An/my evolving relationship with academic writing

It's been about five years since I defended my dissertation (oh my! How time does fly!), and I caught myself thinking about my evolving relationship with academic writing. While I've been somewhat active over the past few years, I also find that I'm a lot less interested in producing academic/journal writing as a genre of writing. And, when I want to engage in such an activity, 'going at it alone' when I don't have a guaranteed venue of publication (i.e., you write the article first and then submit to a journal for review), feels a lot less palatable as an activity during my leisure time. I neither need for professional purposes, nor do I have time during my regular work day for this kind of activity, so it's classified as leisure for me personally (is there an academic equivalent like athleisure, I wonder...🤔).

I make the distinction between writing for journals and writing chapters for books. Not that writing chapters for books is a guaranteed venue, once your proposal is accepted, but it feels like a lot less of a hassle to deal with, especially when - careerwise - I don't necessarily need the writing credit.

Prior to embarking on dissertation work, my writing was a mix of solo work and collaborative work.  Solo work was often about a topic I wanted to explore, but didn't have many local acqaintances that were geeky about similar topics.  This kind of esoteric stuff was also a good way to get started on publishing back in the day, just in case I wanted to pursue a faculty career later down the line.  When MOOCs came about, and I started meeting similarly geeky people, and collaborations meant that we could explore topics together, and - as part of this shared geekdom - get some interesting work out there. The early successes (as measured by citation counts) gave me a boost in the arm to continue (to some extent anyway) with this type of work throughout my doctoral student years, even though I feel like I was spreading myself way too thin.

I think much of the above is still true in post-dissertation land, but my framing has changed a bit, which I think has impacted how I view writing with the ultimate goal of some intellectual activity being some kind of publication.  The duration of my doctoral work mostly removed me out of those productive and enriching collaborations (the straight gut punch🥊).  COVID was tiring  - I feel productivity jumped to new levels during those years without a commensurate rise in rest, which made the academic side-hussle feel a pointless endeavor (the reverse punch🥊) - and LLMs just came around right after COVID with the commensurate panic, hype, and slop (finishing things with right hook to the jaw 🥊). 

I already felt that there was a lot of poor published work out there, and I feel like LLMs have made something that was joyful in the past (the reading of existing literature) into a slog through the mud. To be fair, even before LLMs, I read quite a few research articles where I just said/thought/annotated "this is stupid" or "this is junk."  This is very much true of the Emergency Remote Teaching literature that I read during COVID. However, the present situation feels like LLMs have oversaturated the field with poor literature, making a once fun activity more of a chore.  In addition to the unpleasant chore aspect of it, the saturated nature of the field also means that anything written needs to burst through that noise that exists, both in getting accepted for publication, and ultimately making it to an audience that will find it useful.  So, one of my open questions is: why still endeavor to publish? I don't know if I've found an answer for myself, let alone others. 

Back to writing, for a moment: I find that collaborative work these days tends to be more about my social experience rather than strictly about the subject matter, whereas solo work is solely about the subject matter.  I see solo work as getting engrossed in the subject, in similar ways when I was a doctoral candidate and I was neck deep in the community of inquiry framework, and other concepts I was exploring. Any publications from solo work are incidental, and to be honest, I lose interest in reworking something extensively after I'm done with my exploration if the reviewers want extensive edits.  I'm likely to dust off something I've written to submit to a journal with a CfP on a topic I've done work for, rather than kick off a new project without knowing where it will be published (or even if).

Conversely, the kind of collaborative writing is about the social elements of learning and exploring.  Each collaborative work is an opportunity to expand in different directions, learn new things, push others to think differently, and conversely get poked and proded a bit about your thinking. The artifact or deliverable from this type of exploration can be a published work; but again, I often lose motivation once the deliverable is done to keep up with it.  What keeps me going is a kind of (implied) social contract between co-authors to see this thing through to publication.

What's your relationship with academic writing?  Has it changed since 2020? What's your motivation for writing and publishing?