#also my teacher required we have like three drafts or whatever WITH editing marks so

[cinnabeat]

i wanna go back to the khux era actually that made me feel insane in the best way i wanna feel that again

[bountyofbeads]

Inside Liberty University’s ‘culture of fear’

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/07/24/inside-liberty-universitys-culture-fear-how-jerry-falwell-jr-silences-students-professors-who-reject-his-pro-trump-politics/

Inside Liberty University’s ‘Culture Of Fear’

By Will E. Young | Published July 24 at 6:25 PM | Washington Post | Posted July 25, 2019 |

In my first week as editor in chief of the Champion, Liberty University’s student-run weekly, our faculty adviser, Deborah Huff, ordered me to apologize. I’d noticed that our evangelical school’s police department didn’t publish its daily crime log online, as many other private university forces did, so I searched elsewhere for crime information I might use in an article. I called the Virginia Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators to find out what the law required Liberty to disclose. But the public affairs worker there told the Liberty University Police Department, which complained to Huff. She called to upbraid me: Apparently, I had endangered our newspaper’s relationship with the LUPD. Huff and Chief Richard Hinkley convened a meeting inside a police department conference room, and Huff sat next to me while I proffered the forced apology to Hinkley — for asking questions. Huff, too, was contrite, assuring the police chief that it wouldn’t happen again, because she’d keep a better eye on me.

This wasn’t exactly a rude awakening. I’d spent the previous three years watching the university administration, led by President Jerry Falwell Jr. (who took a very micromanaging interest), meddle in our coverage, revise controversial op-eds and protect its image by stripping damning facts from our stories. Still, I stuck around. I thought that if I wrote with discretion and kept my head down, I could one day win enough trust from the university to protect the integrity of our journalism. I even dreamed we could eventually persuade the administration to let the Champion go independent from its supervision. I was naive.

Instead, when my team took over that fall of 2017, we encountered an “oversight” system — read: a censorship regime — that required us to send every story to Falwell’s assistant for review. Any administrator or professor who appeared in an article had editing authority over any part of the article; they added and deleted whatever they wanted. Falwell called our newsroom on multiple occasions to direct our coverage personally, as he had a year earlier when, weeks before the 2016 election, he read a draft of my column defending mainstream news outlets and ordered me to say whom I planned to vote for. I refused on ethical grounds, so Falwell told me to insert “The author refused to reveal which candidate he is supporting for president” at the bottom of the column. I complied. (Huff and the police department declined to comment on the contents of this essay. Falwell and the university did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Eventually I quit, and the School of Communication decided not to replace me, turning the paper into a faculty-run, student-written organ and seizing complete control of its content. Student journalists must now sign a nondisclosure agreement that forbids them from talking publicly about “editorial or managerial direction, oversight decisions or information designated as privileged or confidential.” The form also states that the students understand they are “privileged” to receive “thoughts, opinions, and other statements” from university administrators.

What my team and I experienced at the Champion was not an isolated overreaction to embarrassing revelations. It was one example of an infrastructure of thought-control that Falwell and his lieutenants have introduced into every aspect of Liberty University life. Faculty, staff and students on the Lynchburg, Va., campus have learned that it’s a sin to challenge the sacrosanct status of the school or its leader, which mete out punishments for dissenting opinions (from stripping people of their positions to banning them from campus). This “culture of fear,” as it was described by several of the dozen Liberty denizens who talked to me for this story — most of them anonymously to protect their jobs or their standing — worsened during my four years on campus because of the 2016 presidential election.

By 2016, Liberty’s efforts to limit free expression were already well-established. (“The big victory was finding a way to tame the faculty,” Falwell told the New York Times last year for a story about privileging Liberty’s financial growth over its academics.) But the school’s methods became even more aggressive after Falwell endorsed Donald Trump early that year, according to multiple current and former faculty members. “The closer you get to the president’s office,” says former history professor Brian Melton, discussing a chilling effect at the school, “the worse it becomes.” Falwell’s staff now operates masterfully to squash challenges to his views and his rise in national political influence.

The dissent that did exist — like off-message campus speakers, insufficiently sycophantic board members, student activists and our newspaper staff — was ruthlessly neutralized. Liberty, founded on principles of fundamental Christianity, is now a place that has zero tolerance for new questions and ideas. Those who harbor them must remain silent, or leave.

