A GPS System for Your Writing | Ep. 52

When a writing project keeps slipping, I rarely find that you have stopped caring about it. More often, you have plenty of priorities but nowhere in the week for them to fit.In this episode, I borrow a metaphor popularized by Stephen Covey, rocks, pebbles, and sand in a jar, to explore why academic weeks so often fill up with email, forms, and small, finishable tasks before the rocks of our writing lives make it in. Part of the trouble is that teaching, meetings, and colleagues’ requests arrive with deadlines and accountability built in, while the book or article waits somewhere burried on your desktop. I also take up a less comfortable possibility: we sometimes let the sand pour in first because the rocks are emotionally harder to touch. Reaching for the inbox can offer relief from the uncertainty of writing, and that is a very human response rather than a failure of discipline.I won’t be delivering a sermon on “just say no,” because that advice rarely holds up for graduate students, contingent faculty, caregivers, or anyone working within unequal institutional power. Instead, I invite you to be more discerning about what goes into the jar first. I share a practical way to name no more than three rocks for a given season and to find where those rocks actually live in your calendar, not in an imaginary next week where nothing runs long. I also suggest some questions for when the plan falls apart so that you can adjust rather than treat an imperfect week as evidence against yourself. The sand will always find its way in. Sustainable writing is built by returning to the work and making sure the rocks get their space first, as often as you can. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.publishnotperish.net

Have you ever noticed that “I don’t feel like teaching today” almost never gets us out of teaching, while “I don’t feel like writing today” excuses us from the page again and again? 🙃In this episode, I sit with that asymmetry and argue it has little to do with discipline or whether we care more about our students than our scholarship.Instead, it’s because teaching happens inside a scaffolding of expectations, calendars, and audiences that carries us on the mornings when motivation runs thin, while writing, for many scholars, happens inside almost no structure at all.So I take apart what actually makes teaching happen: other people waiting for us, time that has already been claimed, an audience real enough to explain things to (rather than the tribunal of imagined critics many of us draft for), a rhythm of small recurring deadlines instead of one looming one, and the tacit permission to walk into the room with imperfect preparation.Each of these conditions can be borrowed for writing and act as a set of questions worth asking when the work has stalled.Instead of wondering what is wrong with you, I invite you to ask which condition is missing and to start building a writing structure sturdy enough that it no longer has to survive on mood, guilt, or last-minute panic.Related Content:https://www.publishnotperish.net/p/planning-writing-like-you-plan-your?utm_source=publication-search This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.publishnotperish.net

I often use a GPS to show me where the traffic is so I can pick the fastest route to wherever I’m going. Often, I already know several ways to get there, so it isn’t about being lost; it’s about choosing well given the conditions I’m actually in. A few well-timed turns can save me 20 minutes! For academic writers, the question becomes: what well-timed turns could get you to your draft more efficiently? This is the question we ponder in today’s episode.That question is at the heart of the 80/20 rule, also known as Pareto’s Principle, which holds that roughly 80 percent of your results come from roughly 20 percent of your effort. Think of that 20 percent as the well-timed turns: a small portion of what you do tends to drive most of your progress, just as a few smart turns can save most of the time on a drive.For those of you tackling book projects, the traffic is relentless. There is always one more article to read, one more paragraph to polish, one more email to answer, and one more piece of feedback to weigh, and many of these feel entirely defensible. The key is to focus most of your effort on the 20 percent of your work that actually makes your project publishable! (Hint: it’s not editing and re-editing sentences for the millionth time.)I close with a small exercise for the week, a kind of route check for your writing: choose one writing goal, ask what would most directly move it forward, notice what feels related but is probably lower-impact right now (the scenic detour, if you will), and consider which standard you could lower without harming the final project. I hope this conversation helps you choose your route a little more deliberately, and I’d love to hear where the GPS sends you! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.publishnotperish.net

