Hooo boy! Another unplanned, unexpected episode to delight and amaze! ...well, it should be interesting, at least?
Herein I talk about quitting my day job — why, how, when — and what my plans are now going forward as a "solopreneur," as the kids call it. ;)
Hit "play" to get the inside scoop and why I prefer working from home as well as what you can expect from me for the rest of the year (courses! books! more podcasts!!!). I value your support and appreciate you taking the time to listen in.
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TRANSCRIPTPromo Intro:
This is episode eight of the second season of the author alchemist. I'm KimBoo York, and today I'm going to talk about why I quit my day job. Hang in there, it's going to be a ride!
Main Intro:
I'm KimBoo, the host of The Author, alchemist podcast. I'm bringing my years of experience as both a fanfiction writer and a professionally published author to the problem we all love to hate: the act of writing. We can't improve on something that doesn't exist, which means the most important thing you can do is simply write. Anything. Just write something. I'm here to help you do that.
Podcast:
Hi, y'all, it's KimBoo, and welcome back. It is a lovely morning, in spring, early March, when I'm recording this. Who knows when you'll actually be listening to it. But today's podcast is super special! I want to get — just like I did last episode, for those who've been following along, I shuffled up episodes that were planned originally to make room for last episode, where I was talking about the launch of my first online course, Out from Fanfic. If you're curious about that, I encourage you to go listen to the unexpected, unplanned Episode Seven (ep. 28), where I talk a lot about it.
This is the unexpected, unplanned episode eight (ep.29), where I decided to actually talk a little bit about what I'm doing and why. This relates to motivation and creativity, I think in a lot of ways, because it's not just a personal decision on how I choose to live my life, but is also related to my need to be creative, my drive to create things, and how much time there is in the day, and how much energy we have in the time that we have in the day. All of these things are related.
So a little bit of backstory. I have had a day job. Well, you know, since I was a teenager, my first job was at Winn Dixie, I was a cashier. I'm sure I was adorable. But I was what 15,16? I've always had jobs, off and on, obviously, always also tried to do side hustles off and on. This job came about in a way that kind of fell in my lap. I wasn't planning to work in higher ed in the sense of working with Disability Services. That was never the intention. But I got a part time job in the Student Disability Resource Center, as it was then known in 2011. About that? 2012? Anyway, working part time on a massive textbook conversion project. We were converting a math... graphing math calculator... Wait, no, wait, hold on. It's been so long now. Okay, graphing calculus math textbook, into Braille math project. After the project wrapped up, the person who hired me essentially walked off the job. And in desperation, the current director, the then director Martha asked me to put in for the position. So I did and I got it.
It really wasn't what I wanted to be doing, in the sense that I had actually gone to get my degree, a master's degree in Library and Information Studies, because I wanted to work with rare books. I got very interested in archives along the way, so I would have been happy to work in an archive job as well. And I did for a little while at the Claude Pepper congressional library on FSU campus, shout out to Robert! I enjoyed working with him, it was a great position. But it just didn't leverage into anything better for me, I tried, but the market was really tight. And it is always really tight in those fields, because even though there's very few people with those skill sets, they're also very few jobs. So unless somebody retires or runs away to you know, start a goat farm or something, those jobs just don't open up. And I was desperate for a job. So, that's the story. Nothing special about being desperate for money. I had come out of my master's degree program with a degree but also with whooping cough and other health issues, and massive student loan debts and absolutely no resources and no help because as friends of mine are aware, where I got divorced right before I started graduate school. So there it was, there was no fallback there.
For many years, it was a very good job. It was very comfortable job. I did like the work that I was doing and I liked assisting the students who came in and wanted to use alternative or adaptable technologies. It was interesting to work on the back end with different publishers on getting alternative texts, files, usually digital files, either PDFs or ePubs for students to use. I mean, a lot changed over the time I was there, because I officially got hired in October 2013, which was almost going on 10 years ago now. So! Technology has really grown. Like when I started in the position, text to speech readers were very uncommon and very expensive. But of course, this was the era when the smartphone was really coming into its own as a strength, as a tool, as a technology aid for people, which has become de facto what it is now. And now everybody can get a text to speech reader on their phone if they aren't already using things like Siri. So it's definitely been a changing, changing field.
But again, not the job I wanted. I kept writing as you know, I was writing throughout that whole period, I definitely wrote fanfiction during that time. I did write some books I put up. Yeah, Parker's Sanctuary, my Cooper, West, male/male novel was put out... 2013 I think? 2014? Self published that one. And Wolves of Harmony Heights, which was my big NaNoWriMo project that got absolutely carried away, came out in 2017. And so I was writing I was working on my career. But it could not be a focus for it.