Falwell, 57, possesses a certain Orwellian gift for painting Liberty as a bastion of tolerance where alternate viewpoints are not just permitted but encouraged. In March, he attended the signing of Trump’s executive order on college free speech and later claimed on “PBS NewsHour” that Liberty was inclusive of all ideas because it had invited Jimmy Carter to deliver its 2018 commencement address and Bernie Sanders to speak in 2015 at the assembly that students are required to attend twice a week. After Falwell learned last month that I was writing this essay, he posted a column on Liberty’s site disputing “sensational stories . . . that we do not allow opposing views.” He wrote, “If there’s one thing I’m certain of, it’s that there will be a strong and critical response to this article by a few former students and a handful of national media determined to paint Liberty in a completely different light on these issues.”

His Twitter account is a much better reflection of his approach to dissent. Falwell’s profile announces that “Haters will be blocked,” and several students who have disagreed or argued with him on Twitter have met this fate. Falwell outright lied on the platform to Sojourners Web editor Sandi Villarreal — who is now my colleague — when he said he’d removed a Champion op-ed criticizing Trump’s “locker room talk” defense because there was simply not enough room on the page. (The piece was already laid out on the page when he pulled it.) In fact, much of Falwell’s message control has to do with safeguarding Trump.

Mark DeMoss was something like Liberty royalty. His late father, Arthur S. DeMoss, gave $20 million to build DeMoss Hall, the school’s main academic building. Mark was also an alumnus, a former chief of staff to university founder Jerry Falwell Sr. and eventually a public relations executive who counted Liberty among his clients. He won a seat on the school’s board of trustees in 1991 after serving as Liberty’s spokesman and became the board’s executive committee chairman in 2008.

In January 2016, days before Trump was scheduled to speak at Liberty, Falwell emailed DeMoss asking whether he should endorse Trump for president. DeMoss says he recommended against endorsing anyone, and Falwell thanked him for the “great advice.” Falwell, at the speech, held back his imprimatur. But a week later, he anointed the billionaire with his support. DeMoss was horrified. “The bullying tactics of personal insult have no defense — and certainly not for anyone who claims to be a follower of Christ,” he told The Washington Post at the time. Falwell seemed to take the rebuke in stride, saying he was “disappointed” in DeMoss but understood “that all the administrators and faculty have their own personal political views.”

Within a few months, though, DeMoss would be gone. The night before a Liberty board meeting that April, the executive committee, including Falwell, convened without DeMoss to vote on a motion to oust him from his role as chairman. DeMoss says that his criticism of the endorsement was the cause. (Before the meeting, Falwell called him a pawn of rival campaigns.) DeMoss resigned as a trustee days later, on April 25, 2016, citing “a lack of trust.”

A week after that, Liberty changed the sign on DeMoss Hall to “Arthur S. DeMoss Hall,” making clear that the structure honored the father and not the wayward son. The message to faculty and students was clear: If you challenge Falwell, you will be not only removed but erased.

The culture of Liberty is governed by lists of principles. According to the Faculty Handbook, for instance, professors are expected to “promote . . . free market processes” and “affirm . . . that the Bible is inerrant in the originals and authoritative in all matters.” One cause of perpetual insecurity at Liberty is the school’s militant refusal to award tenure to any faculty member (outside the law school, which must offer it for accreditation). Instructors are instead hired on year-to-year contracts; during the spring semester, they find out whether they will be coming back the next fall.

The result is constant, erratic faculty turnover. One recently fired teacher describes the spring as a cycle of stressed-out, fearful professors wandering into each other’s offices to ask if they had their contracts renewed yet. “If you’re a conservative Christian in the academic world, the chances of you getting a job are nil in many areas,” says Melton, who worked at Liberty as an associate professor for 15 years before resigning because of what he described as the school’s surveillance and fear tactics. “The administration knows that, and . . . they wield that very effectively, keeping people quiet.”

Late-notice faculty removals have also become more commonplace, according to Melton, stemming in part from Falwell’s stated desire to tame the teaching corps. “He considers the faculty to be disposable beasts of burden,” Melton says. Last summer, 14 professors at Liberty’s School of Education were suddenly told that their contracts would not be renewed as part of what former Liberty spokesman Len Stevens called a “reorganization.” This June, a dozen faculty members at Liberty’s School of Divinity were notified that their contracts would not be renewed. By that late in the year, it is too late to find another job in higher education for the fall.

