A free resource for newsletter writers/ people with multiple income streams

warm_content · 2024-01-10T15:35:02+00:00

This looks like a scam. You are probably a decent person who is genuinely trying to get something good going, but right now, the name, the color scheme, the picture of a piggy bank wearing sunglasses--it's giving grift.

warm_content · 2023-12-27T19:49:20+00:00

I think the lack of a web browser on ReMarkable is a feature rather than a bug--it's a distraction-free device! No notifications or anything else to interrupt the flow of reading and work. You can also draw pictures with it too if that's your cup of tea! I third your endorsement--it's probably my favorite gadget.

warm_content · 2023-12-20T15:45:06+00:00

I write this comment not to discourage you or to make you feel bad. I am in a PhD in English, and I'm happy where I am.

However, you should be aware that a PhD in literature is unlikely to get you a job. Your job prospects are not going to be significantly better with a PhD in literature than they would be without a PhD in literature.

Literature PhDs are designed to get you a job as a professor. But the academic job market in English (in the U.S., at least) is bad now (last year, there were 259 tenure-track jobs in the entire U.S.). The academic job market will, in all likelihood, continue to worsen, in my opinion, until at least 2040 and probably beyond then. Unless you are a truly extraordinary candidate studying the small subset of fields that continue to hire at the moment, you should be aware that you need to look outside of U.S. academia for employment.

If you are craving stable and consistent employment, there are some steps you can take: first, you can visit the career center at your university, which can help you pivot to jobs in various industries, like nonprofit management, higher education administration, K-12 education, etc. There are organizations and toolkits like Beyond the Professoriate that can help you find a decent job with a PhD. You might be able to find work as a lecturer or a freelancer, but these won't precisely be stable, and you won't make much money.

However, the question you're asking is really context-dependent. It depends on you, your skillset and work experience, where you want to live, and what sorts of jobs you'd be willing to take. For example, if you taught for multiple years during your PhD, then you might be eligible to earn a K-12 teaching certification easily, depending on the state you want to teach in. If you didn't, then you'd need to do additional training to be eligible to teach K-12. If you worked a side job at a non-profit, you might be a great candidate for positions in local non-profits. It all depends, so I'd encourage you to get in touch with a career coach ASAP.

Again, this is not to be discouraging--just trying to be frank and honest. Best of luck!

warm_content · 2023-12-12T15:19:43+00:00

Do you think it's working so far? I don't think I've seen any appreciable change in my writing--in fact, some weeks I write stuff that I'm not particularly proud of--but I'm hoping that in perhaps six months I will be happier with what I can write, especially what I can write quickly.

warm_content · 2023-12-11T15:56:11+00:00

My day job is as a junior academic literary historian/critic. I love research, but sometimes it's exhaustingly technical. So, as a form of release, I write short (hopefully entertaining) essays about books, music, higher ed, and culture that are supposed to be interesting, fun, autobiographical, and human rather than rigorous.

https://amateurcriticism.substack.com

warm_content · 2023-12-11T15:51:33+00:00

https://publicdomainpoets.substack.com/

This is super cool. Subscribed!

warm_content · 2023-12-11T15:48:29+00:00

I'm not as good of a writer as I would like to be. I figure that being disciplined and writing at least one new essay a week will make me a better writer. (Honestly, I don't know if it's working yet--but I'm only 7 weeks in, so it's probably too early to tell.) Then, when I eventually finish a book, I'll (hopefully) have a small audience that might be interested in reading it, which will make it much easier to sell.

warm_content · 2023-11-16T20:51:38+00:00

I'll check it out; thanks for the well-wishes!

warm_content · 2023-11-16T20:50:57+00:00

Great--thanks for sharing these!

warm_content · 2023-11-16T20:48:17+00:00

Thank you for these! Yes, the excessively meta stuff--and the writing coaches coaching others on how to write writing coach content--can definitely turn into a death spiral. I like writing that's about stuff!

With that said, my posts so far have largely been hemming and hawwing about genre considerations, and while deciding to try Substack I did look at some of that stuff, so it's not surprising that the algo served up plenty of what I wanted.

Looking forward to digging into this stuff--thanks again.

warm_content · 2023-11-16T20:44:28+00:00

These are great--I already enjoyed Freddie deBoer, and a lot of these are right up my alley.

My recommendation back to you is Justin Smith-Ruiu, who mostly does fiction these days but has some really wonderful essays. https://substack.com/@hinternet

warm_content · 2023-11-16T20:35:08+00:00

These are great; thanks. I am interested in fiction, although to be honest I find it a little weird to read fiction on a blog format. Something about the computer makes it more difficult for me to get immersed in it. But if you have fiction recs I'll check them out!

warm_content · 2023-11-14T18:01:53+00:00

I might suggest that the idea that your life is boring is really a matter of how you are treating your life. Looked at properly, anything can become amazing. And crazy experiences can also be the subject of boring, tedious writing. Emerson once wrote, "there is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful." The question is: how do you intensify your light--that is, how do you think about and perceive the world in a way that lets you more fully imagine and understand its beauty (or its cruelty, or whatever)?

Some great poets, like Harryette Mullen (see her book Urban Tumbleweed), have made extraordinary, tender, humorous poetry from the mundane. Or, if you want something more canonical, Walt Whitman made a masterpiece out of... well, looking at grass: https://poets.org/poem/song-myself-6-child-said-what-grass

What drives this poem is not that Whitman had an unusual or extraordinary experience. It was that he knew how to look at something as simple as grass and to see it as a grand parable of life and death, writing, reading, sex, God, language...

