Two Years Deep

The Newsletter is 2

Hi there,

About two years ago I started writing this newsletter on a whim and I decided that I was going to publish it twice a week. You can read my very first post here. What I didn’t know going into this endeavor is how long I would continue to do it and what I really wanted to accomplish.

I don’t have any revelations as to what I want to accomplish aside from I want to write about the complexity and the issues around being a polymer chemist and the current state of industrial polymer chemistry. I want to try and tell the story of the origins of the stuff that fills our lives. I would like to continue to try and talk to start-up founders about their missions and why their company will succeed in this maddening space. Telling people that there is a problem in how they live their lives is easy, but trying to write and understand the solution is more difficult.

When I started writing two years ago I felt like there was an unlimited amount of things that I could write about and I felt that there was an enormous amount that I needed to get out into the world. Two years into that endeavor I find that my own thoughts have settled down and what I could once summon forth in a few hours takes much longer to think about. What I’ve been writing lately has not been as 🔥 as would have liked either, but maybe I’m being too hard on myself.

If anything these last two years have shown me how difficult it can be to be a writer in this space. I have even more respect for the business editorial team at C&EN than I did before as well as other publications. I think I too have grown a bit as a writer and hopefully as a thinker.

One unexpected thing from writing consistently over the last two years has been that this place has been a fantastic networking tool for me. I’ve been able to virtually meet so many different people either through direct emails, virtual meetings, LinkedIn messaging, or via Twitter. That alone has made me realize the value of keeping this going for as long as I can possibly can and this brings me to the crux of the story.

The pace that I unwittingly set for myself two years ago was ambitious. If I was a full time writer, then it seems doable (maybe). I also took on a new job that has been more challenging that I had initially expected, but in a good way (I hope/think). There are not enough hours in the day or a magical amount of coffee that will sustain this endeavor.

My ultimate hope would be to secure a book deal to write something more in depth about the early career scientist experience. If there are any agents or publishers out there in the audience please reach out or if you know anyone in that space please forward this to them. I’ve just about doubled the audience here from last year going from 633 to 1310 people. After two years of consistently writing I was hoping for a bit of a bigger audience, but I think it would be foolish to keep things going as they are and expect something different this time next year.

I’m going to start publishing once a week and seem how that works for us. My hypothesis is that I’ll be happier with what I’m writing and you will get less emails. Now it’s time to test.

Tony