Every writer has a voice, even in academic writing, and by the end of your first chapter I can hear yours. That ear is how I protect your voice, and it is how I notice when a passage drifts into someone else’s, or into AI’s. Not an accusation: a query, and a 15-minute exercise.
You defended, you celebrated, and now what? Here is what to do with a finished dissertation: why you re-create it rather than revise it, what it can become, and a ten-minute exercise for finding your first publication.
Today the hardcover, Kindle, and Nook editions of Synchronicity in Grief are out from Routledge. The last post in the production journey: where the book started, every post from submission to release in order, what it took, and where to get each edition.
Pre-orders opened at the end of the summer. Print and Kindle release October 19. On October 2 the ebook went live two weeks early. In between, my book has been both out and not out, and almost nobody tells you what that month is like: a typo on one retailer’s page, the wrong date on another, no cover for weeks, a Goodreads record filed under a different Jennifer Hill, and a publisher doing a great deal of work that no longer needs the author.
Today I went to claim my author copies of Synchronicity in Grief: Reconstructing Meaning After Loss (Routledge). That's when I found out the eBook is already live, more than two weeks before the official October 19 release. For a book about meaningful coincidences, that felt about right.
Many grieving people describe experiences that feel deeply meaningful: birds arriving at special moments, rainbows in the sky, a herd of deer appearing at the moment of an important person's death. People often keep these to themselves for fear of being dismissed or pathologized. This book takes those experiences seriously.
A finished dissertation is not a draft of one book. It is a chest of things you can make from it: articles, a monograph, a course, a talk, a practitioner tool, and more. Here are ten, what in the dissertation feeds each one, and a ten-minute exercise for choosing the first.