Writing a book means making thousands of decisions alone, about argument and structure and which sentence earns its place, and then one day the reader reports arrive and several other minds enter a room you thought was yours alone. Even when that feedback is generous and clearly meant to help, it can still knock you sideways, because a book is an entire architecture, and someone suggesting you rethink the structure or add an entire set of literature is much bigger than a line edit.In this episode, I talk through why that disorientation is a normal, even predictable, part of the process and why giving yourself a beat before diagnosing what the feedback means is not procrastination but genuine preparation for the work ahead.Once we’ve sat with the feeling of it, I walk through the system I actually use to make sense of a stack of reader reports: sorting comments by topic (argument, literature, evidence, methods) and then again by scale (minor, medium, major), so you can tell the difference between a bookshelf issue and a load-bearing wall.I also get into the harder, less discussed skill of deciding what not to revise, and how keeping a simple tracking document, noting the concern, your decision, and your reasoning, becomes part of the intellectual labor rather than an administrative afterthought.My hope is that this episode gives you a concrete way to hold onto your authorship even while taking feedback seriously, so you can strengthen the book without handing it over entirely to everyone else’s preferences.As a bonus for today’s episode, here’s a guide on how to think about and work through the revision process for a journal article. Even though the guide is focused on articles, you’ll see many of my major revision processes apply, whether it’s a shorter or longer form project. https://drive.google.com/file/d/167u8HSnk9-UMpGFDiV-mMeGrC-VR1ASu/view?usp=sharing This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.publishnotperish.net

I signed up for a certification in neurodivergent-inclusive coaching because I wanted to understand my clients better, but I learned so much about myself in the process. Since childhood, I’ve known I was dyslexic, but the training provided me with fresh insights into the patterns of my attention, working memory, task initiation, and energy, deepening my understanding of why I resonate so strongly with my clients who have ADHD. More importantly, the course sharpened something I’ve believed since I started Publish Not Perish: a writing strategy is only useful if it works for the brain that actually has to use it, not for an imaginary academic who sleeps well every night, teaches without depletion, and can produce on command.Much of the training centered on executive function: capacities like task initiation, planning, working memory, emotional regulation, and flexible thinking. Looking at academic work through that lens makes a lot of writing trouble that seems mysterious or moral become specific and workable. Three days of avoiding a document probably doesn’t indicate laziness or poor discipline. The task may be too big, your capacity may be depleted, or the stakes may feel so high that starting becomes difficult. Each problem calls for a different response.In this episode, I talk about what this training taught me about neurodivergence, writing, and my own brain, and why you may not need another productivity system so much as a better understanding of what produces friction for your brain and what lights it up. Ps. Much of the definitional information I share in this episode comes from the course Neurodivergent Inclusive Coaching, which I took with the organization In Good Company in 2026. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.publishnotperish.net

A few weeks ago I published an episode about treating your writing plan as a Google Doc and not a PDF. The rationale is that just because you plan to write that chapter draft in four weeks doesn’t mean you can predict everything that can get in the way of that plan. While I still hold there is no crystal ball for planning writing projects, I do think there's a common planning mistake that I see many academics making: we plan without taking into account what is actually on our plates and instead plan in some sort of ideal void that is free of the rest of our responsibilities. It’s a sort of amnesia that forgets the hiring season, the grading spike, the invited chapter we agreed to months ago, the family visit, and the always, already hectic semester rhythms. As a result, we often make writing plans without all the data we need, and when those plans collapse, we feel behind and ashamed that we have failed the plan. In this episode I walk through what it looks like to plan from a fuller view of your responsibilities, starting with your work calendar and the service commitments that look tiny on paper and enormous in the nervous system, then the writing obligations beyond the book that draw from the same intellectual and emotional reserves, and finally the parts of your life outside work that have their own seasons of less quiet, less privacy, and less energy. Once you can see all of it at once, you can scale the work to the conditions you are actually writing in, which might mean rereading the chapter and revising ten pages rather than finishing the whole thing, or leaving yourself a clear memo so that future you can re-enter the manuscript without having to excavate it. And if just revising ten pages makes you feel like you’re not being ambitious enough, remember that scaling your writing plans is what actually allows ambition to survive your actual work life and life life. Related Content: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.publishnotperish.net

There’s a fantasy that circulates with writers, including academic writers, that writing has to feel meaningful, or clear, or inspired before it counts. Today I want to trouble this notion and instead present what I think is a more realistic version of what actually happens in a writing life.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! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.publishnotperish.net

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: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.publishnotperish.net

“Originality” is a small word carrying an enormous amount of weight in academic writing, and I think it causes a lot of undue angst.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.Related Content:https://www.publishnotperish.net/p/reframing-the-desire-to-write-profoundly This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.publishnotperish.net

Last week I talked about the hidden curriculum of academic book writing: the professional knowledge scholars are expected to have but are rarely taught directly. 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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.publishnotperish.net