Writing Camp (‘Finishers Edition’) Starts on Monday!
So let’s get prepared!
Gooooooooood morning, afternoon, or evening, wherever you happen to be! I have two announcements:
ANNOUNCEMENT #1: To celebrate Page by Page exceeding 500 subscribers, I’m offering a 40% discount on annual subscriptions until 15 May. That means that, for the next few weeks, an annual PBP subscription costs only $30!!
If you’re a free subscriber who’d like access to everything in the PBP archive (plus all paid subscriber posts), or if you’re someone who’s been waiting for an even more affordable way to support my work, this is your chance!
If you’re already a paid subscriber, then I have a special thank-you offer for you: between now and 15 May, you can DM me to set up a 30-minute online meeting to discuss a project you’re working on. I’d love to hear about your work, so please do get in touch!
ANNOUNCEMENT #2: The second round of PBP Writing Camp starts this coming Monday! I’m thinking of this one as a ‘Finishers Edition’—the focus is going to be on finishing a specific project, a specific part of a project, or a specific stage of a project.
Starting on 22 April 2024, you’ll receive 5 days of prompts, guidance, and encouragement to help you meet your goal. I was inspired to launch Writing Camp when I participated in the November 2023 Essay Camp run by the marvelous
—if you haven’t subscribed to her Substack already, I encourage you to do so!To sign up for the PBP Writing Camp, make sure you’re a Page by Page subscriber, and then sign up for the ‘Writing Camp’ section in your account settings page, which you should be able to access here. [Update: you will find step-by-step instructions at the very end of this post.] If you don’t sign up for the ‘Writing Camp’ section, you should still be able to access the posts on the PBP site, but they won’t get sent directly to your inbox.
How you can prepare for Writing Camp
This edition of writing camp has a simple objective: to help you get into the mindset of a finisher. We all have projects that we’ve started but never finished. This week, we are going to practice the art of finishing. This doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily end up with the final version of whatever you’re working on, but it does mean that you will end up with a finished version of something.
To get into the mindset of a finisher, you need good preparation:
Set appropriate goals. This is the first step towards becoming a finisher. If you set outrageous, unrealistic goals for yourself, you set yourself up for failure! So to prepare for next week’s workshop, you need to ask yourself two questions. Firstly, what is a finishable goal you can set for this 5-day online workshop? This might be a small project you’re working on, or a small part of a bigger project, or a specific stage of a project, etc. Secondly, how much time can you realistically devote to writing this next week? Reflecting on these questions will put you in the best position to achieve your goal and get the most out of this Writing Camp.
Put it in your calendar. Once you’ve figured out how/when you’ll fit Writing Camp into your schedule, put it in your schedule. Trust me, this really helps to make it a proper commitment, one you’re less likely to skip!
Have a back-up plan. I get it: sometimes, life just happens! And when it does, the important thing is not to panic or give up. So before Writing Camp gets going, identify a few other days in the following weeks when you might come back to your project in order to meet your goal, or one day that you can devote to writing almost every week. Thinking all this through in advance will make it easier for you to come back to your writing practice if it gets interrupted without getting disheartened. If you miss a day of Writing Camp or have to postpone a lot of it, that’s fine! All Writing Camp posts will remain freely available on PBP for all time. You can always catch up later—just pencil it into your schedule.
I’m based in Switzerland, so will send out each prompt at 6am Swiss Time (i.e. CET). I’m someone who writes best when I write early, preferably without having even put on makeup or changed out of my pajamas. But you do you!
See you at Writing Camp!
[Step-by-step instructions for signing up:
FIRST: Log into Substack on the internet (*not* the app) and navigate over to Page by Page.
SECOND: Look in the top right corner of your screen and click on the three tiny lines indicating the dropdown menu. Scroll down and click on ‘Manage Subscription’.
THIRD: Once you reach the page to ‘Manage your subscription’, scroll down until you see the section for ‘Notifications’. Under that, you should see a button for ‘Writing Camp’ that can let you ‘Receive emails for new posts in Writing Camp’. Click it so that it is green. And that’s it!
From now on you should receive any new Writing Camp emails directly to your inbox. If you *don’t* receive them for some reason, fear not! You can access them anytime via the Page by Page menu, and I’ll make sure they remain freely available to everyone for all times.]
As ever, thanks for reading. This is a reader-supported publication, and the best way to support it is to become a paid subscriber (either at $5 per month or $50 per year, though I’m currently running a discount which means an annual subscription only costs $30 per year!).
If you’re really feeling generous, and you’d like access to everything above and regular feedback on your own writing whenever you need it, you can become a Founding Member ($150).
VB,
M