It is a new year and I hope 2022 will be a healthy, contented, and successful one for you. The successful part requires hard work and diligence. It also requires productive habits and some learned skills.
But perhaps you do not want to be successful. So, with tongue firmly planted in-cheek, here are the top ways to sabotage your writing and publishing efforts this year.
TAA Member Corey S Shdaimah is the Daniel Thursz Distinguished Professor of Social Justice at the University of Maryland School of Social Work and an academic author in the social work and policy implementation writing disciplines. Her latest publication is Social Welfare Policy in a Changing World.
She is currently working on two books- Research Handbook on Law, Movements, and Social Change with co-editors Steven Boutcher and Michael Yarbrough (forthcoming, Edward Elgar) and The Compassionate Court: Support, Surveillance, and Survival in Two Court-Affiliated Prostitution Diversion Programs with co-author Shelly Wiechelt (forthcoming, Temple University Press).
Why do you write? Are you writing to share you knowledge with others? Are you writing to get the thoughts out of your head and onto paper? Perhaps, here at the start of the year, you are writing (or not) because you have resolved to do so. Or are you like Flannery O’Connor who said, “I write to discover what I know.”
In this week’s collection of articles from around the web, we find insight on new years’s resolutions for authors, writing deadlines, writing strategies, the end of writer self-doubt, and the future of open access. Whatever your reasoning, we encourage you to write every day. Happy writing!
Over the years, as a writing coach trying to help others write more effectively, and as a writer seeking to improve my own ability, I have read a lot of good advice on writing. Too rarely, however, have I found advice that really helped me in my struggles with writing anxiety or that resonated with me as a coach seeking to help other anxious writers. Too often, the advice boils down to “be disciplined and write.” And that’s great advice, of course. At least in a general sense. But for people struggling with anxiety in their writing process, it’s not necessarily good advice. Depending on the degree of anxiety, “be disciplined,” can lead to vicious cycles in which each anxiety-drenched attempt to write only confirms the fear that writing is a painful ordeal. If you’re feeling enough anxiety, writing is a painful ordeal, as I will attest from personal experience.
TAA Member Cason Murphy is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Iowa State University and a textbook and academic author in the theater, music studies, dance studies, media studies, critical reinterpretation of the canon, and contemporary performance practices writing disciplines. His latest publication is The World at Play: Performance from the Audience’s Perspective.
Since he just completed his first textbook earlier this year, he has engaged in several smaller projects for now: a few performance reviews for theatre journals; fleshing out an essay from a conference proceeding on teaching a musical theatre performance class during the pandemic; and a survey of several video game-inspired theatrical performances that resulted from experimentation over the past 20 months.
College textbook publishing has changed in many significant ways over the past twenty years. While the industry is still dominated by a small number of large publishers, their product and business models have evolved greatly. Pressure to create a variety of low-priced product options and resulting decreases in growth and profit have caused many publishers to pull back on the acquisition of new products. Consequently, acquisitions editors have often begun to focus on managing existing titles rather than on acquiring new products. If you are flexible, persistent, and creative, you can still find opportunities to write or contribute to a college-level textbook.
Join us Thursday, February 10 from 1-2 p.m. ET for “Connecting With a College Textbook Publisher in Changing Times”, presented by Sean Wakely, Vice President of Product and Editorial at FlatWorld. Wakely will describe the current college textbook publishing landscape and provide you with actionable ideas about how to approach and form a relationship with the editorial staff who are responsible for bringing new writing talent into a publisher.
Register Today. Members Only. Join TAA.
