Melanie Sindelar

Four honest tips for the project still sitting on your desk. Swipe through.

A plan is just the beginning. Now you have to act on it.
Submit by September is open. First cohort starts Monday 1 July. Eight weeks of weekly inputs, co-writing rooms, peer feedback, and one submission party at the end.

You can pay with institutional funds. Write to [email protected] and I will send an invoice.

Questions? Ask me here on Instagram or write to [email protected].

Sign up: https://members.emerge-scholars.com/Submit-by-September

You are exhausted from this academic year. It is finally summer, and all you can think about is finally being on holiday.
Maybe you are dreaming of swimming in a cool Austrian lake. Maybe you are planning a summer somewhere on the seaside, with nothing on your plate but the sun and a book.
And then it creeps in.

The R&R you never submitted. The journal article you promised as part of your scholarship or your grant. Maybe the last article you need for your cumulative dissertation. And you start asking yourself the question every academic asks themselves in June: how the hell am I supposed to rest and write at the same time?

In most cases, the answer is that the summer just slips by. You did not really rest, because the guilt followed you to the lake. And you did not really write, because there was never one clear day where you sat down and made progress. September arrives, and the to-do list is the same one you carried in.
That is what Submit by September is for.

Eight weeks, from 1 July to 31 August, working on one article with me. We build a Summer Writing Plan in Week 1 that holds both the rest and the writing. One editorial step per week. Four co-writing rooms a week, and I am in them. Two peer feedback rounds. And a Submission Party on Monday 31 August, where you actually submit.

You go from A to B with rest planned in, not stolen back from the article.

Early Bird is €349 until Tuesday 17 June at midnight. It moves to €449 on 18 June. Comparable US programmes run €1,500 to €2,000, and my own 1:1 rate is €129 an hour, so €349 is roughly two and a half hours of my time for eight weeks of work on your article. First cohort, lowest price it will ever be.
If you sign up before Tuesday at midnight, you also get a free pre-programme session with me to decide which article to work on, my written feedback on your Summer Writing Plan in Week 1, and permanent access to every session recording.

Link in bio, or members.emerge-scholars.com/Submit-by-September.

anthropology qualitativeresearch academicchatter writeyourarticle summerwriting

Your article is not stuck because you are not writing enough.

It is stuck because the argument is not yet doing the work it needs to do, or the structure is fighting the reader, or the evidence is not landing where it should. None of that gets fixed by another month of word-count tracking in a writing group.

That is what Submit by September is built to fix.
Eight weeks, from 1 July to 31 August, working on one article with me. One weekly input session. Four co-writing rooms a week, and I am in them. An Article Roadmap in Week 1, where I read your Summer Writing Plan and give you written feedback on it. Two peer feedback rounds, on the argument in Week 4 and the intro in Week 7. A Submission Party on Monday 31 August.

After Workshop 1, one participant wrote in the chat: "this has been a true paradigm shift for me." That was one free hour. Imagine eight weeks.

The Early Bird price is €349 for the full programme, and it moves to €449 on 18 June. Comparable programmes from the US run €1,500 to €2,000, and my own 1:1 rate is €129 an hour, so €349 is roughly two and a half hours of my time for eight weeks of work on your article. This is the first cohort, which is why the price is where it is, and it will not be this low again.

If you sign up before midnight on Tuesday 17 June, you also get:
→ A free pre-programme session with me, to decide which article to work on
→ Written feedback from me on your Summer Writing Plan in Week 1
→ Permanent access to all session recordings, so you can come back to them long after the cohort ends

Send me a message or go to members.emerge-scholars.com/Submit-by-September.

postdoc anthropology qualitativeresearch academicchatter writeyourarticle

Your article isn't stuck because you're not smart enough.
Somewhere between 30 and 70% of submissions to academic journals are desk-rejected before they ever reach peer review. At top anthropology and ethnography journals, the acceptance rate sits at 10–15%.
That is almost never about ability. It is about craft. And craft is solvable.

I keep seeing the same five reasons keep otherwise excellent articles unpublished:

01 — No clear argument. The article describes a topic. It does not argue a claim.
02 — Weak positioning. It cites the literature but never enters a debate.
03 — Overloaded structure. It is trying to be three articles at once.
04 — Evidence doing no work. The material sits on the page. It does not prove anything.
05 — Revisions that never close. Every pass adds. None of them finish.

On June 11 at 2pm I am hosting a free 60-minute workshop in the Emerge Café where we walk through all five — with a short exercise for each one applied to your article. Not a lecture. A working hour.

By the end you leave with six things on the page, not just in your head: a one-sentence argument for your article, the specific debate it enters, a section audit, evidence that finally does intellectual work, a submission threshold so revision can close, and a protected two-week plan in your calendar.

This is for you if you have material — a chapter, a stalled draft, a conference paper, fieldnotes — and the article that was supposed to be done by September is still open in a tab.

Pull up a chair in the Emerge Café. Link in bio to save your seat. Replay sent to everyone who registers.



journalpublishing writeyourpaper ethnography anthropology academia scholarship academiclife writingcommunity phdwriting publishorperish emergescholars emergecafé