Academic Writing Month Challenge 2019

As my dear friend said, isn’t that every month? But actually, it’s really easy to spend hours editing, working on proofs, prepping for speaking engagements, working on my day job, in meetings, responding to emails, etc etc etc….and all of a sudden it’s been days or weeks since I’ve produced new written content.

That’s not to say I’m not writing – far from it. I write constantly, but a lot of it is rewriting or writing for work projects. These are very valuable tasks and I happily spend time on them. But moving my scholarship forward and contributing to the public or scholarly conversation requires new words.

I have a few projects I want to move forward in the next couple of months: a book review, a short article for a magazine, a long-form essay for a volume, and a work essay. Because these all need to start from scratch, I’ve been procrastinating. There, I admitted it. Fingers crossed that will help.

But if not, I’ve decided to publicly declare (mostly just for accountability) I’m doing the #acwrimo (academic writing month) challenge. The idea is to set a word count or minute goal for each day. For example, you could set a goal of 300 words or 30 minutes. No goal is too small, after all progress is progress.

I typically write pretty quickly and I like to set ambitious goals, but I know there is a lot coming down the pike (*wave hand emoji* page proofs and indexing!). So I’m going to set a reasonable goal of 250 new words each day. If I get more words some days, wonderful, but if not, that’s 7,500 new words this month. That would knock out my book review, short article, and my article for work, which would be a ton of progress!

I’m going to create a chart for myself and cross out each day. There might even be stickers…whatever it takes. I’ll report back at the end of the month, but if you have a project that you’d like to work on, I encourage you to join me!