Earlier this week, I wrote about that specific mid-July stomach-drop: the moment you glance at the calendar and realize the semester is closer than the version of you who made summer writing plans in May could have ever imagined. And the writing you’d hoped to finish by now isn’t as far along as you’d hoped.
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.
Related Content:
Managing that Mid-July Panic
Every year around this time, I encounter academics who wake up one day to discover that it's mid-July and they haven't made as much progress on their writing as they had hoped.
