Much of your writing days will be insignificant, banal, or feel like you are going in circles. Yet, when one writing session becomes the referendum on whether years of work on your book or article were worth it, the work is buried under all that weight, and we start requiring impossible conditions before we’ll let ourselves begin to write.

I talk through why “I don’t feel like writing” and “I can’t write today” are two different sentences, even though we treat them as the same one, and what it looks like to let a session be ordinary instead of steeped in ceremony.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that anyone should push through exhaustion, grief, or genuine distress, because there’s a difference between dealing with life stress and managing feelings about writing. I’m talking about the smaller, more common friction: boredom, the dread of opening the document, the sense that we’re not ready or clear enough yet. You don’t need inspiration to write. Instead, inspiration comes through the act of writing itself.

I walk through a few ways to shrink a writing session down to something you can start before you feel like it and why repeated, unglamorous contact with a project does more for it than waiting for the beautiful, spacious afternoon. I hope you find my musings useful!

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If that feeling found you, this episode is a continuation of that conversation, though it takes a different angle.

Rather than offering steps for getting back on track like the newsletter did, I want to shift how you think about the plan itself. This is the plan you built back when summer still existed as an idea rather than a lived, complicated season.

What would it mean to treat your summer writing plan less like a verdict on your seriousness as a scholar and more like a rough draft that has room for growth?

I’d contend that your plans weren’t wrong so much as incomplete. They didn’t account for how depleted you’d be after a punishing school year or the wedding and the visiting in-laws and the kid suddenly home from camp sick or the way “revise the chapter” turned out to be an entire ecosystem of rereading and restructuring rather than just one task.

In this episode, I make the case for treating your writing plan like a Google Doc instead of a PDF: something easily editable, something that absorbs what you’ve learned about your actual capacity rather than something you failed to live up to.

If your plan has gone quiet, this one’s for figuring out what it’s trying to tell you. And no, it’s not that you failed the plan; it’s that the plan didn’t account for your actual summer.

If you need help rebuilding that plan for what’s left of the summer, my 1:1 Writing Strategy and Structure Program could be your next step.

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We’re told our dissertations need it, our articles need it, our books need it, and somewhere along the way that reasonable expectation curdles into something much heavier, the sense that we need to produce an idea that has never existed in anyone’s mind before ours.

In this episode, I want to push back on that definition and offer something I find far more workable.

Scholarly originality is more often achieved by building on existing ideas that emerge through relationships, applying a familiar theory to an unfamiliar archive, or noticing and bringing to the forefront a pattern that everyone else has ignored.

A topic no one has studied is not the same thing as a contribution, and a well-trodden topic can still hold real insight if you’re asking a sharper question or reframing the stakes.

Give the episode a listen, and see whether relation, rather than invention, gives you a little more room in your quest for originality.

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We covered why a book is a different genre than a dissertation, how to think about press selection as a question of fit rather than only prestige, and what a book proposal actually needs to do for the editor who receives it.

You can listen to that episode here:

This week I turn to what happens after the book enters the publishing system, which is often where even very accomplished scholars start to feel unsteady.

An editor expresses interest, and then things go quiet. Reader reports come back contradicting each other. You are asked to revise, but it is not always clear which feedback deserves your full attention and which reflects one reader’s preference for a different book entirely.

A lot of what I want to do in this episode is slow the process down so it becomes legible. Academic publishing timelines are genuinely long, and without a basic understanding of why, ordinary delays can start to feel like evidence of something: that the project is wrong, that you misjudged your readiness, that you are not really a book writer. Part of what the hidden curriculum costs people is the psychological load of interpreting silence without any framework for what silence normally means.

The other thing I spend time on is peer review, and specifically the skill of reading feedback rather than simply surviving it. Reader reports are not verdicts. They are one or two people’s encounters with your manuscript from their own location in the field, and your job as the author is to interpret them strategically: to find what is genuinely pointing to a problem in the manuscript; to distinguish that from a reviewer asking for a different book; and to make revision decisions that strengthen your project rather than dissolve it into someone else’s.