For former faculty members, Liberty’s culture of fear can live on. The school often requires terminated professors to sign a nondisclosure agreement if they want their severance packages, several told me — a practice that is extremely uncommon in higher education, according to Robert Bezemek, a California lawyer who represents labor unions at universities. (As Melton puts it, “They force this NDA on you by leveraging the ability to feed your family against you.”) Even former teachers who hadn’t signed NDAs told me they feared that talking to me on the record would somehow get them blacklisted from jobs elsewhere or imperil their friends who still work at Liberty. One thought my request to speak with him was a trap, calling my previous connection with the school “fishy.” When I contacted another for an interview, she warned me, “The university is on to you.” I confess I harbor a certain paranoia, too, from years of being watched at the Champion. Melton and several other current and former members of the faculty told me that they believe the administration surveils everything they do on Liberty’s server, tracking when instructors complete a task late and searching for evidence of “disloyalty” to Liberty or Falwell, as a former professor put it. Another onetime instructor declined to use his university-issued laptop because he thought Liberty had equipped it with spyware.

One cause for alarm came just before Trump’s inauguration, when then-Provost Ronald Hawkins ordered all campus faculty members to fill out an anonymous survey that asked respondents to rate how politically and socially liberal they were on a scale of 1 to 5. “We are interested in how we compare with other institutions on political and social views,” Hawkins’s office said in a follow-up email to faculty members. But, according to a former professor who talked with others in her department, many initially refused to take the survey out of fear that if a department had too many left-leaning professors, the administration might target it for more oversight or even firings. There is no evidence of Liberty firing a faculty member explicitly for his or her political beliefs, but everyone I spoke to believed that the school could easily manufacture some other pretense. “There is zero trust between the administration and faculty,” Melton says. FIRE, a nonprofit that fights for free speech on campus, put Liberty on its 2019 list of the 10 worst colleges for freedom of speech.

Things aren’t much better for the 15,000 students on campus. In 2009, Liberty withdrew funding and recognition for its College Democrats chapter because, as Mark Hine, the senior vice president of student affairs, put it, the national party defends abortion, opposed the Defense of Marriage Act, supported “the ‘LGBT’ agenda, hate crimes, which include sexual orientation and gender identity, socialism, etc.” A.J. Strom, who graduated in May, tells me that several students wanted to revive the College Democrats but no faculty members were willing to advise them, without which Liberty will not recognize a student club. “They said they would love to sign on but that if Jerry saw their name on the club application, they would be fired,” Strom says.

Student leaders have consistently helped administrators enforce the culture. After the Charlottesville rally in August 2017, members of Liberty’s Student Government Association drafted a statement expressing solidarity with Heather Heyer, the protester murdered by a neo-Nazi, and all people demonstrating against white nationalism. Then-SGA President Caleb Johnson refused to release the statement and send it to university administrators for fear of what Falwell might think. (Johnson said in an email this past week that the author was “a self-described ‘Never-Trumper’ ” and that “we would not allow the platform of Liberty Student Government to be improperly used by a political activist with obvious ulterior motives.”) “There’s 100 percent an atmosphere of fear at Liberty,” says Caleb Fitzpatrick, who was then the student government’s speaker of the House and helped draft the statement. “There was a need to avoid being seen as a liberal or progressive, or even being different.”

In September 2018, nearly a year into the #MeToo movement, Liberty invited conservative provocateur Candace Owens to speak at an assembly. A few days before her visit, Owens tweeted that the women accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault were “making it up.” In response, Addyson Garner, then president of a libertarian club on campus, organized a rally to support victims of sexual assault, called #LUforMeToo, which would occur right after the Owens speech. The day before, Jacob Page, then the student body president, summoned her to his office, where he and Vice President Derek Rockey pressured her to cancel the event, Garner told me in May. She left the office in tears, but she and her fellow organizers decided to protest anyway. About 25 students attended, a rare show of defiance on a campus that discourages political dissent. (In an email this past week, Rockey said he thought students should attend a public dialogue on these topics rather than stage a protest. Page said he and Rockey “support bringing awareness to victims of sexual assault” but “felt it was unproductive to engage in partisan protests.”)