Around 2018, I also decided that I wanted to go into creativity coaching now, over time, I realized that one on one coaching isn't really my strength. I do offer it as a service, but it's a really premium service because it takes so much energy out of me that I can't do it for a lot of people. So I have to be very careful about who I do one on one coaching with because it is so energy intensive. That desire changed into wanting to provide online courses on motivation and creativity. I'm always very clear here at the Author Alchemist about my role, which is not to make you a better writer, but to make you write. There are a lot of tools and people out there who can help you with your craft, and find ways to develop your skill set. My role, I believe, my my talen, the thing that I do best is helping people actually sit down and do the writing to get over the mental mind blocks the psychological hurdles, the fear and the insecurity that leads people to not write. That's what I do.
So the whole time I've had that job, I was working on these things. And then the pandemic hit. Why do feel like a lot of books of the next 10 years are going to be opening with that line: "and then the pandemic." Because well, it makes sense. I mean, it changed everything overnight. Our lockdown started on March 18 2020. We went work-from-home expectation was probably working from home through summer, and then coming back into the office in fall...which actually we did. FSU called us back into the office, but we were only working a couple of days a week and only with a skeleton crew. So only one or two, of us were in the office at any given time during the course of the week. Some people worked one day a week I was working two days a week...Wednesdays and Thursdays? So yeah, we were actually called back into the office a lot sooner than a lot of other people.
And that kind of leads to the two pronged reason on why I decided to quit. One: I was not happy that my employer was so desperate to get warm bodies back in the office that it would be willing to risk our lives to do it. If you think back into 2020, we were dealing with a lot of unknowns. We didn't know how deadly COVID was going to be, and we didn't know how the government was going to handle it. There was...just...it was just a yawning void of uncertainty. And so being called back into the office when the campus itself was shut down, there were no students on campus. We only went back to partial repopulation in the summer of 2021 and then full repopulation in the fall of 2021. So we were there for six months for absolutely no reason, no reason at all. I didn't appreciate that. And it was kind of the writing on the wall for me to realize just how little my life matters to my employer.
I'm gonna say my boss, I had a pretty good boss, I think the leadership team for the department I was in wasn't happy about it either. But we're a public institution. So you know, our governor, I'm just going to be straight out people. I know, I don't try to get political here, but our governor is awful, totally awful. Basically, organized crime is running Florida right now, not very happy about that. I was very happy to get away from public university setting for that reason.
The other reason though, was a little bit more personal in the sense that working from home made me realize how much more energy I have when I am able to be in an environment that feels safe for me and that doesn't require a lot of energy for me. I saw something interesting on Twitter the other day, a talk, a discussion that was going on about people working from home and their preference for it. And it was specifically talking about introverts versus extroverts. And I do have friends who are extroverts and who have had issues with being isolated, and who are really looking forward, if they haven't already, to going back to the office so that it can be around people. That's something that energizes them and gives them purpose and, and helps them focus on what they're working on. And so they've been complaining a lot about not being able to do that. Then somebody else said, you know, the frustration you feel over being forced to be an introvert for the last two years is the same frustration, introverts feel being forced into environments filled with people all the time. Literally as an introvert, I have been forced into situations where I'm constantly around other people since I've got my first job. I've never liked it, it's always been soul sucking, it's always been draining.
Having that time to work from home really brought that home in a way that even working from home during my graduate program, which kind of is what I did, like first year and a half that program, I didn't even have a job and so I was working from home and it felt great. But in a way, mentally, to me, it was an exception, because I knew that it was for grad school. I knew I would have to get a job eventually and that I would not be working from home in the future. I probably could have if I thought about it that way. But you know, I was just really locked into the idea of, you know, get a master's degree, go get a real job, which I did. And then you know, go back and work in an office like an adult, isn't that would adults do? So even though I kind of clued in at the time, "gosh, wow, I'd really love to do this live this way, you know, be at home, work from home be around" — at that time, my cat had gotten a dog yet — "...you know, be home all the time. That's this is great." That's what I thought. "Unfortunately, I can't do this. Because I'm gonna have to go out and be an adult get a real job once I graduate." So I wasn't really thinking of it in the same way I was thinking of it during the pandemic lockdown when I realized, "ah, this is really what I should be doing. This is really how I should be living."
It was a wake up call for me in a lot of ways, as much as I had already planned for the fact that that my job at FSU was so-called temporary even though I had it for years, I hadn't really acted on that. I'd gotten complacent, I'd gotten comfortable. And for some people that's necessary. I don't want to say oh, if you get complacent you're not going to do anything. There are people out there who really need that sense of comfort, that sense of safety in order to be creative, in order to do the work that they need to do like that. That's a requirement for them. It turns out I'm not one of those people. When I am in a situation where I'm comfortable, I do get complacent. I do think well I can always do that tomorrow or I can do that next week or I can do that over break. I'm actually looking back on myself shocked that I got as much done as I did, that I did as much writing as I did, that I developed the Author Alchemist as much as I did. And literally the author Alchemist has taken almost four years to really get to this point of launching; not making any money, it's been a, it's been a money drain the whole time there, I have not made any money at this business. But I've developed websites for it. I've worked on this podcast, I've thought about the courses I want to develop, I've refined exactly what services I can offer that fit in with both my needs and the needs of the people I'm hoping to help. They weren't four wasted years, they were just for very part time years/ I could, literally if I hadn't had a day job, I'm sure I could have condensed all that learning, and experience and effort down into, you know, six months. But I didn't because I had the day job.
