Tag: writing

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news writing

Eight Years After Room 524

It dawned on me a few days ago that today is eight years since I started my life as a skills trainer. On September 15th 2008, I registered my business. I was a guy with a PhD in maths, a few ideas about what I might do as a freelancer, but no real clue. This was me:

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My last day in the postgraduate office

I left behind Room 524, my workspace for nearly four years. One day I was working surrounded by interesting people who loved research. The next day I was working alone at the dining room table: What to do? How to start? It seems like yesterday sometimes, and also like another life. A lot has happened in eight years (I got married! I have a daughter!). Work highlights include:

I’ve been fortunate to work with a lot of great people, and I know that I’ve learned a lot along the way. It’s not always easy to be a freelancer. There can be a lot of disappointments. But you can work to your values: it is very liberating to realise that you can step back from something that isn’t satisfying. You can say no to things that you think will get in the way, and say yes to things that excite you or you think can make a difference.

One of the things I like most is the freedom to do fun things, to play. You can do something “just because”. I have thoughts for more little experiments and “just because” ideas; let me know in the comments if you want to hear more.

Thanks for reading!

Nathan (@DrRyder and @VivaSurvivors)

Categories
news writing

Self-Publishing For Academics, out now!

Last week I wrote to say that I had a new book out today, so here it is!

This!

Helen and I worked hard on this for months, and the end result is a compact how-to guide on self-publishing, aimed at academics who are wondering what it’s all about and if it’s right for them. Yesterday, the awesome Research Whisperer blog published a post by us which explored how Helen and I collaborated. This morning Helen has published a blog post that we both worked on, a kind of dual Q&A where we explore the whys and hows of self-publishing and this book.

We’ve been quietly hyping the book on Twitter, as shouting from the rooftops is not quite our thing: still, it was great to wake up this morning to find that our book had made it’s way to the Number One spot in the College & University chart of the UK Kindle Store!

Number1

Self-Publishing For Academics is available now from the Amazon Kindle Store! It’ll be available from other e-book distributors soon, and I’ll update this post with a list of links as and when those links go live. Check out the Research Whisperer post and Helen’s blog for more details. I’m really proud of what Helen and I have produced in such a short space of time, and I hope you check it out and find it really useful too.

Thanks for reading!

Nathan (@DrRyder and @VivaSurvivors)

Categories
news

Announcing: Self-Publishing For Academics, new e-book!

Hello!

It’s been a few months since I last wrote, but that’s all for a good reason: I’ve been working hard on several things, but in particular on Self-Publishing For Academics, a new e-book that I’ve been writing with Helen Kara. Helen is an indie researcher, I’m an indie skills trainer and we’ve both self-published books before. Helen got in touch with me at the end of last year with an idea, which has now become:

We wanted to write something to help others in academia figure out how to self-publish something that’s important to them, like I have with my viva books and Helen is doing with her series. We each had different experiences and ideas for how to get it done, and by joining forces we were able to write this pretty effectively and get a lot done in a relatively short space of time (we had our first Skype meeting to throw some ideas around in mid-January!).

In Self-Publishing For Academics, aspiring self-publishers can explore the practical realities of making an e-book, find the perils and pitfalls that can trip you up, and learn about some of the great ways to make progress. We can’t teach you how to write something awesome, but this book can help you get your own amazing writing out there and in front of others.

Self-Publishing For Academics is due to launch next Wednesday, May 18th 2016, and we’ll be tweeting and sharing it widely on that day. We would love it if you could help us tell others about it. Tweet, share it on Facebook, email your friend who has always been talking about self-publishing something – and email us if you have any questions about it. You can email me here and look for Helen’s contact details here.

Thanks for reading this post – Helen and I are really pleased with how this project has turned out, and hope that it’s a great help to academics who want to self-publish.

Nathan (@DrRyder and @VivaSurvivors)

Categories
quick thought writing

Comma Chameleon

I can’t spot my grammar mistakes until long after I’ve made them. Despite taking time and not just dashing out 500 words and hitting publish, I often find bad grammar in what I have created. Or, more typically, my wife spots it. The post that I did yesterday for Viva Survivors went live and I got it sent to me by email (I signed up for my own subscriber list; it helps me remember what’s going on when I’m busy). I scanned it quickly, thinking Yes, another post out there, another connection with- Wait what’s that comma doing there?

They blend in. The commas and the semi-colons lurk in among the words. They make sense in my head. I use them to create pauses or to moderate how I speak – which is how I write to an extent, sort of conversational-like. But it does mean that I risk creating confusion. I want my writing to be conversational, fun, informative, challenging – but not challenging because people are really working to parse things. I think my biggest problem with writing is my own self-belief in what I am doing, a kind of sabotaging impostor syndrome. Not too far behind that is missing the commas, the parentheses and the exclamation marks that just creep in the background.

I wonder what I can do about that. I want to read something about good grammar – which I think I know on some level, but don’t apply consistently – but maybe reading and trying to apply something isn’t enough. Does anyone out there have any suggestions for me? Have you built up good written grammar, and if so, how did you do it?

Thanks for reading.

Nathan (@DrRyder and @VivaSurvivors)

Categories
creative thinking work writing

Under Pressure

I stopped work on a planned series of books in the summertime because it no longer felt like fun. I felt pressured.

