Publishing Series with Rae Song
A message from Mimi: I met Rae Song at AAAL2016 in Orlando Florida. She is a grad student investigating transnational identity negotiation and a volunteer with the AAAL Graduate Student Council (@AAALgrad) and hosts her own amazing blog, Lost in the Maze of Languages.
Reading through it, I found Rae's posts documenting her process of writing a publishable article in 3 months, based on the amazing book Writing your Journal Article in 12 Weeks by Wendy Laura Belcher. If you haven't read this book yet, I strongly recommended it: it has many useful tips to get your writing into shape. Because Rae engaged with Belcher's recommendations and narrated her process on her blog last year, I invited her to reflect on how that went for her and to repost the project here as a special Publishing Series with Rae. Keeping looking out for these posts every Thursday that will walk you through Rae's journey over the next few weeks! Why not start the 12-week challenge yourself! Our adventure with Rae starts tomorrow!
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A message from Rae: First, I was flattered when Mimi asked me if she could repost my 12-week project on the Caesura Collective blog. Soon, the familiar fear that probably every writer knows so well crept into my head. "But it's an old project. I ended up not logging the progress consistently at the end. And it was just for me to benefit from the regular writing so my postings wouldn't make sense to other people." When I shared the concerns, however, Mimi responded back to me saying "Life happens and sometimes we don’t completely finish our project or aren’t perfectly consistent! And that’s OK!" And this reminded me of the point of this project, and really, the point of my being as a writer and academic, as this blog writes: [to break] the cycle of competition and isolation in higher ed and [blur] the lines of who gets to create and share knowledge.
So here I am, inviting you to my journey into finding and molding my voice as an academic writer. It won't be perfect, and it won't make sense to you at times. But, as I discovered, that's OK! I just hope that my attempt could also inspire you to create and share, even with fears, so more people like us can be inspired and we can create a positive cycle of knowledge production.