{"id":7031,"date":"2011-12-11T06:27:59","date_gmt":"2011-12-11T11:27:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/?p=7031"},"modified":"2011-12-11T06:27:59","modified_gmt":"2011-12-11T11:27:59","slug":"writing-challenge-the-end-or-is-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/2011\/12\/writing-challenge-the-end-or-is-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing Challenge: The end, or is it?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A<\/span>\"Sciwrite\u201cI love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.\u201d \u2013 Douglas Adams<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019m a week overdue for my final sciwrite<\/a> check in<\/a>, and I didn\u2019t make my goal of submitting the manuscript by the time I arrived in San Francisco for AGU. The week leading up to AGU was insane, as conference prep and the end of the semester collided with a bout of the stomach flu. This past week was an extremely busy conference week, and the word document hasn\u2019t seen many changes in the past two weeks. But I\u2019m actually glad I didn\u2019t make my submission-by-AGU goal, because the process of writing my talk was another useful step in gathering my thoughts and honing my message; I got good feedback on the talk; and I had a very helpful discussion with a mentor\/editor about which journal the paper should go to. I\u2019m flying home from AGU more confident that I\u2019m on the trail of something neat and with more ideas for relatively painless analyses that will give the paper extra oomph. I\u2019ve also started thinking about how I want this paper to be the beginning of further work on the topic, and how I might craft my ideas into a proposal in the next several months. Of course, I still want to get the paper off my desktop and into review in the near, near future, so I\u2019ll be getting back to work on it just as soon as I finish this post.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m really pleased with the progress that I\u2019ve made on this project over the past six weeks or so, and I know that if I hadn\u2019t set myself a spirited goal and a vigorous timeline I wouldn\u2019t have made as much headway. I think my take-away lessons were two-fold: (1) it is possible to work writing into my hectic daily routine, but only if I am willing to focus with laser-like determination on a self-imposed goal and able to let a few other things slide to make the writing happen and (2) a timeline is a good thing, but sometimes the science and the story is better served by missing a deadline and getting in another round of thinking and feedback before submission. I strongly suspect that the public accountability on the blog helped a bit, too!<\/p>\n

I hope that sciwrite was motivational to others as well, and I\u2019d love to hear how you all did and whether you took away any lasting lessons or practices that you\u2019ll continue to apply. What\u2019s next?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.\u201d \u2013 Douglas Adams I\u2019m a week overdue for my final sciwrite check in, and I didn\u2019t make my goal of submitting the manuscript by the time … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,14],"tags":[531],"class_list":["post-7031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-life","category-publication","tag-sciwrit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7031"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7031\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7034,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7031\/revisions\/7034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}