Revision, I argue, is less about fixing and more about design—the work of shaping the reader’s experience across the whole manuscript, which requires you to hold onto your own authority over the project even while taking feedback seriously.

The overarching theme running through both episodes is that when professional knowledge is distributed unevenly, confusion is perceived as inadequacy.

The goal of these two episodes is to give you a little more of the map — not so that publishing becomes easy, but so that you can stop experiencing its difficulties as proof that you were never ready.

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In this episode, I dig into the hidden curriculum of academic book writing: some of the professional knowledge scholars are expected to have, even though it is rarely taught directly. I focus on the front end of the process, starting with why a book is not simply a bigger dissertation, moving through how to think about press selection as a question of fit rather than just prestige, and arriving at what a book proposal actually needs to do.

This episode also makes an argument I care about: that not knowing any of this already does not mean you have done anything wrong.

The hidden curriculum is not hidden equally from everyone, and turning uneven access to professional knowledge into a private story about your own inadequacy is one of the most predictable and most damaging effects of a system that relies on knowledge it does not consistently teach.

Next week in Part 2, I turn to what happens once the book enters the publishing system: peer review, revision, and timelines that shape how academic books are received and evaluated. The hidden curriculum does not end when an editor expresses interest. In some ways, that is when the next layer begins.

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Today’s episode stays broadly in that same vein but focuses on a question I hear frequently from scholars who are working on academic books: how much of my previously published material can I include in my book?

You’ve probably heard some version of this advice already: “No more than 25% of your book should have been previously published.” Some people frame it as chapters—“no more than one or two.” The numbers may shift depending on who you talk to, but the anxiety they produce is remarkably consistent. The moment you hear a figure like that, most of us start doing involuntary math, counting up chapters and estimating overlaps and wondering whether we’ve quietly ruined a book we haven’t even finished.

In this episode, I try to offer some relief from that spiral — not by dismissing the 25% figure, which does reflect a real concern in academic publishing, but by explaining what it actually means and, more importantly, what it doesn’t mean. That number circulates the way a lot of publishing lore does, passed from senior to junior scholar in a conference hallway, until it starts to sound like official policy handed down from somewhere authoritative. It isn’t. What it is, I’d argue, is a rough threshold—a signal that it’s time to look more carefully at the nature of the overlap, not a verdict on your manuscript or its publishability.

The more important question, and the one acquisitions editors are actually asking, isn’t how much of your material has appeared before. It’s whether your book offers readers a substantially new intellectual experience. Those aren’t the same question, and the gap between them is where most of the real work of revision lives.

I talk through what that means in practice—what transforms an article into a chapter, what doesn’t, and what you should be able to say when an editor asks you directly about the overlap. I also get into a few factors that don’t always come up in these conversations but that genuinely shape how an editor will read your manuscript: the extent of the revision, the press you’re approaching, and yes, some of the harder structural realities of how prestige operates in academic publishing.

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In this episode, I want to gently dismantle that image, because I don’t think it is consistency at all. I think it is a fantasy. And I think most of us have spent a significant amount of time feeling like failures in relation to a standard that was never real to begin with.

My definition of consistency, arrived at after years of coaching writers and also after years of being a writer who has stared at a blank document wondering how I ended up there again, is this:

Consistency is not sticking to a writing routine perfectly and never getting off track. It is the commitment to return as soon as you can.

That distinction matters more than it might seem at first. I spend time in this episode on the difference between avoidance disguised as busyness and genuine overwhelm that requires triage, because those two things feel different from the inside, even when they look similar from the outside.

I also return to a metaphor I find myself coming back to again and again with clients: the meditation analogy. A meditation practice is not about achieving uninterrupted focus. It is about noticing when your mind has wandered and bringing it back, without drama, without self-flagellation.