Guests at the school who deviate from the prescribed philosophy can be targeted, too. In October 2017, the anti-Trump pastor and writer Jonathan Martin arrived at the invitation of the Christian musical duo Johnnyswim, who were performing on campus that night; Martin also announced on Twitter that he would lead a prayer meeting with students the next morning. Falwell took it as an unauthorized protest, and the LUPD sent three armed officers to remove Martin from campus, telling him he’d be arrested if he returned. Martin tweeted that it was “evidently in response to my strong criticism of @JerryFallwellJr’s alignment not only with the darkest contours of Trumpism, but expressly with Steve Bannon & the alt-right he represents.” Falwell told the Champion that Martin’s forcible removal was “a matter of safety.”

A similar episode unfolded in 2015 when Jonathan Merritt, a Liberty alumnus and Christian writer, was disinvited to speak on campus after authoring an article critical of Hobby Lobby, the company permitted by the Supreme Court in 2014 to deny its employees contraceptive health-care coverage. The Green family, which owns Hobby Lobby, is close with Falwell. “You don’t seem to remember who your friends are,” Merritt remembers Falwell saying over the phone.

One afternoon in April 2016, when I was still a cub reporter during my sophomore year, I received a one-sentence email from Deborah Huff, our adviser: “need to talk to you about SG,” the subject line read. I should call her that night. She copied the editor in chief, a senior. I was clearly in trouble.

“SG” stood for Scott Garrett, a traditionalist conservative who represents Lynchburg in the state legislature. According to records I had found through the Virginia Public Access Project, he owned millions of dollars in stock, some from companies that lobby lawmakers in Richmond. A few days earlier, I interviewed him for the Champion about possible conflicts of interest stemming from his assets.

After dinner, I called Huff. She sounded annoyed. When I described my reporting to her, she told me the Champion would not run my story, because Garrett was afraid that the article would hurt his reputation. The message was clear: I had no business heckling Liberty’s friends and allies. (“I don’t remember the incident in question,” Garrett emailed me this week when I asked him for a comment. “And I don’t understand why I would say the article would hurt my reputation because there was no conflict of interest.”)

Out of fear that arguing with her would end my career at the paper — she selected which students would advance to editorships — I apologized for looking into Garrett’s finances and assured her that this sort of thing wouldn’t happen again. I understood that her job, and by extension mine, was to protect our righteous, evangelical university. Before becoming a Liberty teacher and then supervisor of the Champion, Huff worked for the Fundamentalist Journal, a now-defunct Falwell-owned periodical. I didn’t see defending the faith as the main purpose of journalism, and I wasn’t out to safeguard Liberty. But in the face of a mentor I trusted, I believed I must have been in the wrong.

Looking back on the emails from that episode three years later, I’m embarrassed by my naivete — and my willingness to abandon a scoop with obvious journalistic merit. The scales began to fall from my eyes as, over the next 18 months, I saw how in every issue of the Champion the administration strategically manipulated or erased stories. Huff discouraged us from following leads that might disrupt the image of Liberty as a prestigious, respectable evangelical institution. In pitch meetings, she made it clear that the Champion would not cover Liberty scandals, even those that appeared in mainstream news outlets (such as the Falwells’ secret business relationships and the wave of Liberty alumni who sent back their diplomas after Falwell defended Trump’s comment that there “very fine people” on both sides of the white nationalist Charlottesville rally).

By the time I became the Champion’s editor, the censorship I hoped to stop was already shameless. In February 2017, I wrote an article on a higher-education task force that Trump had asked Falwell to lead. Falwell emailed me his personal edits, removing every quote from an expert concerning possible conflicts of interest that Falwell created by accepting the position (in the end, the task force was never formed). Months later, Huff ordered that my story about Martin’s expulsion from campus include lines about how Liberty is inclusive of different political beliefs, in the face of obvious counterevidence. An administrator spiked a news report about an on-campus swing dancing club that was temporarily banned. When film students drafted a petition in early 2018 objecting to “The Trump Prophecy” — a hagiographic tale about a firefighter who said he had prophesized Trump’s election, which Liberty students were compelled to produce in order to receive their degrees — faculty at the film school crafted our coverage into a fluffy bit of PR highlighting students who looked forward to working on set. Champion reporter Jack Panyard was so disgusted, he removed his byline from the piece. Then there was sports editor Joel Schmieg’s column about “locker room talk” after the “Access Hollywood” video came out; Falwell blocked it from publication.