So two years into the pandemic, I found myself in a place where I do have a little bit of, of a safety net, a little bit of money in the bank. It's not a lot. I figure I've got about six months smooth sailing before things get really rough for me. And I'm just gonna lay it out there and be totally honest, this is not me saying you know, I have I have $500,000 in the bank so I can just make my business dreams come true. No, nooooo, nope nope. I do not have a lot of money in the bank, but I do have some. And when my job made it very clear that working from home was never going to be an option for me, they turned down my my disability accommodation request to be able to work from home part time, I was only asking for three days a week, they wouldn't even talk to me about it. Well, they did talk to me about it. Basically, were talking to me about it saying "no, we can't do that. How about you just deal with it." Alright, byyyyye!
I really decided to quit my job over November in 2021 going into the American US thanksgiving holiday, but I wanted my holiday hours through the fall or through the winter break, so I didn't turn in my resignation until January 4th. Because we were short staffed and everybody's quitting — hey, great resignation! It's hitting everywhere. I think my job, my department still has four position counting mine for positions open out of a nine person office. That's a lot, kind of tells you something. Anyway, they asked me to stay on until March or through the end of February. So I stayed until March 3rd, which was the end of a pay cycle for FSU. And then I left.
Now it's March 7, as I'm recording this, and I am a free woman on a countdown to making some money. But here's the deal. Instead of investing myself emotionally, in getting up early to be at the bus stop by 706. So that I could be at work before eight o'clock. So I could sit in my office and deal with all these other people and not be home. And just energy sucking me dry and phone calls and just, distractions and barely being able to work on my things simply because there's so many other things that I had to do. I'm going to be able to take that six months and really throw everything I've got at it.
What can you expect? What can you expect if you're listening to this? This is a longer episode already. Sorry about that. But here we go, we're gonna wrap up with what you can expect: more courses from me, I have Out from Fanfiction, which is one of my premier courses. Full cost is $130. But I'm going to be doing some smaller courses to my next one is actually going to be based on a module out of out from fanfiction. It's only going to be about $30, it's gonna be real short and sweet. But uh, hopefully will be just as helpful. As for that.
The next month, the next thing that I'm working on after that I'm kind of haven't decided yet, I might eventually open up a membership group. I have ideas for that, but I haven't really nailed down how much energy that would take for me. I think that's one of my biggest holdouts on doing a membership type-of group because it would take a lot of energy and oversight on my part. Not sure I'm ready for that one yet.
And of course, fiction writing I've got an erotica, male/male erotica series of shorts, they're really short stories that I'm going to be publishing that I'm really excited about called His Secret Life. And then I've got two novels that I'm working on right now. Bones and Brews, which some of you have heard a lot about over the past year and a half, which is kind of my steam-punk, diesel-punk, magical, urban, magical fantasy, fake dating romp, which I think developed the plot unexpectedly...that we're kind of stalled out, but it's still still one of the priorities. I'd like to get that done within the next couple of months.
I've also got the polyamorous fantasy novel The Queen's Aerie, about 40,000 words into that one, I think it's going to be closer to 90 or 100,000 words. Very happy to be back to writing that one. That's a fun one. It's got a lot of tropes. And it's got dragons. I mean, what could you what? What more do you, what more do you want from me? That's going to be coming out in a few months as well. So you're gonna see a lot more creative writing for me. Maybe even some fanfiction might get like on that back on that train. It's been a hot minute, since I've written any fan fiction at all. And I miss it. I miss it. Just what, you know, what, what am I gonna write? I don't know. I have the time and energy to do it.
There's a lot of stress being my own boss, and you'll probably hear me complaining about that. But I'm excited. I have finally hit the point, I think, I'm gonna have a lot to offer people, and I'm willing to ask for money for some of those things. I hope you're here with me on this journey. I think we're all going to create some wonderful stuff, books, stories, fanfiction. It's gonna be great. Thank you for joining me on this journey. I appreciate it. Now get you to writin', because that's what you really need to do.
Outro:
Thanks for listening to me ramble on about writing here on the Author Alchemist Podcast. I'm KimBoo York and I hope this episode has helped clear away the cobwebs from your inspiration. For more podcasts and other tools including self paced online courses, please visit my website at www.authoralchemist.com (no dashes) or email me at KimBoo@authoralchemist.com I'd love to read your questions and feedback. Now, time to get some writing done.
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