Writing consistency works the same way. Returning to your desk after three weeks away carrying a backpack full of shame is not actually productive. The punishment is just another obstacle between you and the sentence.

What I most want you to take from this episode is permission to come back without the accumulated weight of the time you were away. The practices and the structure still matter. And the interruption is not a failure; it is just an interruption. Regardless of the detour, the destination was always there.

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And, believe me, I understand that impulse completely. When your book is bound up with tenure, promotion, years of accumulated work, and your sense of whether you actually belong in this field, critique can stop feeling like feedback and start feeling like a verdict.

But peer review was never designed to tell you whether you are a real scholar or whether your project deserved to exist. It is diagnostic. It shows what is working, what has not yet come clear on the page, and what the project might need in order to become what it is trying to be.

In this episode, I also get into something harder: how to work with feedback that feels frustrating, unfair, or even hostile, without either collapsing under it or dismissing it out of hand. Not every reviewer is right. Not every suggestion should be followed.

But even a poorly framed or seemingly off-base comment can sometimes be pointing at something real—a problem of scope, audience, framing, or significance that the reviewer couldn’t quite name, but you, once you stop wincing, might be able to see.

The approach I want to emphasize here is about treating reviewer feedback as information rather than punishment, so you can sort through it with more steadiness and judgment than the first raw read usually allows. In the end, the goal of peer review is to come through it with a clearer, stronger, more intentional book—and with a little more trust in your own capacity to receive hard things and keep writing anyway.

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In today’s episode, I’ll walk through why significance often crystallizes late in the writing process, why vagueness can feel protective, and how to think about the “so what” as something your book makes possible rather than just a gap it fills.

My hope is that this episode helps you stop treating an elusive significance claim as evidence that something is wrong with your project. Sometimes the "so what" is already there, threaded through the work, waiting for you to see it clearly enough to name it and feel confident enough to claim it.

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That experience in the gym has an uncanny resemblance to the moment in writing when an argument gets difficult, the structure will not quite settle, and suddenly email, footnotes, or “just a little more reading” starts to look very appealing.

I talk about the difference between real rest and avoidance and why both matter for academic writers. Rest is essential and it is part of how growth happens. But sometimes what looks like rest is actually a retreat from the intellectual discomfort that makes our work stronger. I also reflect on consistency, not as writing every day or meeting some punishing productivity standard, but as the practice of returning to the gym, to the page, and to the hard thing that slowly builds progress over time.

All of this is to say that you can do hard things, and it is the act of doing those hard things that makes the magic happen.

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Architect-writers begin with the blueprint, the chapter map, and the planned sequence of ideas. Explorer-writers need to write fragments, follow associations, talk through examples, or spend time with one part of the project before the larger argument becomes visible.

You can read more about the distinctions I’m making here:

If you’re an explorer-writer too, common academic writing advice can make you feel like you’re doing everything wrong, especially when that advice begins and ends with “make an outline.” But struggling to outline at the beginning doesn’t necessarily mean you’re avoiding the work, lacking structure, or failing as a writer. It may mean that writing is how you discover the argument before you can organize it.

In this episode, I discuss a method for still producing structured academic prose without beginning with an outline.

Academic writing still needs to become generous to the reader. Your reader needs a path through the problem, the evidence, the intervention, and the stakes. But the process that helps you find the argument is not always the same as the structure that helps someone else follow it.

So, I walk through a more useful process for explorer-writers: start where there is traction, write to discover, harvest what appears, cluster before sequencing, name the emerging argument, build the reader’s path, and use a reverse outline to refine the structure.

You don’t have to begin as the architect. You can instead begin as the explorer, learning the shape of the terrain as you go.

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Today’s episode asks what happens after the tenure sprint is supposedly over.

The promise of tenure is that the pressure will ease, the finish line will hold, and a more spacious academic life will finally become possible. But for many scholars, the habits formed during the pre-tenure years do not simply disappear.

