Hey Reader. It has been a while since I emailed you. I could pretend this was a carefully considered business decision. It wasn’t. Life got very full, several things needed my attention at once, and the emails slipped off the list. So I’m starting again with something useful. Have you ever read the same paragraph of an academic paper four times and still had absolutely no idea what it meant? The sentences look like English. All the right academic words are present. And yet meaning has failed...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Hey Reader. I'm going to be blunt today. Hope you're ready! Here’s something I’ve noticed after 20-plus years of supervising doctorates: most stuck students aren’t actually stuck where they think they are. They think it’s a writing problem, so they force themselves to write. They think it’s a structure problem, so the writing goes nowhere. They think they need to read more, so they read - but it’s a contribution problem, so the reading just adds to the pile. Different problem, different move....
4 months ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader. Tonight at 9pm UK time, the bonus laser session goes away. The Circle will still be here on Friday, but this extra won't be, and I want you to decide with the full picture in front of you. Here it is. Premium is $19 a month: the Completion Blueprint, live sessions, and a community of people who understand exactly where you are. VIP is $150 a month: all of that, plus 1:1 time with me every month and a dedicated Voxer day, with only eight places ever. Join either tier today, and you...
4 months ago • 1 min read
>> I'll be sending a few emails about this bonus offer this week. If you are certain you don't want to join the Circle right now, CLICK HERE and you won't hear any more about this offer, but I'll still send you my regular DocDates << Hey Reader. I could tell you what the Circle does, but the members say it better. Dawn put it like this: "I have not felt progress like this in months and I really feel as though I can do this!" Notice what shifted for her. Not the workload. The sense that the...
4 months ago • 1 min read
Happy Monday Reader! Something unexpected came up this weekend, and I'm going to be straight with you: I need to bring in some income quickly. Rather than invent a clever reason for a promotion, I'd rather tell you the truth and make you a genuinely good offer. So here it is. Until Thursday at 9pm (UK time), everyone who joins the Doctoral Success Circle gets a bonus 25-minute laser session with me. One to one, just you and your study, to pin down your immediate next steps and get you moving...
4 months ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader. Today's my birthday, so I'm marking it by launching something I've been building quietly: the Golden Thread Review. Here's what it is. You bring your thesis, work within my Golden Thread GPT to generate a written breakdown of where your thread runs, and where it's getting lost, and then you and I spend 25 minutes together talking it through properly. It's £47 for this launch period, and it's built for exactly the moment you're in if you can feel the ideas are there but can't yet...
4 months ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader. How are you doing this week? Really? Pre-S: A quick story for you today, then some links to help you (and me!). 🧭 I once arrived in a city I'd never visited and spent the first two hours going in circles. Not because the city was confusing. Because I hadn't looked at a map before I left the hotel. Something similar happens in thesis writing. You're in the middle of it. You've written chapters, revised sections, and gathered sources. But somewhere along the way, you've stopped...
6 months ago • 1 min read
Ok Reader. It was definitely a dark moment when I saw that price yesterday. We live in a rural area (like, broadband-doesn't-reach-us-here rural!), and I rely on my car. A weekly shop this week was nearly twice the price it was a couple of months ago. The world is on fire, and the cost is heavy for everyone, in our own ways. If you are affected by the nastiness right now, I'm sorry. I hate not being able to influence things - but all of this is definitely out of my circle of influence....
7 months ago • 2 min read
Hey Reader. A little story today. S. came to me six months before her submission deadline. She had written 325,000 words. For context, a doctoral thesis in the UK runs to around 80,000 to 100,000 words. S. had written more than three times that. The problem wasn't that she hadn't worked hard enough. The problem was that buried inside those 325,000 words was a thesis - and neither of us could see it yet. So that's where we started. We took everything she had written and sorted it into...
7 months ago • 1 min read