This interference frequently caused shouting matches with, and passive aggressive emails from, administrators. “Too bad the editor and chief of The Champion penned this editorial for the homecoming edition without any effort to learn all that is being done at Liberty to prevent and react appropriately to sexual assault,” Liberty General Counsel David Corry wrote to Falwell and Huff about my column on campus sexual assault. Instead of sticking up for the journalists she supervised, Huff emailed me to complain that I did not “make sure Liberty was separated from the conversation or address what Liberty does that is different than other schools.” Later that day, the piece was removed from the website without my consent. (In his preemptive statement last month, Falwell seemed to address these episodes. “In the past few years, some students screamed ‘censorship’ when they didn’t get their every word published in our campus newspaper,” he wrote. “But that standard isn’t even attained within the newsroom of commercial newspapers.”)

In the wake of these run-ins, members of our staff often gathered in my office to daydream about taking the paper independent or grouse about Huff, whom we felt was gaslighting us. What kind of newspaper adviser would denounce our attempts to keep Liberty accountable and make us repeatedly apologize to administrators for trying? By this point, it was clear that the principles of investigative journalism I was learning in class were verboten when it came to Liberty itself. The Champion could never be an avatar of press freedom or truth-telling.

I grew up in a politically conservative household and was active in my denomination; my values changed at Liberty as I embraced a more inclusive and open vision of the church. My views of Liberty, and of the values I saw Falwell profess on a daily basis, changed as well. I considered transferring schools or resigning from the paper. The weekly fight for the right to publish was exhausting. Still, I decided to stay because I saw that, on the occasions we won — when we either persuaded administrators to leave an article alone or worked around their objections — we sparked dialogue among students on Twitter and in classrooms that challenged Liberty’s status quo. But ultimately, our fraught relationship with our overlords was untenable, and something had to give.

The end finally came for the Champion when a left-leaning faith group, the Red Letter Christians, organized a “Lynchburg Revival” in April 2018 to protest Falwell’s support of Trump and what the group called “toxic evangelicalism.” Two days beforehand, Liberty’s police department notified RLC leader Shane Claiborne that he would be arrested if he set foot on campus. The Champion had already decided to cover the event, but the stakes were higher now. Huff told us it would be too controversial for print, but the other editors and I didn’t think we could ignore it.

The day before the gathering, Falwell sent an email to Erin Covey, our assistant news editor: “Let’s not run any articles about the event. That’s all these folks are here for — publicity. Best to ignore them.” When we explained our dilemma to RLC organizers, they tipped off a reporter at the Religion News Service, which ran a piece detailing Falwell’s censorship. Covey gave on-the-record quotes. Panyard, who was set to succeed me as editor in chief in a few weeks, briefed the reporter on background, as did I. (Vox also picked up the story and amplified it, and I imagine it galled Falwell to be depicted as an insecure tyrant in a liberal publication.)

The school’s response was swift. Falwell convened a tele-meeting with Bruce Kirk, who was then dean of the School of Communication, and our entire staff. They reprimanded us for talking to the press, and Falwell justified his censorship by arguing that the Red Letter Christians were “not keeping with the values of the university.” Then he spoke candidly for the first time about, as he saw it, the virtues of censoring us. “That’s what you kids are going to run into when you get into the real world and start working for for-profit newspapers. That’s what they’re going to expect of you, and I want you to learn that while you’re here.” Kirk, who was sitting with us for the meeting, chimed in, agreeing with Falwell’s depiction of the “real world” of journalism. Being censored by a higher-up in the media industry is “just a part of life,” he said. (Before he began at Liberty, he worked for a local news station operated by Sinclair Broadcasting.)

After the meeting, I felt sick. I hadn’t said a word while Falwell flayed us for trying to practice basic journalism and act with integrity. I went into my office, closed the door and waited until most of the staff members left the newsroom. Then I sat down at my desk and wept.

A week and a half later, Kirk called Panyard and Covey into his office and told them they were being let go as part of a “reorganization.” Nobody else was affected; they’d been fired. It was the most aggressive and direct action the administration had ever taken to silence the Champion. I was not fired — I was a lame duck anyway — but I resigned and refused to take part in the production of the last edition of the year. I cleaned out my office that same day. Soon after, I learned I would be the last student editor in chief of the Champion and that from now on the paper would be run directly by the school. (Kirk did not respond to multiple requests to comment for this story.)

Even at Liberty, there are still those who publicly reject Falwell’s diktats. A petition supporting Mark DeMoss won more than 70 student signatures when Falwell ousted him in 2016. During the presidential election, free speech lived a little when Liberty United Against Trump, a student group, scored national media attention for its stance that the school did not uniformly approve of Falwell’s endorsement. It said it accumulated more than 2,000 student signatures for its statement.