When you spend years working inside ambiguity, trying to discern what will count as “enough,” overproduction can start to feel like the safest answer. Saying yes becomes more than a habit; it becomes part of how you prove you are serious, generous, collegial, and deserving.

I also look at why advice about “just saying no” often misses the deeper problem.

Not everyone has the same freedom to set boundaries without being judged, penalized, or read as insufficiently committed. Service, mentoring, diversity work, and emotional labor often fall unevenly on scholars whose belonging has already been made conditional.

I want to hold both truths together: individual strategies for saying no can matter, especially as acts of self-preservation, but they are not enough on their own. The deeper work is building departments and institutions where labor is transparent, shared, and recognized and where exhaustion is no longer mistaken for commitment.

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Here, I offer a different way of thinking about it: a strong conclusion doesn’t just summarize the manuscript. It synthesizes the argument, helps the reader see what the pieces add up to, and makes the stakes of the work clearer.

I also explore how a conclusion can open outward without becoming inflated or vague. That might mean showing what your analysis lets us understand differently, clarifying the broader implications of your argument, or pointing toward questions that emerge from the work in an organic and grounded way. I share how writing the coda to my book helped me see conclusions differently, not as administrative cleanup, but as a genuine space for reflection, interpretation, and extension.

If conclusions have felt dull, frustrating, or difficult to pin down, I hope this episode gives you a more interesting and more useful frame.

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In this episode, I talk about how that belief takes hold, why it’s normal to desire these blocks, and why it reflects a model of academic life that does not match the reality most scholars are living, especially those juggling teaching, service, caregiving, health concerns, and the constant interruptions of institutional life.

I also make the case for a different way of thinking about writing time. Progress does not depend only on having more hours. It depends on matching the kind of time you have to the kind of task in front of you. Not every part of book writing requires the same level of focus or energy. Freewriting, outlining, revising, note-making, and drafting all ask different things of you, and some of them fit surprisingly well into smaller windows.

When I stopped treating “working on the book” as one single activity, I could make meaningful progress in the time I actually had instead of dismissing it as insufficient. That shift changed more than productivity. It changed my relationship to the project itself. The book stopped feeling distant and accusing and started to feel like something I was genuinely in conversation with again.

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I walk through three common reasons deadlines keep slipping:

1. Sometimes the work requires a strategy you haven’t developed yet, so the real task is not producing faster but figuring out how to proceed.

2. Sometimes the deadline was built around a fantasy version of your week rather than the one you’re actually living.

3. And sometimes the problem is that the manuscript is asking for a decision you haven’t made yet, so you stay busy without truly moving forward.

What I hope this episode offers is a more useful way to read your own patterns. Instead of treating missed deadlines as a verdict on your character, I want you to see them as information. If you can identify whether you’re dealing with a strategy gap, an unrealistic plan, or an avoided decision, you can make a much better next move. That might mean testing a few approaches before setting a new deadline, planning from the evidence of your real life rather than your ideal week, or writing your way toward the decision the project is demanding.

The goal here is not to become harsher with yourself. It’s to become more accurate so your deadlines can start supporting your work instead of quietly undermining it.

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In this episode, I explore why so many scholars blame themselves when a routine falls apart, rather than questioning the assumptions built into the strategy itself. I wanted to name that pattern clearly because I think these breakdowns often reveal far more about the limits of the system than about your commitment or capacity.

I also consider what changes when we stop asking, “What’s wrong with me?” and start asking, “What would actually work for my real life, my real energy, and my real writing process?” I talk about the invisible assumptions built into many productivity systems, why so many of them don’t hold for scholars juggling caregiving, heavy teaching loads, neurodivergence, chronic stress, or writing in an additional language, and why flexibility is not a weakness but a necessary design principle.

If you’ve built up a graveyard of abandoned routines and you’ve started to believe that nothing works for you, I hope this episode offers a gentler and more honest reframe.

