can be worn 100 different ways, and don’t cost much. When scarves aren’t warm enough, I’ll mix things up with my stupidly inexpensive wrap collection. Or a statement necklace from Target. But mostly, it’s scarves that have the most dramatic effect. Even if I don’t buy clothes that often, I’ll buy at least one scarf a year to update my look, and suddenly my oldest outfits look new again. 

A note on makeup, which is sort of an accessory—this is actually the one area I spend a lot of money on. As I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten choosier about what I put on my face. While I used to wear bright drugstore makeup, now I prefer to wear color in my clothes and neutrals on my face. I usually wear the Urban Decay Naked 3 palette and Kat Von D Tattoo liquid liner (which, relatedly is the same liner that Victoria from Crunchyroll uses, much to my disappointment. I thought if I bought the same liner as her I could look that good, but it’s all talent.)

3) Forget what looks best, what feels best?

When I was in Girl Scouts, I earned a badge for determining which color clothing looks best on me. I bought paint chips at Home Depot and held them next to my face to figure out if I was a Spring, Summer, Autumn, or Winter. I’m so glad Girl Scouts isn’t like this anymore.

I don’t pay any attention to what colors I look good in; I prefer to focus on clothing cuts I look good in—or better yet, feel good in. You might not be aware that you already choose things using this requirement. What are the most-worn clothing items you have? Do you already find yourself wearing a “uniform” of sorts? Since it’s almost fall, here’s what I will wear when the weather gets cooler: skinny jeans, a graphic tee, and a hot pink or teal blazer. Instead of changing what I like, I’ll build around my preferences to create an updated wardrobe. If my skinny jeans get too tight or my blazer gets frayed, I know I’ll want more of the same. I also know I’ll probably going to be wearing a T-shirt no matter what my plans are, so maybe I’ll buy a new statement scarf to cheaply dress it up.

Making sure everything looks good together gives me more variety, which means more outfits without more clothes, which means my clothes don’t wear out as quickly and I don’t have to buy them very often. I would rather buy Gunpla than buy clothes any day, so this works for me.

How does your job affect your wardrobe?

Otaku Links: Exclamatory anime titles!!!

Otaku Links

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  • Summer anime is winding down, and I’ve already got my eyes on what’s coming up this fall. Since I’m a sports anime fan, I definitely want to check out Long Riders!, a girls’ cycling anime, and rugby anime All Out!! (Side note, what’s with exclamation points in anime these days? Neither of these hold a candle to the upcoming Keijo!!!!!!!!)
  • It feels like I post a new Colette Bennett fandom article every week, but I can’t help it. Her latest, What’s it like to be a trans Lolita, is an emphatic look at the intersection of fandom and gender identity.
  • How do you make money as a novelist? Some Quora real talk from one of my first favorite fantasy authors, Mercedes Lackey. “Of all of the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, only about 10% make a living from writing.” Oof.
  • I just finished Back Off, I’m A Ninja, the third book in Natalie Whipple’s YA triology. I rarely read YA but this self-published series ignores mainstream trends in exchange for a compelling story that somehow manages to touch on pretty much everything I like, from Japanese myths to Dungeons and Dragons.
  • Did we kill hobbies by monetizing them? To celebrate the end of Japanese 301, some of my classmates and I went out for a drink, and I mentioned I review anime. “So do you still enjoy watching anime?” was the first question I got.  I do! But for some people, getting paid to do something fun can absolutely kill the leisure aspect of it.
  • On the same topic: Why Flexible Working Makes Me 100% Happier. I work my “day job” even less than Emma does—four half days a week—but I still struggle to get everything done. I know that if I had a full time job there’s no way I’d be able to accomplish all the stuff that’s important to me.

Photo via Daily Dot

Your embarrassing former self

Writing

embarrssing-former-self

Last week, my betta fish died. This was a downer not only because Elliot was a cute and reliable pet, but because the way he died—overheating in the Virginia summer—should not have happened. Last year, I co-authored a book about DIYing a “smart” fish tank that relies on a Raspberry Pi and text-messaging to alert the owner when the tank is too hot or too cold. I literally invented this device and yet, this summer, I didn’t have it turned on.

