Your day job can be a means to an end by putting food on your table while you write, but it could be an end to your means by sucking the life out of you. This Writer’s Digest blog takes the first approach, describing the benefits of interacting with people and learning non-writing job skills. How else are you going to learn the sound of man’s last breath after he has been stabbed? You learn that kind of thing on the job.

Elsewhere on the web, Joss Whedon didn’t need a vacation after shooting The Avengers; he needed a working vacation on a radically different movie. So his wife insisted he take up an adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing.

“I’m a huge proponent of the no budget movie,” Whedon says. “I love working on location. It makes you a better filmmaker. You don’t have everything conveniently placed for you. People are using the environment and it spices things up. I think of myself as a classical storyteller, which is why the digital era excites me. Classical storytelling is about getting a story told. It started with cave people around a campfire saying, that wooly mammoth was enormous, you should have been there! For me, that’s all that matters. It’s why I love writing comic books and I love writing prose. I love all mediums.”