Panyard, the deposed editor, launched a new independent newspaper, the Lynchburg Torch, with the help of other refugees from the campus weekly. In the past year, it has published stories that the Champion’s overseers would have blocked, such as a report on LGBTQ students who oppose Liberty’s position on same-sex relationships. Addyson Garner put on another rally this year to support queer Liberty students after transphobic comments from Falwell and his wife, Becki. (“We’re raising her as a girl,” Becki Falwell said of their granddaughter Reagan, as her husband looked on. “We’re not letting her have a choice.”) Dozens of students participated, according to Garner and posts on social media. It was the first time I had ever seen the rainbow pride flag flown openly on Liberty’s campus. The school is changing.

But in significant ways, it is not more tolerant, and it certainly does not celebrate “the open exchange of competing ideas” that Falwell described in his column. In a discussion with the incoming Champion staffers after I left, Kirk said, “Your job is to keep the LU reputation and the image as it is.” The students who recall a more open time at Liberty, before Trump, have now graduated. All those who remain chose to go to Falwell’s school after he endorsed Trump, forming a much more compliant student body that generally accepts and even supports Falwell’s crackdown culture.

I graduated in 2018. Since then, I’ve tried to put Liberty — and the stress and self-doubt that officials there saddled me with — behind me. But I still fume when Falwell spews dumbfounding conspiracies online or retweets a bigoted rant from Trump, and I still become uneasy when I see my diploma, which is sitting in a cluttered drawer at my parents’ house. I made amazing friends and memories on campus, but I’m realizing the extent to which I internalized the fear tactics; I still sometimes self-censor my thoughts and writing. How can a college education stifle your freedom of thought? When people ask me if I regret going to Liberty, as many do, I usually pause. I don’t know.

[char27martin]

How to Work with an Editorial Calendar

Nearly all the writers I know are working on multiple projects. Maybe they aren’t drafting three novels at the same time, but they might be writing articles or blog posts, submitting short stories, or drafting one novel while editing another. And, most authors today, whether traditionally or indie published, are responsible for a significant amount of their own publicity, marketing, and scheduling. Time management can feel daunting and sometimes overwhelming, especially for creative types!

This guest post is by Tabitha Lord. Lord lives in Rhode Island, a few towns away from where she grew up. She is married, has four great kids, two spoiled cats, and a lovable black lab. She holds a degree in Classics from College of the Holy Cross and taught Latin for years at the Meadowbrook Waldorf School. She also worked in the admissions office there before turning her attention to full-time writing. You can visit her blog at tabithalordauthor.com where she hosts guest bloggers, and discusses some favorite topics including parenting and her writing journey. She released her first novel, Horizon, in December 2015. It won the Grand Prize for the Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards in 2016.

My pre-writing career as the admissions director and Latin teacher at a private school helped to prepare me for the business side of the writer’s life. My days were filled with planning events, communicating with families, paperwork, writing ad copy, serving on multiple committees from HR to development, and teaching middle school Latin. Multitasking and switching “hats” from teacher to administrator to colleague became second nature, but my varied responsibilities definitely required a high level of organization, and meticulous attention to my calendar. Many techniques from that career are useful now as I try to structure my time in this more creative, yet equally demanding, field.

Here are a few tips on how I work with my calendar in order to meet deadlines, manage multiple projects, and find the space I need to imagine and create.

Start with broad strokes: Define your goals and major deadlines, and then back into the details.

I begin with a yearly overview. Looking at 2016 as an example, I had to complete the draft of a novel if I wanted to release it by summer 2017, I’d committed to working with a non-profit organization on an extensive series of human-interest stories, I had continuous submissions due for BCB (an online book review and interview site), and I was in the process of creating a new web-based business with a friend. There were also several conferences and conventions I wanted to attend. Once the major deadlines for all my projects were in place and travel dates blocked off, I was able to see which things needed the most attention, and when.

I have a habit of sitting down each Sunday to plan. During that time, I scan four weeks ahead and add more detail to my calendar. A month ahead of time, I know which blog posts are due and what interviews I have scheduled, and I can clearly see any approaching deadlines. I’m then able to refine my tasks and priorities even more for the short term.

On Sundays, I also create a detailed “to-do” list for each day of the coming week. I’ll mark off chunks of time for particular projects, and look at the overall balance of the week to make sure I’ve scheduled enough time for the most urgent things.

