You are very welcome, dear friend!
As for scholarly writing, I could wax poetic for days but I’ll try to be brief.
The two main kinds are an article and a book. Everything else is a derivative of the two.
To write a scholarly article, you need an idea and a calculator. The idea should never be “I want to write about …” because that’s not an idea but a topic. An idea is, for example, “In her novel Frankenstein’s Mother, Almudena Grandes projects her neoliberal subjectivity of a twenty-first-century leftist back onto the dictatorship of Franco.” I first came up with this idea right here on the blog but then the article suffered significant travails because the edited volume it was destined for became a victim of a romantic split between its editors. In any case, the article is coming out in print in a couple of months.
After you get your idea fleshed out, get out the calculator. Think about how many words you can realistically write in a day and subdivide the intended length by this number. Then look at your calendar and mark the date when you will be done. I do not recommend sitting down to write anything unless you have a clear date of completion. The worst thing is to turn into one of those people who spend years “working” on the same article that no longer motivates or remotely interests them. They have the eyes of exhausted old horses that should have been put out to pasture years ago.
We are in literature, folks. Nobody is solving Fermat’s theorem or curing cancer. Whatever it is can’t possibly take several years. If it does, you are probably writing the wrong article in a wrong way.
Another piece of advice: in the name of everything holy, please don’t tell yourself, “today I’ll be working on my article / book.” That’s a road to bad, bad places. Say, instead, “today I will write 3 sentences about the extent to which Grandes was influenced by Ramiro Pinilla.” After you finish your 3 sentences, decide what tomorrow’s 3 sentences will be about. “Tomorrow I will write 3 sentences on how Grandes is much more influenced by Pérez Galdós than Pinilla.”
The brain resists the grandiose. It likes tiny, bite-sized projects. I can’t tell you how easy it is to write when you start every day knowing exactly what today’s 3 sentences should look like.
As for a book, it’s one of those things where the changes accumulate incrementally but are realized in a burst. I came up with the idea and a detailed plan of Neoliberal Love in a single afternoon. But I had been thinking about neoliberal subjectivities for at least a decade. I have all my secondary sources annotated and pretty much learned by heart at this point.
The Ukrainian book was written in a 5-month ecstasy of writing but it contains things I’ve been reading and thinking about since 2006. So my advice: read, think, discuss, and one day it will burst out of you like a geyser.
An article is planned, scheduled and executed. A book erupts like a flamethrower. But there won’t be a book without many carefully planned and severely executed articles.
I’m not sure if I’m answering what you wanted to know but feel free to specify if you were looking for something else.
Clarissa's Blog 
The worst thing is to turn into one of those people who spend years “working” on the same article that no longer motivates or remotely interests them
I work with someone who has been finishing a book for years and years now. They can’t do this until they finish their book and they can’t do that until they finish their book. And another thing will have to wait until the book is done. I’m not sure if they have just realized this is the perfect excuse to get out of doing things or if they really think they are going to finish this book. My bet is that they are going to retire in a few years and “finally finishing the book” is going to be the plan for retirement.
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Right? It turns into a lifestyle, filled with guilt and discontent but impossible to let go. I had a colleague who was just about to turn a conference talk into a book. It’s been over a decade. She’s still going to do it any day now.
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I’m quite fond of once important and now useless projects for the critical distance they provide between me, specific people in my orbit, and more important things in the works that these people may yet manage to sabotage.
It’s in this role of Overly Attached Person caring about the output, someone who has no real stakes in it except to gain Schadenfraud Bonus Points because of an observable failure from their perspective, that the would-be saboteurs reveal themselves.
And so when an author ends up confronted with such circumstances it’s much better to go along with this interpretation.
That’s especially the case when the author gets very little in the way of actual support from these people and won’t be going to any trouble to mention them in the foreword and most especially on the dedication page.
As many authors are INFJ types who hurt when they have to door slam people for being too nosey, some may come to the view that moving a bulky piece of furniture in front of that door is vastly preferable.
Then they continue to hear the noises that come through it without making any efforts to venture through.
In workplaces some of these book projects serve as arms-length proxies for dealing with people who have become too personally involved.
Should a retirement or change in situations come to pass, enough consideration has been given already as to who should remain in the loop.
So chances are pretty good you will never hear from that person ever again.
It’s the kinder and gentler form of door slamming, after all.
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Just to clarify, I’m not looking for any Schadenfreude points with the person I wrote about. My own past is dotted with abandoned projects, and I would never shame anyone for abandoning something that no longer inspires them. I’m frustrated with the situation because things that would benefit the department or students don’t happen or the work gets pushed off onto other people. For example, there is a great idea for an online course in this person’s area of expertise, the course is almost guaranteed to enroll well, the dean has repeatedly encouraged us to offer additional online courses and really wants to see higher enrollments, but work on the new course can’t be started until the book is finished. I think the idea for the course was first floated seven or eight years ago, but nothing has happened because of the book. The ugly reality is that every decision at our university (and the continued existence of every department and program) boils down to tuition and grant dollars. Figuring out ways to fill classrooms is really important and it’s frustrating to see a really good idea be shoved to the back burner.
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