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perfectionism is a strategy for surviving in environments where the cost of imperfection feels dangerously high…[Furthermore,] perfectionism doesn’t look the same on everyone, because the conditions we’re surviving in aren’t the same. The stakes of imperfection are not distributed equally, and that changes everything about how perfectionism operates, what it’s protecting, and what it costs.

You can read that post here:

Today, I’m taking a similar approach to the podcast by thinking through the structural roots of what we often call imposter “syndrome.”

I explore why so much academic doubt is not a sign that something is wrong with you but a deeply understandable response to working in environments where the rules and conventions are unclear, the feedback is inconsistent, and the expectations keep shifting. If you have ever felt like everyone else got some secret handbook you never received, this conversation is for you.

I draw on Dr. Angélica Gutiérrez’s concept of impostorization, which provides a way of shifting the focus away from individual pathology and toward the structures and practices that make people question their intelligence, competence, and belonging.

Throughout the episode, I talk about how doubt and uncertainty can function as useful information rather than evidence that you do not belong, and I offer a more grounded way to build efficacy: not by pretending uncertainty is not there, but by learning how to navigate it with more clarity, support, and self-compassion.

My hope is that this episode helps you feel a little less alone, a little less self-blaming, and better able to see that your uncertainty may make much more sense than you have been led to believe.

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In this episode, I talk about the quiet threshold that often sits underneath all that preparation: the moment when you have to decide whether you trust your ideas enough to start putting them on the page. You worry that your ideas aren’t new enough, sharp enough, or important enough—and that if you draft, you’ll find out they don’t hold.

I also name the impossible standard that tends to fuel this fear: the belief that your book has to revolutionize your field to be worth writing. And I offer a gentler, more accurate definition of what strong scholarly work actually does—how most meaningful books move conversations forward without needing to reinvent the whole discipline. Along the way, I unpack why “I need to read more” can sometimes be less about reading and more about self-protection, and I return to a distinction I come back to often: writing to think versus writing to communicate.

If you’ve been stuck at the edges of your project, trying to get to certainty before you begin, I hope this episode gives you a steadier standard to measure yourself against and a little more permission to start drafting before you feel completely ready.

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What I haven’t talked about as openly is what it actually looks like to work with me one-on-one, especially when you’re trying to move a book project forward. So in this episode, I’m pulling back the curtain.

I walk through the difference between coaching and developmental editing, why I weave both together, and how that combination helps scholars move complex book projects forward with more clarity, structure, and sustained momentum. If coaching has ever felt a bit opaque or hard to picture, this episode should make things much more concrete.

I also get into what the process looks like in practice—from the initial strategy session where we identify your goals and the obstacles standing in your way to the ongoing support that helps you keep making steady, real progress over time.

Along the way, I dig into why so many academic writers find themselves stuck, what makes book coaching different from other forms of writing support, and why having the right kind of help can shift not just the project itself but your entire relationship to the work. If you’ve been quietly wondering whether this kind of support might be the thing that gets you unstuck, this episode is a good place to start exploring that question.

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In this episode, I’m talking about the hidden cost of carrying too many writing projects at once: the almost-finished article, the chapter that needs revision, the proposal you keep meaning to start, and the project you feel guilty for neglecting. Individually, each one might be manageable, but together they create a constant background hum of obligation that drains your cognitive and emotional bandwidth—even on days when you’re genuinely productive.

We often treat these difficulties as a scheduling problem, but what I see again and again is that the deeper issue is scattered attention: too many open tabs on your brain’s desktop quietly pulling on you. Academia trains us to tolerate this, even to see it as ambition, but it comes at a real cost.

So I’m inviting you to consider a different kind of progress—choosing what’s active and what’s explicitly dormant for now. You don’t have to abandon anything forever; sometimes naming what you’re not working on is what finally lets you focus, settle, and move forward without guilt.

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