Structure your work life to honor your personal rhythms.

Step one is recognizing you have a rhythm. A friend of mine, who works a full-time job in a different field, writes during his train commute to and from work. He plugs in ear buds and hits an impressive daily word count. Another friend works late into the evening, when the house is quiet and everyone else is asleep.

Writing, in one capacity or another, is my full-time job now, and I’m learning a great deal about rhythm. For example, I’m productive with task-oriented items like scheduling social media in the morning, but I couldn’t solve a plot tangle before noon to save my life. Likewise, I have to keep things simple on Fridays because I’m pretty worn out, but I can often get some solid creative writing in over the weekend.

When I’m drafting a novel, I need several uninterrupted hours for my creativity to flow and to hit my daily word count. It’s tricky for me to work one hour without interruption, never mind four, but I know this is what I need to do. Draft weeks wind up with a unique rhythm, and I’m often hiding at Starbucks to make it work!

I’m also noticing a rhythm to the year. Summers are busy with cons and conferences, so I can’t plan to draft a novel, but I can write blog posts and short stories. In the fall, when everyone is back to school and out of the house, I’m ready to find those uninterrupted hours and renew my affection for chai lattes.

There’s no right way to schedule your time, only the way that works best for you. When I respect my natural rhythms, and organize my work life around them, I find I’m much more productive, and certainly much happier.

Leave space for the unexpected. Equally as important, know when to say no.

Your calendar will help you do this! When deciding to take on a new project, I think about two things. First, does the project resonate? Even if I’m excited and want to say yes immediately, I always sleep on it. Either my creative energy and enthusiasm will grow or it will dissipate. If I’m still interested, I have to assess the time commitment and consult my oracle … um … calendar.

In general, I’m tempted to say yes to everything, but one glance at my calendar, with my current commitments highlighted, sets me straight. Either there is time or there isn’t. And if there isn’t, and I still want to do it, I have to consciously reorganize my priorities and be honest with myself about what that means.

Use the tools available to you to increase efficiency.

Because I’m actively involved in the business of my career, it can be difficult to carve enough time and space for creativity. It becomes urgent to streamline the task-oriented side of my work. Using tools like Hootsuite or CoSchedule to manage social media and content is almost essential. There’s a learning curve, of course, but in the end, the time saved is worth the investment.

I’ve also learned to use Quickbooks for my accounting. I schedule time every month to review my records and financial transactions, and once per quarter, I make an appointment with my accountant. We spend a few hours reconciling the books and assuring that everything is in order.

Of course, I’d rather be thinking about how to extricate my main character from a deadly inter-planetary battle, but I have to attend to these things. If I plan them into my calendar rather than letting them sneak up on me or have them unintentionally hijack my day, I feel more in control of my time.

Schedule downtime and time for self-care. Put this in the calendar.

In my daily planner I make sure to block off time for the gym or a yoga class everyday.  I hike one morning every week with a group of friends, I belong to two book clubs, and I get together with a group of neighborhood moms once a month for dinner. All told, this works out to about two hours per day to myself, and one night a week out for fun. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not that much time.

When deadlines loom or the “to-do” list is jam-packed, it might seem practical to bump one of these things. But, I find when I do this I’m actually less productive. I need time to clear my head, time to breath some fresh air, time to laugh with my friends, and time to let go of whatever I’m working on and get some perspective.

My downtime doesn’t come last in the list of priorities, penciled in only after all the “work” things, rather it holds equal importance. It has to. Much of the writer’s life is solitary. We’re alone in our own minds for a good bit of the day. This isn’t necessarily good for my mental health, so I have to be mindful to step away, seek out the company of others, and take care of myself.

Maintaining control over my time is the single most important factor impacting my productivity. When something unexpected happens—I’m sick, my kids are sick, my computer dies—I do what I have to do to get through, and as soon as possible, I sit down to re-work my calendar. My organizational habits may seem a bit obsessive, but I have more freedom to work once the infrastructure is in place. If I’m proactive as opposed to reactive with regard to managing my time, I feel less stressed, more productive, and in general, satisfied with my work-life balance.

The biggest literary agent database anywhere is the Guide to Literary Agents. Pick up the most recent updated edition online at a discount.

If you’re an agent looking to update your information or an author interested in contributing to the GLA blog or the next edition of the book, contact Writer’s Digest Books Managing Editor Cris Freese at cris.freese@fwmedia.com.