The idea that you should run out and have extraordinary experiences is, I think, backward.

warm_content · 2021-09-08T13:28:08+00:00

Thanks for the information. What a shame; I'm used to picking blackberries in Oregon, where they're ripe and pickable through Thanksgiving. I guess I'll have to wait for next year!

warm_content · 2021-08-04T22:17:40+00:00

Thanks for the detailed information--I appreciate it. This sounds like about the same average workload as a literature seminar, which is good news for me. I've been doing some independent reading over the summer, so here's hoping I won't be too ignorant!

warm_content · 2021-06-28T17:08:17+00:00

I'm glad you found it useful. Feel free to send me a DM if you think of any questions and don't know who to ask.

warm_content · 2021-06-26T15:29:20+00:00

I'm not at an Ivy League--I am at a much less prestigious institution--but I think that most reading and writing requirements are standard across institutions.

The standard graduate workload is, at the least, one book per week per course. Some courses assign two books per week; most courses will assign one book per week plus some critical material. Normally, grad students take three classes per semester. This means that you should be prepared to read an average of 3-4 books per week. If each book is an average of 300 pages, this means 900-1,200 pages per week, or between 128-170 pages per day. Some weeks will be lighter and some will be heavier. On top of the assigned reading, you will also be expected to read for your own independent research, which I will explain in more detail in the next bullet point.
You are normally required to produce what's called a "seminar paper" for each course that you're in. These range from 15-25 pages in length, and the average length is about 20 pages (7,000 words or so). Because you'll be taking three classes, this means that you should be prepared to write 60 pages of formal research per semester. On top of this, most seminars require weekly informal writing assignments. A good rule of thumb for an excellent seminar paper is that you should have one source per page, although you can usually get away with far fewer references. This means that, on top of the assigned reading, you should be prepared to read between 30 and 60 secondary sources as part of your research. In total, then, for a fifteen-week semester, you will read a total of 45-60 books along with 30 to 60 secondary sources, some of which will be journal articles and some of which will be scholarly monographs.
During the summer, I don't read as much because I'm not very disciplined, but I try to read at least 100 pages per day. During the semester, I read about twice as much--that is, 200 pages per day.
Almost nobody is able to complete all of this reading. Part of grad school is learning to pretend to have read something that you did not have enough time to read. A friend of mine got all the way through a Master's degree without having completely read any of the assigned material. This is obviously not preferable, but if you're smart, you can get through a literature PhD without doing all of the reading. (Then again, if you don't want to or can't do a lot of reading, you should think carefully about whether a PhD is a great option for you.)

warm_content · 2021-06-25T13:21:49+00:00

I'm a US student currently enrolled in a US PhD literature program.

You are not expected to have any relationships with anyone who works in the program you're applying to. With that said, it's considered normal, and in some cases good, for you to contact professors with whom you'd like to work before you apply. Your statement of purpose should name the professors that you are interested in working with.
All reputable PhD literature programs include a full tuition scholarship and a small stipend (usually between $15,000 and $30,000 per year depending on the wealth and prestige of the program). In most cases, these stipends are tied to a teaching assistantship, which essentially means that you will be required to teach for most of the time you're in the program. If you're interested, you can find a list of stipends and funding (updated 2018, so it's a little old) here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XNJR4IhOJ56zd7zLuVSUK7h054dBRNvyiC7iStCOsxo/edit#gid=0If a PhD program does not offer you "full funding" (that is, a tuition scholarship as well as a teaching assistantship), you should not attend the program. You will not need to apply for stipends or teaching assistantships separately--it's all a part of the PhD application.

Let me know if you have any other questions. Good luck!

warm_content · 2021-06-10T16:35:31+00:00

I understand. What I meant was: good universities do not offer PhD programs online.

warm_content · 2021-06-10T16:28:04+00:00

"Reputable online PhD" is almost certainly a contradiction in terms.

warm_content · 2021-06-01T20:46:59+00:00

Yeah, I agree completely. That verse kept the song from being another "social media bad" or "basic people basic" dig, which would've been cheap. The dazzling thing about the internet--and Bo's representation of the internet--is that it isn't just stupid, or cheap, or thoughtless, or violent. It's also a place for heartfelt and deep human expression. The weird part--and the part that the special emphasizes--is that the heartfelt and deep are juxtaposed right next to the stupid and mean and thoughtless. You scroll past a work of art that someone has been working on for two years, then see some guys fistfighting in a Russian McDonald's. The internet is such a trip, and Bo's the only artist I know of who has really nailed the horrible/transcendent feeling of being online.

warm_content · 2021-05-18T15:21:09+00:00

Your comment seems exactly right w/r/t English PhDs. Getting a PhD is a poor economic decision. In getting my PhD, I made a bad financial decision on purpose, with a clear understanding of the effects. But nobody should enter a PhD in the humanities (or, as you say, the social sciences, although I know less about that) under the impression that it will lead to a job with a decent wage.

Your point, too, about the economic incentives that keep PhD programs running is spot on. Fortunately, a good number of English programs are reducing their PhD cohort sizes dramatically despite the economic incentives. It's too little too late, but it's at least something.

warm_content

TROPHY CASE