Publish Not Perish

“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....

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 liste...

There is a moment in many academic book projects when the writer realizes: I don’t actually know what game I’m playing. You know your field, your archive, your argument. You’ve written a dissertation. You may have published articles and given conference papers and mentored students. And then someone says, “You should send a proposal to a press”—and suddenly a whole new set of questions opens up th...

Most of us are carrying around a definition of consistency that is quietly working against us. The image that forms when I say the word to the academics I coach is almost always the same: the writer who rises at 5am, never misses a session, has color-coded their calendar down to the fifteen-minute block, and produces words every single day through sheer discipline. It’s the ideal image of the prod...

There is a version of peer review preparation that looks more like fortification. You revise and revise, patch every gap you can anticipate, and submit hoping that reviewers will find nothing to critique. 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, c...

Most of us know our work needs a strong significance claim, but actually writing one can feel surprisingly difficult. I doubt that’s simply because writers don’t understand their projects. Often, it’s because we’ve been trained as scholars to be careful, qualified, and intellectually humble, while the “so what” asks us to do something much more exposed: to say, clearly and confidently, that our wo...

In today’s episode, I’m reflecting on what a year of lifting heavy weights has taught me about writing. When I first started working with genuinely heavy weights, I realized that the hard part was not only physical. My brain often told me to stop before my body had actually reached its limit. That experience in the gym has an uncanny resemblance to the moment in writing when an argument gets diffi...

In my newsletter this week, I explained why I almost never start any sort of writing project with an outline. It’s simply because I’m much more of an explorer-writer than an architect-writer: I usually need to move through the material before I can see the structure. Architect-writers begin with the blueprint, the chapter map, and the planned sequence of ideas. Explorer-writers need to write fragm...

Over the last two weeks, I’ve been interrogating the hustle culture embedded in the sprint toward tenure and the broader culture of busyness in academia. You can access those posts here: 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...

In today’s episode, I talk about why academic conclusions so often feel flat to write and what shifts when we stop treating them as simple summaries. For a long time, I thought the conclusion’s job was just to restate what I had already said, and that made it feel tedious and lifeless. Here, I offer a different way of thinking about it: a strong conclusion doesn’t just summarize the manuscript. It...

For years, I had a Sunday-night ritual that felt practical but was quietly keeping me stuck. I would scan the week ahead looking for the kind of writing time I thought counted: long, uninterrupted stretches where I could really sink into the manuscript. Most weeks, those stretches were nowhere to be found, and I would close my planner already defeated. The myth that big blocks of writing time are...

In this episode, I talk about what’s really going on when you keep missing writing deadlines you set for yourself. I want to make a distinction that matters: a missed deadline is not proof that you’re incapable of follow-through. More often, it’s a sign that the deadline/goal itself needs a closer look. I walk through three common reasons deadlines keep slipping: * Sometimes the work requires a st...

What if the collapse of your writing routine is not evidence that you lack discipline but a sign that the system was never built for the realities of your life? 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 oft...

Earlier this week, I wrote about the structural roots of perfectionism and argued that 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 every...

The moments that stall a book often look…reasonable. They look like being diligent: reorganizing notes, refining the outline, and doing just one more round of reading so you can feel ready. 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 w...

If you’ve been reading Publish Not Perish for a while, you know I spend a lot of time thinking about sustainable writing practices, the emotional landscape of academic writing, and how we make meaningful progress on long, complex projects when life is already demanding so much of us. What I haven’t talked about as openly is what it actually looks like to work with me one-on-one, especially when yo...

How many writing projects are you holding in your head right now—like, actively holding—not just the one on your desk, but all the others tugging at you in the background? 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 gui...

Today I’m unpacking a piece of advice that sounds simple—and sometimes even motivating—but often leaves scholars feeling worse when it doesn’t work: “Just sit down and write.” If you’ve ever tried to follow that instruction and immediately felt your brain seize up, your confidence drop, or your draft suddenly look unfamiliar, you’re not alone. In this episode, I talk about why the problem usually...

In this episode, I’m sharing a shift that quietly changes everything for a lot of academic writers: moving from seeing writing as just a skill you perform to recognizing it as a relationship you live inside over time. So many of us are technically capable of writing and still feel stuck, resistant, or exhausted by it—and that disconnect isn’t a personal failure. It’s often the result of how we’ve...

There’s a particular kind of grief that comes with deleting pages you fought to write. In this episode, I talk about why that feeling is so common when you’re turning a dissertation into a book and what it reveals about the shift from writing to be evaluated to writing in service of an argument and a reader. I reflect on why cutting isn’t a sign that something went wrong but an essential part of h...

If revising your dissertation for a book feels harder than you expected, there’s nothing wrong with you or your project. In this episode, I talk about why dissertation writing trains you into very specific habits—and why those habits can linger long after the degree is done. I reflect on the deeper shifts required when moving from dissertation to book, not just in structure or scope, but in how yo...

In today’s episode, I talk about a part of writing that academic training rarely asks us to examine: how writers actually move through their work. We’re taught to evaluate arguments, evidence, and outcomes—but much less attention is given to what happens between drafts, or how writers interpret difficulty as it arises. I share how coaching shifts attention from the finished product to the writer i...

Greetings, dear listeners! January has a way of making us feel like we should already have our writing plans figured out—clear goals, steady discipline, and a strong start. Sound familiar? In this episode, I want to gently interrupt that pressure. Instead of asking what you should produce this year, I invite you to consider a different starting point—one that’s quieter, more humane, and often more...

Today I’m sharing the story of “Fatima”—a composite of so many scholars I’ve worked with over the years (and, honestly, a little bit of me too). Her dissertation sprint “worked.” She finished, defended, and landed a faculty job. But once she stepped into life as a new professor, the same strategies that got her across the finish line suddenly stopped working altogether. I use her story to explore...

In this episode of PNP: The Podcast, we’re diving into the urgency trap. You know that feeling that everything needs your attention right now —the ping of an email at 9 PM, the “quick” request that derails your writing time, the sense that you’re always behind no matter how much you do? We’ll explore why academia runs on manufactured urgency, how it sucks energy from your important work and well-b...