Elliot’s death wasn’t just tragic; it was frankly embarrassing.

However, as a person who lives my life in public—as a writer and blogger—I’ve slowly gotten used to the fact that my embarrassments are public, too. (Though luckily, they don’t usually involve a death count.) My books and blog posts are always coming back to haunt me.

The main source of my embarrassment is this: I can’t read something I wrote more than two years ago without cringing. I can’t focus on the content, instead getting distracted by all the ways I would improve on past Lauren’s clunky wording.

At their best, my old blog posts needs a good editor, preferably the me of today. At their worst, they’re just plain offensive. I once referenced transgender people with a slur. (A lot of people give Tumblr teens a hard time for being overly PC and I get it, I’ve been mocked for cooking Japanese food in my own kitchen, but I wish something like Tumblr had existed when I was a teen to remind me that people who aren’t me exist and deserve respect.) It gives me shivers to notice the subtly sexist wording in a post about my first Gunpla, “begging my boyfriend to buy me one” probably because that sounded like wording in a magazine, even though I had a good job and was perfectly capable of buying my own merch.

When people want to insult me online, they retort to calling me fat and ugly. But if they really wanted to get under my skin, they could try dissecting my old writing. “Her syntax is a mess!” “This run-on sentence is criminal!” Not to give anyone any ideas. After all, the troll inside my head is already doing this.

Still, there’s no running away from my embarrassing former self. My writing lives forever online, which means there will always be old pieces for me to over-scrutinize. There’s nothing to do except move past it. Here are my coping mechanisms for you to borrow:

  • It’s OK to revise stuff. Sometimes I look at old posts that are still popular, and realize I’m not sure I even agree with myself anymore. You can dig up an old post and polish it up and re-post that thing. My My Little Monster post is a great candidate for this since it’s still controversial, still one of the top five posts here, and it’s not really how I feel anymore. I’d like to rewrite it while emphasizing it’s OK to like problematic things. Other stuff is sort of dated, for example, my book Otaku Journalism has a poorly-named “Navigating Ethics and Bias” chapter, which features an Internet culture blogger. I wrote this book in early 2014, but in hindsight this is a VERY UNFORTUNATE juxtaposition. I’m sure that if you have an anime blog, you can probably also think of some posts and pieces that could use an update for 2016.
  • Heck, it’s OK to delete stuff. Sometimes stuff isn’t salvageable. Earlier this year, I set more than 200 of my older posts to private because they get barely any traffic and I don’t feel like they represent my views anymore. (Don’t worry, there are still 500+ public posts on this blog, so you won’t run out of stuff to read!) I may revisit these old posts and clean them up like in the first tip, but for now they’re down, and it gives me peace of mind to know nobody is going to stumble on stuff I’m not 100% ready to share anymore. I don’t owe anyone to store my posts in an unchanging, museum-like archive. This is my blog and I can run it however I want.
  • It’s not an excuse not to write. “Why begin writing now if I’m just going to hate it in two years?” is a really unhelpful train of thought. For one thing, if you don’t write now, you won’t have improved enough by the end of two years to see any difference. You’d stagnate, and worse, you wouldn’t be sharing your potentially great stuff with the world.
  • Don’t let your inner (or outer) critics win. I put up a somewhat viral tweet defending an awesome feminist writer recently, and have gotten a bunch of crap on Twitter about it. The day that happened, I realized “I can’t write my Otaku Journalist post today.” I didn’t want to write a post while metaphorically looking over my shoulder, reading and re-reading each sentence as if I were my own enemy attempting to eviscerate it. Creation requires a measure of personal revelation and vulnerability—you can’t be creative when you have all your defenses up. Write from a neutral state of mind.

No piece of writing is ever finished because we as writers are never finished. As we continue to improve our skills and evolve and nuance our views, we will always be able to think of ways to edit and re-do our writing—if not now then eventually.

Don’t let your embarrassing past self stop you. The only smart option is to keep forging ahead.

Photo of Elliot in happier times.