What a wimp! I hear you cry, and you’re kind of right. If everyone stopped everything because there was a bit of pressure then we wouldn’t get anywhere at all. But nevertheless, it stopped being fun as a project to work on, and so I stopped working on it.

Pressure is by no means a bad thing: it’s just a thing, and things are used for good or bad, for great things or poor ends. With a bit of reflection, I realised recently that the problem with the situation – and the books – was me. We’re not surprised by that Nathan, I hear you mutter, and neither am I, but I forget from time to time that I am my own worst enemy, and that that enemy is a saboteur by nature.

On this occasion, the enemy was supplying bad pressure:

  • The last book wasn’t that good, this one will be even worse.
  • You’re not like those other writers, you know, the good ones.
  • You need this book to be good. You need it to be loved.

With pressure like that, the end could only come in one of two ways: a book which I was never happy with, or an abandoned project. I think, on this occasion, that I chose correctly.

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news

Summer Experiments Revisited

Just over two months ago I wrote a post where I talked about my plans for the summer. I would be blogging less, and on different things, and I’d be doing that because I had a writing project that I was super keen on! I was going to change the world! I was young, the world was good and nothing was going to get in my way!

Ahem.

Well, what actually happened was I went on holiday for a week, came back, looked at what I was writing and fell head over heels out of love with it. I thought that the writing itself was alright, but I wasn’t sold on the overall project any more. It didn’t sing to me. And similarly for the alternative blogging that I was thinking of doing on here, I just didn’t have the heart for it any more. I liked the concept, but wasn’t sure about where the execution of it was going. I guess, maybe it didn’t need to be going anywhere in particular, but still I just wasn’t feeling it.

So I did something completely different: I started a role-playing game business.

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Categories
quick thought writing

Summer Experiments

Through the end of July and August, when few of my clients want me to deliver workshops, I’ll be working on a new writing project – which I’ll announce properly some time in the next week! I need to produce about 35,000 polished words by the end of September in order to hit my goals, and have a series of first draft milestones spaced out over the next six weeks.

Throughout a big chunk of this time I’ll be writing most days about PhD matters – and so I think here on this blog I’ll take the opportunity to do something a little different as a creative outlet. I’ll still be writing something PhD-related, but it may be more of a piece of creative fiction rather than the non-fiction that I’ve been writing for the last year. I have a couple of ideas of the directions that might take and it may draw together some of my other interests as well.

Summer is a good time for experiments: I’d rather be cold than hot, but sunshine boosts me a lot! I feel like I can get a good routine going. I also know that there is going to come a point where I think “I need to be out there delivering workshops…” but I wonder if there is maybe something that I can do about that…

Anyway! Stay tuned over the summer for fiction, of a sort. A few more weeks of PhD musings and ideas.

What experiments might you try over the summer?

Thanks for reading!

Nathan (@DrRyder and @VivaSurvivors)

Categories
quick thought

You Don’t Use Your Maths Any More, Do You?

A few days ago I was talking to someone about my work. They know me fairly well, so it came as a shock when they said:

“You don’t use your maths any more, do you?”

It really surprised me. They don’t see me every day, so how could they know what I do or don’t do?

I don’t follow the #postac hashtag a lot on Twitter, but I follow a few people who are involved and I wonder if this is a common thing if you finish a PhD/post-doc and then go on to do something outside of academia?

I suppose I felt a little judged as well. Which, on reflection, is odd! I’ve been doing what I do now for nearly seven years. I’ve been doing this longer than my PhD. I couldn’t do this without my PhD – my PhD was like start-up capital for this business. And not just in terms of experience with the area that I work in, important as that is, but in the intellectual capital that I accrued as well.

Some of that is totally maths-related. I analyse problems and make some decisions very quickly because I have a brain that is keyed up to look at things in a certain way. I look for certain types of information about a situation, because my experience – in maths – tells me what things are important to look for.

I guess… I guess I felt like perhaps I wasn’t being seen for something that I am. I’m not a mathematician, I don’t think, not any more. But I do use those tools, that mindset a lot. I’m sure I always will. I love maths, and I love solving problems with maths.

I’m happy using what I’ve learned, happy to be an a-math-teur. 🙂

Thanks for reading!

Nathan (@DrRyder and @VivaSurvivors)

Categories
writing

Book Reviews Please!

I Need You!

Have you read either of my books? If you have, would you consider posting a review on Amazon or on your blog? If you do, and send me a screengrab or a link that proves you’re the author, I’ll send you a 50% off code to my books on Payhip – you can either buy a copy of a different book for yourself, or give the code to a friend so that they can give one or both of my current books a try.

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Categories
work writing

On Guest Posts

Unless this is the first post of mine that you’ve read, you’ll know two things about me: one is that I really enjoy writing things (and delivering workshops!) for postgraduate researchers, and the other is that I run the Viva Survivors Podcast. But these are not the only outlets I’ve had for communicating with researchers. In the past I’ve written a few pieces for various publications like the late GRADBritain, the former Vitae “What’s Up Doc?” blog and others. I thought it might be fun to go and look at these pieces – some of which are a few years old now, and share links to them in today’s post. As it happens, because of site restructuring I can’t find the pieces I’ve written for Vitae – if I look on my hard drive I’ll see if I can find my copies and share them soon – but in the mean time I’ve found links to a couple of others that I’ve written or been involved with.

And at the end of the post I want to make you an offer that you won’t refuse!

Continue reading “On Guest Posts”