Last night, I sent what I hope is the complete first draft of my book manuscript, How to Write and Win Research Grants in Canada: A Handbook for Scholars, to my editor at UBC Press. Excluding references and appendices, it currently sits at 74,884 words. I’m hoping that it’ll be published in the first half of 2028, and it’ll be available in print for purchase as well as open access through the press’s On Campus imprint. It’s my first book.
There are still lots of steps before the book gets published. It’ll go through a peer review process, although not one as rigorous as academic peer review, since this isn’t strictly an academic book (meaning, there’s no argument, no methodology, and no results or findings); then, I’ll make revisions, get it copyedited, secure permissions from interviewees, get the images redrawn, get the index prepared, and approve the proofs. And then party.
And even though there is still a lot of work ahead of me, I’m proud of this first draft of the manuscript. Like much of my work about academic writing, the manuscript balances practical, how-to advice with an attention to the political context in which this work takes place. I share my favourite strategies for making grants highly readable, focusing on the suggestions that most readers won’t have heard before, and including “before” and “after” examples of edited sentences. In the book, I give a tonne of advice, but also advise people to not follow that advice if they decide it doesn’t make sense for their specific audience and context. To me, these qualities of the book are all about empowering researchers to make their own choices about how to best communicate their proposed work in the unusual genre of the grant application.
One of the most fun (and most challenging) parts of writing the book was coming up with fake examples of projects that researchers might be applying to Tri-Agency to fund. When I have to give examples of research projects, I often fall back on my own dissertation topic, which was on bad late nineteenth-century translations of narrative poetry. But because this book has to speak to researchers in a wide range of disciplines, it includes fake examples of grant proposals related to:
- bilingual language development in children in French immersion schools
- broadside balladry of the English interregnum
- Bronze Age ceramic petrography
- dementia care for people transitioning into long-term care homes
- early childhood education for children with experiences of trauma
- fermentation processes in home kimchi production
- frog vocalizations
- genome size in 500+ species of salamanders
- membrane fouling in wastewater treatment bioreactors
- nutritional aspects of diabetes
- queer Portuguese speakers in Angola
- representations of care work in Belgian graphic novels, 1930–1970
- seasonal influenza transmission in university residence halls
- settlement outcomes for new immigrants
- sixth-wave feminist neo-formalist philosophy
- South Korean online subcultures
- stellar nucleosynthesis
- strange-flavoured quarks
- topological insulators
- walrus tusks v. narwhal tusks
I decided to write this book on October 1, 2023 — 973 days ago. At that point, I already had about 30,000 words in my manuscript, because I’d been writing my University Affairs column, “Ask Dr. Editor,” for five years, and so had already articulated a lot of what I want to say about grants. Over the next 973 days, I conducted my 180+ interviews (with the support of three excellent grad student interns), wrote 32 pieces for my column, pitched the book, had my pitch rejected, pitched to a new publisher, had my pitch accepted, procrastinated, moved 4551km from my hometown of Vancouver to my new home in Montréal, missed two manuscript submission deadlines, worked with two freelance editors, got a dog, and wrote an average of 46.1 new words per day. There are, at various states of progress, 67 versions of the manuscript in the folder on my desktop called “0writing.” I don’t know how many of these traces will be visible in the book when it is eventually published.
Because it’ll be maybe another 700 or so days until the book is published, I thought I’d make the traces of this phase of the publication process a little more visible, through some ad hoc pieces that I’ll post in a blog mini-series. Having never been through this process before, these occasional blog posts will give me a space for reflection and sharing, plus for something that I’m not naturally good at: celebration.
I’ve never done this before — never written a book, yes, but also never written about the messy middle of making something. Back when I was in grad school, I used to love work-in-progression conversations, because I loved being able to see how thinking unfolds and evolves. So I’ll try to be precise about how the manuscript is changing over the coming months, as it works its way toward a published object. But I’ll also be celebratory. The book exists! Words are on digital pages! One of those words is the word “salamanders”! The book exists!