    The post How to Work with an Editorial Calendar appeared first on WritersDigest.com.

from Writing Editor Blogs – WritersDigest.com http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/guide-to-literary-agents/work-editorial-calendar

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Handbook for Capstone Project Proposal Format

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It is a fact that many college or university students don’t pay proper attention to the guides and format when writing a capstone paper. This project is basically a way to check the progress and intelligence level of the students. Whatever they’ve studied in college or university is supposed to be discussed. The capstone is mostly considered as best way to examine the learning capability for seeking more knowledge. For writing the best capstones, more than 50% students belong to all the colleges of developed nations prefer following the format. You can’t try to make any personal amendments in the capstone’s format. The team of experts or professional panel pay full concentration on each step and the way of following format as well.

Capstone Project Proposal Format: Things to Take into Account

The ideal capstone project is created when you start it in an engaging way. For example, the title page play an important role to leave the first impression (negative or positive). Therefore, it must all the important elements. The appropriate title page is comprised of Project Title, Student Name, Class, Name of Teacher and the date of submission. The next important step is to write an abstract that covers all the major points required to be discussed in the project. The abstract takes a lot of time as this is about all of the titles and things to be added in the project. The editing of title page is the highly significant task. All of the titles must be on the page’s center.

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Capstone Project Format: Do’s and Don’ts in Formatting

You can never imagine of submitting the project without an excellent formatting. It can have a major impact on the rejection of your whole draft (which really sounds heartbroken). There are few tips that can help you in doing up to the mark editing of the capstone project report. Have a look at these steps and share with your fellows as well.

Margins and spacing

The spacing between the margins should be double. Like any research journal, you are required to make each word more readable and visible by choosing double spacing between margins.

Titles must always be in the center

The center alignment of main titles is included in the standard format of the capstone projects. This is one of the major mistakes students do in creating capstones. Make sure that main titles must be on center while subtitles should have right alignment.

Table of contents

The table of content’s section of capstone projects is not so complex. All you need to do is to use numbering for enlisting the main titles. Enlist the subtitles by using simple bullets. You can divide the table of content into different phases. For example, the phases may include Project Outline, Development Methodology, Requirements, Design, Development, Testing Phase, Schedule and References.

References

The reference section in capstones varies according to the type of projects. Majority of the students rely on adding references of different sources to make the research more valuable. The sources can be encyclopedias, books, publications, newspapers, periodicals, magazines and journals. The dissertations and theses are also suggested sources of it.

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Sample Capstone Paper APA Format

The capstone papers are written in the standard style APA format like many other projects. This is the professional style to make this project more appealing for grading. Make sure that you follow all important guidelines for implementing the APA style format into your project. In this type of sample capstone paper APA format, you have to add the reference of each page by mentioning it on the center bottom of a page. The author-date citation method is followed when using APA format. The full reference must appear in the list of reference along with author’s last name and year of publication.

Capstone Proposal Format: Important Quotes Shared by Experts

According to Claire Danes, “I discovered Orson Welles in college; my Freshman English professor screened ‘Citizen Kane’ for us, and I wound up writing a 20-page term paper on it”.

Best capstones are created in result of a collaborative effort or teamwork. Therefore, henry ford said it in an excellent way. He quoted, “Working together is success”.

Another best suggestion by John Rogers for creating good capstone project is “You can’t think yourself out of a writing block; you have to write yourself out of a thinking block”.

Once you pay attention to these three quotes, you will find a lot of suggestions and useful tips for creating excellent capstones.

Become Wiser in Choosing a Writing Service

Capstones are exceptional and you can’t rely on a simple content or academic writer for creating it. A writer must have prior ample experience of writing the capstones. Like our team, the professional authors must have adequate knowledge about writing capstones. You don’t need to search more options for hiring the best services. We do offer excellent capstone writing services at affordable price. Always remember that your future is on the stake and you can’t take any risks in this situation. Therefore, you need to make wiser decisions by choosing the trusted and economical option.

Final Verdict

The college or university capstone projects mostly take five to six months to be completed in the appropriate manner. The best way is to avoid doing it all by yourself and rely on the credible team of professionals. There is nothing wrong in it. If you’ve proper understanding of the project, you can hire an expert for making it simpler or help you choose nursing or criminal justice capstone project ideas. However, if you want to create the capstone project by yourself, this will require at least two months of in-depth study.

Capstone project proposal format is the first step to create an engaging and feasible report. Here are some ways and recommendations of it!