Publish Not Perish

Jenn McClearen, PhD

Publish Not Perish is the podcast for scholars who want to write more—without burning out. Host Dr. Jenn McClearen shares practical tips, honest reflections, and real stories to help you make steady, meaningful progress on your writing with more ease, clarity, and joy. www.publishnotperish.net

  1. 2d ago

    Stop Planning for Time You Don't Actually Have | Ep. 49

    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

    Stop Planning for Time You Don't Actually Have | Ep. 49

  2. Jul 24

    The Case for Ordinary Writing Sessions | Ep. 48

    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

    The Case for Ordinary Writing Sessions | Ep. 48

  3. Jul 16

    Your Writing Plan Is a Google Doc, Not a PDF | Ep. 47

    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

  4. Jul 9

    Why "Originality" Is an Overblown Writing Goal | Ep. 46

    “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

    Why "Originality" Is an Overblown Writing Goal | Ep. 46

  5. Jul 2

    The Hidden Curriculum of Academic Book Writing, Part 2 | Ep. 45

    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

    The Hidden Curriculum of Academic Book Writing, Part 2 | Ep. 45

  6. Jun 25

    The Hidden Curriculum of Academic Book Writing Part 1 | Ep. 44

    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 that no one ever taught you how to answer. 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. 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

    The Hidden Curriculum of Academic Book Writing Part 1 | Ep. 44

  7. Jun 11

    The Consistent Writer Is Not the One Who Never Gets Sidetracked | Ep. 42

    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 productive scholar. 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. 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

  8. Jun 4

    Peer Review Is Not a Verdict | Ep. 41

    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, 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. 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

    Peer Review Is Not a Verdict | Ep. 41
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About

Publish Not Perish is the podcast for scholars who want to write more—without burning out. Host Dr. Jenn McClearen shares practical tips, honest reflections, and real stories to help you make steady, meaningful progress on your writing with more ease, clarity, and joy. www.publishnotperish.net

Information

  • Creator
    Jenn McClearen, PhD
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    49
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Jenn McClearen
  • Show Website
    Publish Not Perish

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