Otaku Links: A big week for anime

Otaku Links

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  • Funimation and Crunchyroll have teamed up to bring more subs to Crunchyroll, more dubs and DVD releases to Funimation and generally more anime, the way you want to consume it, for everyone. I think this is great news! I already pay for both services so I guess I’ll be seeing the results of the partnership pretty soon.
  • It’s rare that a single interview changes the way I review anime, but this Yatta-Tachi interview with Shingo Natsume & Chikashi Kubota of One Punch Man fame did just that. After the following comment, you can bet I won’t be referring to sloppy looking episodes as ones that “ran out of budget”:

“A lot of people have this common misconception that the quality of the actual animation is based on the production’s budget. But in Japan, the TV production world, especially when it comes to anime, generally they all have the same budget. There are really rare situations where some have a little less and some tend to have a little bit more, but nothing that is very drastic. So, in reality, it is based on the staff.”

  • My friend Amelia wrote an articulate, provocative article on how moé shows can infantilize and sexualize characters at the same time. I love moé because it is often unintentionally subversive (the way New Game! portrays a successful all-woman game studio and Yowamushi Pedal shows that moé main character Onoda can be both tough and into princess anime). But it’s important to remember the construct our fantasies are built on. I touched on this once when talking about another one of my favorite moé shows: You are the only male character in “Love Live.”
  • This was a great week for anime industry interview pieces. The flawless Deb Aoki interviewed Nami Sano, the author of Haven’t you heard? I’m Sakamoto. I was surprised to learn Sakamoto didn’t start out as a gag manga at all!

Screenshot via New Game!

August 2016 Income Report

Careers, Income Reports

august-income-report

Thanks for bearing with me as I feel out how much I want to share with these income reports. This month, I’m going to be vaguer about everything, speaking in estimates when it makes sense to share amounts.

Financially, this was my best month of the year. After a so-so summer, I finally got a bunch of money I was owed all at once. I still am waiting for about $1,000 in back pay from various gigs, but that’s the freelance life for you.

aug-streams

Two elements converged to make this a huge month for my freelance income stream. First, there was some sort of accounting error at my day job which led to my paycheck being a fraction of what it is usually, despite me working overtime. It happens.

Second, it was a bad Amazon month. The way Amazon affiliate earnings work, you get paid three months after the fact. So even though August was a $650+ month for my Gunpla 101 site, I got paid my May earnings, which were only around $350.

aug-compare

Here’s an income stream comparison with July. These circles aren’t to scale, or July would be way smaller. The point is, because I got a lot of checks I was waiting for work from last month, freelance went super well. Combined with the error at my day job and a low month for Amazon, Orsini Bowers Media gigs basically take up the entire pie.

aug-total

Here’s a much better chart for showing total income since I started writing these reports. I think I’ve mentioned before that in 2015, I had a five-figure month AND a three-figure month. Freelance really fluctuates.

Honestly it’s a huge relief to be earning a lot again. I have been feeling burnt out and overwhelmed. I’ve been slowly morphing into the kind of person I hate, who always says “I’ll have it done by tomorrow” and then has it two days later. It’s a clear sign I am doing too much at one time, so I need to better regulate my projects.

aug-profit

Because of all those earnings, my expenditures took a considerably smaller chunk of my business than usual. This month, I spent money on web hosting, renewing my Freckle time-tracker for the year (so no more monthly payments), paying Gunpla 101 contributors, and paying Rusty, my amazing developer for GunplaDB.

How did I do on those August financial goals? Great! I made sure I got paid and cooked at home and brought lunch to the office 99% of the time. I did not spend as much time on my affiliate sites as I should have, but I am in the midst of a big new tutorial for Gunpla 101. Plus, John and I came up with a new savings plan, so I’ll be contributing more money to that.

My September financial goals are:

  • Contribute August income to each savings goal. Our goals are to 1) create an emergency fund that consists of three months of our total living expenses 2) save up for another international vacation and 3) save more aggressively for retirement.
  • Find some new freelance gigs now that I’ve gotten paid for and finished up the last batch of jobs.
  • Invest time and energy in building up GunplaDB, my newest affiliate site.

Share how your August went, and any financial goals you have for September, in the comments!

Previously: