Quickest Rejection Ever

Scholarly journals are notorious for holding onto your submissions for way too long, keeping you in a sort of torturous limbo about whether or not you've got the "right stuff." (Sometimes I just need to throw in a little NKOTB to keep my spirits up). My most recent submission, however, was rejected at lightning speed: 8 days after I sent the manuscript off via e-mail, I received an e-mail back saying, "Thanks, but no no no thanks." In so many words. 

It could've been worse - they could've taken 2 or 3 or 4 or more months to let me know they'd rather pass. But it also could've been better, and not just b/c getting accepted (obviously!) would have been ideal. The comments that I received from the editor both seemed to miss the point of contributing new scholarship to the field and the topic of my article, which made yesterday not only disappointing but also totally frustrating and mildly infuriating. 

Let me illustrate with a produce example: 

I wrote my paper, we'll say, on the wilting of romaine lettuce. First, the editor of said journal responded that wilting is a "theme" only "fitfully" under discussion in the criticism about romaine lettuce. To which I would respond (were I able to respond), "Yes, and not even 'fitfully.' No one's talking about it, and it's useful. That's why I brought it up." The point of scholarly commentary, as I understand it, is to further the conversation about and understanding of the topic at hand by developing already existing avenues of discussion and introducing and exploring new ones. 

The other majorly dumb comment was that editor had hoped to read an in-depth discussion of why there are so few varieties of greens available in produce section. Um, yes, well, great - but that's not even remotely my topic! And, as Butcher so eloquently put it: "There are a ton of greens in the produce section." Indeed there are. (Iceberg, spring mix, field greens, raddichio, just to name a few.) 

He might as well have said he was hoping to read a piece on Sense and Sensibility rather than something about a contemporary American novel. 

Everyone's always talking about how helpful reviewer's comments can be in the writing process. But what about when they're not? All this did was tick me off. The only legitimate comments he made were that 1.  he doesn't think the topic is impt. enough to sustain article-length treatment - an opinion he's entitled to, but that I and the professor with whom I worked on the paper disagree (in fact, she keeps encouraging me to make the paper longer) and 2.  that I offer only a "pat" discussion of people's responses to wilted lettuce. 

The first I will have to simply ignore, and the second, well, I don't actually disagree with him. I had about 4 more pages of stuff on the topic, which my prof. said to cut - so I did. Who's right and who's wrong? Only time will tell: I'm going to take the advice a former professor gave me years ago and send the thing out again ASAP (though the places I'm looking at have slooooooow response times, and many of them require snail mail submission - boo, get into the 21st century!). 

The very first time I played this game, back in late 2008/early 2009, it took the journal I submitted to 3 months to tell me that they didn't even send my article to reviewers. It was like the hugest slap in the face, and I believe there were tears (and probably many). I was ready to chuck the thing in a drawer and forget about it. 

But my professor told me not to do it; he found a journal I could submit to via e-mail, making the process almost painless, and said to just send the thing out without making even one change. So I did it. And five days later, that journal wrote back - and they wanted my piece just as it was. Just goes to show: it's possible to get accepted even faster than you get rejected.

Old Good News

I'm doing just about everything I can to avoid working on my critical history for medieval lit., which includes writing a blog post that I meant to write in August and every month since. As an aside completely unrelated to the topic of this post, however, I would just like to note that 

a. critical histories are ridiculous; 
b. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing; 
c. regardless of a. and b., writing this is still a better option than writing a 20-30 page legitimate paper on medieval literature about which, after an entire semester of sitting through almost 3 hours of class a week, I still know nothing (beyond a few key concepts). 

Now that that's been handled, back to the good news. 

This summer, about 4/5 of the journal article I published at the end of '09 got reprinted in a book. I had no idea this was happening - no one contacted me in advance, which is surprising despite the fact that the journal publisher owns the rights to my article and can therefore do as it pleases. It just seems like good form to let authors know their work is going to appear elsewhere. 

In fact, that only reason I found out is b/c I have a vain habit (I can admit it's a bit ridiculous) of Googling my name and, lo and behold, the new book came up in my results. 

Look - that might be me
in there! 

I proceeded to contact the book's publisher to request a contributor's copy, and they kindly complied. So I'm in a book. And it's on my shelf.

The two coolest things about this experience are, first, that the general editor of the collection is only like one of the most famous critics in the world of English literature. Love him or hate him, you know who he is. I, for one, happen to love him. (Nevermind the fact that he probably had actually nothing to do with picking my piece.) 

And the second is the fact that the excerpt of my article is the second longest in the book, which contains excerpts from a bunch of articles. Like, it's way longer than most of the excerpts. So I feel cool. 

That's my old good news. At this point I'm nearly out of excuses for not doing my work. Nearly.

Score! Double Score!

Responses from the Louisville Conference on Culture and Literature since 1900 went out today . . . I got accepted for both panels I submitted to! 

For most conferences you're only allowed to submit to one panel, but Louisville has creative panels as well as the traditional critical panels - which means I'm going to be reading a critical paper and then, at another time, reading my fiction as well! Score! 

No, Louisville isn't the greatest conference in the world, nor is it the hardest to get into. But, most of the people in my dept. who applied last year got in, so if I didn't get in this year (I didn't apply last year), I would have felt sad. And after all those rejections last school year (5!), I'm flying high over another acceptance. 

Looks pretty! 

Plus, Louisville's relatively close (though not so close that driving in the car in possibly crappy February weather while 6 months pregnant won't be a pain) and registration and hotel accommodations aren't terribly expensive (though not "cheap"). 

So I'm siked. Butcher's going, too, and I'm guessing a bunch of other peeps from my dept. who I've yet to talk to (it was a chaotic, student conference-filled day). And Brad's coming! He'll get to the be my chauffeur :). Which makes me even happier, b/c I pretty much hate having to drive. Hopefully it won't be too cold and we can do some sight-seeing. Wonder what the temperature in Kentucky is in late February . . . .

Finally (!) an Acceptance

No, I have not been twiddling my thumbs over here: I've actually been working my butt off (and, like half of the grad students in my office, I've been sick for weeks), and I'm finally seeing the fruits of my labor - I got accepted to the Pop Culture Association/American Culture Association conference in April! 

My luck with conferences has been, well, no luck at all, and my goal for this semester was either to 

1.  Finally get accepted somewhere after already having been rejected at 5 conferences; or 

2.  Really (depressingly) impress myself with 10 rejections total by year's end. 

I have to say, I'm pleased with the outcome :). 

On top of writing up an abtract for PCA/ACA (which took me unusually long for some reason), I wrote a different one for a conference in Louisville and submitted creative work for their creative panel, and I'm in the midst of organizing a panel on a different topic for the Narrative Conference - a bad*ss international conference being held in Las Vegas in March. 

B/c Narrative is so super awesome it's really hard to get into and they don't have much love for grad students I've been told. So, I'm not holding my breath. Even so, I've got an assistant prof. on my panel and a doctoral student with a number of publications, and I think all our papers sound pretty strong. Basically, I'm keeping my fingers crossed but not gonna freak out over a rejection (besides, after 5, I'm so far beyond freaking out about such things). 

Anyway, good things are happening, and the stress and time suck that is applying to these things is winding down for the time being, especially since I'm not applying to ALA b/c I've got stuff going on during May when the conference is scheduled. Spring already promises to be busy as I'm reading in a creative writing reading series sponsored by the department and most likely presenting in a university program that features researchers on campus as well as from outside the university. 

Finally finally finally! I'm exhausted, but I feel so much less loser-y. And it's a good conference to boot :).

Better Late Than Never . . .

I'm sitting at Starbucks, across from my decaf-drinking, novel-writing hubby, and I've finally (after saying for weeks and weeks that I was gonna get to this) begun revising the paper from my contemporary lit. class this past fall. Hence the title. Or at least, it's partially responsible for the title. 

This paper doesn't require a lot (and the little things it needed I did early in May), but it does require the thing that usually trips me up with papers: more. That is, it needs to be longer. Well, actually, first it needs to get shorter and then it needs to get longer. Shorter, b/c the teacher who has encouraged me to revise this paper vetoed the last 5 pages before the conclusion; she thinks they are part of a separate paper (which I will not be writing) and can be condensed into 2 paragraphs. So that's just great. 

Not sure at the current moment exactly how this paper is going to get shorter-but-longer, but I'm feeling refreshed after a month of absolutely no reading (well, 3 pages of Olive Kitteridge - was bored with it - and 20 of A Visit from the Goon Squad - which I've thoroughly enjoyed thus far) beyond magazines, blogs, and the ocassional glance at the German textbook and not an ounce of writing beyond this blog (and I've been enjoyably lax even with that). 

Other "better late than never"s are just some belated reports regarding the past semester. 

1.  The torturous theory paper turned out swimmingly. I got a 95% on it, which was delightful given that I didn't spend nearly as much time and effort as I might have had I, well, had the time to do so and been at all interested in writing the paper. And I didn't put nearly as much into it as I did into my modernist poetry paper. 

2.  Speaking of the modernist paper: A+! That's my first ever A+ on a paper in grad school! (Well, I technically got an A+ on my first theory paper of the semester, but he assigns points, not letter grades, so it doesn't feel nearly as thrilling.) I don't even know how many grad profs use A+s.

My modernist prof, who may end up being my dissertation director, had only lovely things to say about the paper, which was a total b to write, given the fact that I am anything but a theory guru and I had to teach myself some hard-*ss feminist theory to pull this paper off. (This might not mean anything to anyone but me, but nonethless: Luce Irigaray is NOT user-friendly, and theories of the male gaze ain't no picnic either.) 

*She did, however, correct three minor typos (one on the first page), for which I blame Bradley, who is my proofreader. Apparently, he and I need to have a performance review. And pronto.

3.  I got an awesome teaching schedule for the fall. In fact, the prof who does the scheduling gave me exactly what I asked for, day and time both! The same thing happened for this past spring, and I was really leery I would get screwed this time around to even out that good fortune (and he seems rather unpredictable with scheduling). Who says I'm a pessimist?! My teaching schedule has a major impact on my functioning and happiness during any given semester, especially since the morning commute into the city is so hateful. But no morning commute for me during Fall 2011. Yea! 

Now, better late than never, I'm going to post this post. :)

I've become an expert - overnight

Sometimes, a totally unexpected/weird/cool e-mail from a random journal editor asking you to review an article being considered for publication shows up in your inbox. Okay, sometimes is an exaggeration; once is more accurate, but you gotta start somewhere, right? 

The scoop: yesterday I get an e-mail from the editor of a journal that I've never heard of, asking if I'll be an outside reviewer (!) for an essay that focuses on the book on which I published my first article. If not, the editor asks, could I recommend 1 or 2 people who I think would be qualified to do so? Oh, and he called me "Prof."! Haha! 

So, my eyes pop out of my head, etc. etc., and then I look up this journal online, thinking it's some silly thing that's existed for about 3.2 weeks, but siked nonetheless. Not so. It's been in existence for more than 30 years and some major theoretical bigwigs published articles there about a decade ago. Like, Jonathan Culler? Um, major bad*ss. 

Of course I said "yes" in about no time flat. (Well, 55 minutes or so.) And like that - 10 min. tops - he writes me back with the article attached. Now I've got 6-8 weeks to review this thing and make my recommendation on publication.

Just so you can understand the magnitude of my shock and how much this has tickled me: outside reviewers are supposed to be "experts in the field." (That's the exact phrase Brad and I use when teaching our students about peer review.) It's a little laughable that anyone could think of me as an expert in anything outside of, say, sitting on the couch, drinking Mt. Dew, or arguing. 

Brad's immediate response was, "They must have liked your article!" My response was, "They probably haven't read it. But there are like no articles published on that book." I'm willing to settle somewhere in the middle. They probably haven't read it, maybe glanced at it, and chances are the author (who cites me!) recommended me as a reviewer b/c lots of journals (and it seems, from the website, that this is one of them) ask the author to do so. 

Anyway, this is one more step in the direction of me feeling like a real true adult with an actual possible career. Instead of a flunky who's 29, still in school and stinks at it, and who's never going to get a teaching job. 

A seasoned professor who's been asked to review an article 100 times would probably groan and find it to be more of a pain in the butt than anything else. But when I think about it, I'm like, Wait a minute - I think someone might be taking me seriously . . . !

Humble Pie

Looks like that frightening, horrible thing Maryann made
Tara and Eggs eat in True Blood season 2 . . . yikes! 

I'm eating a big ol' bite right about now. 

So, I've been grading student papers for a few days now (very very slowly) and, for the most part, they're pretty impressive. Their ideas are sophisticated and well-organized; their introductions make an attempt to be engaging; the papers use good sources in a smart way and even seem to be getting somewhere with the dreaded Topic Sentence. And the students seemed to have grasped the need for evidence to support their claims and the difference b/t analysis and summary. 

Of course, this doesn't apply to all of the papers, but, on the whole, I'm pretty happy with what we accomplished this semester, and I feel like they've really learned something (hopefully multiple somethings). 

There are, however, writing habits you can't train out of people in 16 short weeks - for example, their beloved "From the beginning of time . . . " or "In all of human history . . . " statements in the introductory paragraphs. (Hate those.) Another bad habit? Relentless use of "is" and other bland helping verbs instead of interesting active verbs. 

But this post concerns not about a bruise to my ego for failing to be Super Teacher (I would hate that whole leotard thing anyway [though a cape would be awesome]). Instead it's about an ego bruise resulting from my own writing. 

While I should be grading, I've spent the last half hour looking over the article that I'm revising before returning it to the journal that has accepted it for publication. And what I've seen in this half hour of looking at my written-in-about-three-days-under-the-great-duress-of-a-looming-class-deadline essay is that the writing, well, kinda stinks. 

No, I'm not fishing for compliments (none of you have seen the paper anyway!) - I'm being serious. I pride myself, if anything, on my good writing, so I wouldn't say it wasn't so great unless it really wasn't. For instance, if the word "is" shows up one more time in that paper, I'm pretty sure the authorities are going to restrict my use. 

But that's not the worst thing I've found so far. The worst thing comes in the form of grammatical incorrectness and general non-sense-making-ness. The following isn't an actual line from the paper, but it conveys an appalling sentence structure that I can not believe I wrote and did not revise out immediately, let alone sent out for the world to see: 

The neighbor's attitude regarding Sally's new minimum-wage job suggests that having even low-paying employment can be viewed as being a hard worker, much the way Tony's willingness to accept a pay cut suggests blah blah blah. 

There are so many things wrong with that sentence - most notably the glaringly hideous mess pairing of "having" and "can be viewed as being" - that I shudder to think three people read (my real version of) it and had only to assume I thought it was a reasonable expression of my ideas. (Well, three people - at least three - other than me and Brad. Those were my professor, the journal's managing editor, and the outside reviewer). And the idea that this sentence could appear in a journal several pages below my name . . . 

The horror! The horror! (For all you Conrad fans out there.) 
It's okay if you're embarrassed for me; I'm embarrassed for myself. But I guess a kick in the butt is good every now and again, just so you don't get complacent (right?). 

Anyway, I'm gonna go work on that sentence, cut my students some slack, and try to get away from that awful offal pie . . . .

Oh, yes, I did

I most definitely did just use inchoate in my modernism paper. You better believe it! 

This might be lame, but I'm feeling quite satisfied at the moment. Although, I'm pretty sure I should wipe this grin off my face and get back to the day's torture . . . . 

Too-short Paper = Lamest Thing I Could Be Doing on My Birthday

Yep, you heard right - it's 2:10 in the afternoon on my birthday and I'm holed up in the family room (with a sweet kitty to my left), trying to lengthen a paper that's 3 pages short of the minimum, even though I'm absolutely out of things to say and was about a page ago. 

That sounds like something a high school or college student would do, you say. Are you sure you're in grad school? you ask. Yeah, I'm sure. I've been here for the past 6 years - I know what it looks like.

Don't cry for me, though. (At least not yet - the paper's due on Friday, and another one on Saturday. Though there's no page limit for the second one, it's half-a-debacle at this point.) Brad's heading out of work in no time to come home and hang out with me, my mom will be on her way over in the early evening to celebrate, and there's delicious veggie/chip dip and pretzel Jell-o on the horizon. My day will improve yet!

This again?

Unless I'm dreaming - and the whole point here is that I'm not, unfortunately - then yes, I am up again at 4:30 a.m. Working. 

This time, I'm not dealing with grading, but with a paper on a poem by modernist poet Mina Loy, visual culture, and feminist theory. Basically, it's about marriage/female objectification and commodification/consumer culture/dept. store display windows/the male gaze/mannequins/and possibly prostitution (why not throw a little bit of that in there?), which, I realize, sounds anything but basic. 

Why such odd timing, you ask? Well, I've got Mr. Snores-a-Lot to thank for that. He somehow managed to go through not 1, not 2, not 3, but 4 varieties of snores in about 15 minutes. Every time I nudged him awake, he shifted slightly and proceeded to snore differently. Unfortunately, once I'm un-sleepified even the tiniest bit, I'm pretty much done for the next few hours. So, with no time to waste during this final week of the semester, I dragged my 4.5-hours-of-sleep arse out of bed and down here to start working on this paper. Again. 

Sigh. 

Before this proceeds, I think I need some Word Bubbles Rising to get my mind going . . . okay, really I just love that game. 

A good week for titles

Earlier this week, I came up with a pretty rockin' title for a dissertation. Oh, you've written a dissertation? you ask. No, silly. I'm still eons away from the writing phase! But last week I had the makings of an idea for a dissertation topic. And thinking up a snazzy, jazzy title has helped me to conceive of an even more specific possible direction. 

Would I write a dissertation to fit a title? Oh you better believe it, mister. 

Next in the title saga is a great title Shannon came up with today for a paper she's currently writing on Lady Audley's Secret and The Woman in White. (This chick reads everything - everything except the one thing she should be reading, which, of course, is contemporary literary ficiton!) She's already got the paper going and certainly didn't need the title to make it happen, but I'd put money on the fact that she's got some extra steam now that she has that little title in her brain (like most titles of critical work, it's actually not little at all, but never you mind). 

The final installation of this week's successful title-age (though it's only Friday - who knows what titles tomorrow will bring) comes in the form of a title for a story that I just started writing tonight (and admittedly, on which I have not yet gotten very far). I spent the week conjuring up the idea for this story, and in thinking of a title, I was trying to find a word that meant what "orphan" means regarding a child who loses a parent, but applied to a sibling who loses a sibling. Well, no one I asked had any such word, and I got distracted and started thinking of other things and then the perfect title popped into my head today when I was musing about the story's projected thematic concerns. 

Not only is this title on-the-money - I'm sorry, but I refuse to be modest about titles; they're simply my fave part of writing! - but it even led me to a character's name! And naming characters all kinds of layered, allusive, symbolic, yet seemingly average names is probably my second favorite thing about writing. It's so darn satisfying! 

Why is a good title so important to me? Well, for lots of reasons, not the least of which is something I tell my students all the time: it's the first impression your reader has of your piece; it's the first chance you have to pull her in and the first opportunity for you to lose her. But, even more than that, the title sets a tone, a mood, even an expectation, for me when I'm writing. It helps me to know the piece as I craft it, to understand it, to feel where it's going and what it's going to become. I know that sounds awfully intangible, and I guess it is. But when I've got an awesome title facing me from the top of the page, I write always trying to do it justice.

I think I've found my calling

Every day is Women's Day. Or at least it ought to be 

Okay, that whole calling thing is a bit of an exaggeration, especially b/c you most likely need to have a lot more energy than I do to respond to a calling, but I do think I've found something (finally!) that I like re: literary/critical theory. 

It should surprise, well, no one that what I'm talking about is feminist theory. It doesn't surprise me, as I always figured if something was going to interest me in terms of theory, it would be feminist, but even so, it's a pleasant revelation b/c I've definitely got no love for deconstruction and the rest of post-structuralism nor for reader response theory. 

And, as it turns out, this year in my papers I've actually been using some of these fem. theory concepts (and even some of the theorists) without knowing it. And, just as interestingly, the little that I've read so far is ridiculously applicable to my own fiction. It's making me think about my own work and its preoccupations in a whole new light. 

Talking about the prevalence of illness in women's fiction/poetry, for instance, Susan M. Gilbert and Sandra Gubar (whose Madwoman in the Attic I read part of - and loved - last semester, having no idea it was feminist theory) explain, "the woman writer feels herself to be literally or figuratively crippled by the debilitating alternatives her culture offers her, and the crippling effects of her conditioning sometimes seem to 'breed' like sentences of death in the blood shoes she inherited from her literary foremothers." Um, yeah - like, this kind of stuff is all over my work. Who knew I was writing in some kind of tradition (albeit - and I have to say this - one hindered by the patriarchy)? I kind of feel empowered. (Brad is now officially wary of my taking feminist theory this coming fall - and to think, not two days he was encouraging it.) 

Just the other day, one of my classmates asked me if all this theory stuff is affecting my creative writing. I responded, "That's such a cute idea - like I have time to write creatively right now." But had I answered her seriously, I would've said, No, I think most of the stuff is either nonsense or it's interesting and has no place in practical discussions of creative work and no place in actually doing that work. Now, I'm not so sure about that. 

As for a theoretical stance apart from my own fiction, this fits me pretty well; it's in line with my interests, my politics, and my concerns (even while Kristeva and surely a host of others seem like idiotic nonsense to me). To end, an oh-so-true thought from Simone de Beauvoir's brilliant The Second Sex: 

"Thus, as against the dispersed, contingent, and multiple existences of actual women, mythical thought opposes the Eternal Feminine, unique and changeless. If the definition provided for this concept is contradicted by the behavior of flesh-and-blood women, it is the latter who are wrong: we are told not that Feminity is a false entity, but that the women concerned are not feminine."

As Promised . . .

First (of course) a narrative: 

So, I'm laying in bed this a.m., not wanting to get up, flip-flopping over b/c my hips hurt, but it's 8:10, and it's time to move my behind. I know the article decision is coming in oh-so-soon b/c the status on the online system changed Friday to "Awaiting ME decision" and it's been more than 4 months. So before getting up, I do what every normal American does (bah!) before climbing out of bed on a Monday morning: I check my e-mail on my new smarty-pants smart phone. 

What do I find? Well, none other than a big fat rejection from the Modern Language Association (MLA) conference. 

This ain't lookin' like a great start to the week. I may or may not mumble some not-allowed-b/c-of-Lent obscenities, then right away text  Brad to report the bad news. Then I text Butcher to report not only the bad news but also that he owes me $5. (In a moment of low self-esteem on my part, he bet me $5 that my proposal would get accepted at MLA. Of course I will not accept my winnings b/c I know, even if he denies it, that he was simply being a good friend b/c I felt like crap at the moment - I know this is why b/c there was no reason at all to believe I'd get into, like, the best literature conference ever. Thanks, Butcher, that was sweet.). 

Now, of course, no one texts at the speed of light like I wish they would, so while waiting to hear back about my rejection, instead of twiddling my thumbs I go back to my e-mail to read the e-mail again and spur on the moping. But . . . ! 

In the time it took to send two text messages, I've gotten a new e-mail . . . I squint at the teeny-tiny text . . . I read, "We are happy to inform you that we have accepted your manuscript" - !!!!!!!!!!! 

Naturally, I go bat-sh*t crazy, lunge out of bed, call Brad, shout happily in his ear, and relay all of the exciting details. Repeat with Butcher. Repeat with Mum. Text to Shannon. E-mail to Amanda. There: now you have my morning. 

Happy me! 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
And now, the exciting details . . . 

The reviewer's comments were really positive (!), which is amazing considering

1.  This is an unrevised paper turned in for a class, the majority of which was written in 3 days. (Anyone who knows me and my writing, knows I don't roll like dat.)

2.  Reviewers can be niz-asty. I've heard many a horror story about reviewers' responses, so it definitely could have gone another way.

This reviewer, who recently taught the book on which I wrote in a seminar for English majors, said my presentation of research and historical context was "valuable material for teaching the novel." Which makes me want to shriek with excitement - ! But it gets better! She - it's a blind review, so I don't know that the comments come from a woman, but there's something in the wording and tone that suggests to me they do - thought my paper was "very timely, full of good information as well interesting analysis" and said my application of theoretical material to the novel was "first-rate." 

Like, ah! Thrilled! Not feeling as stupid as usual when it comes to the literature stuff! 

Her suggestions for revision include: 
- cutting out a handful of lines to make the paper not-so-long (it's only as long as it is b/c I was trying to make a page requirement for class; a requirement which, it should be noted, I still did not meet);
- replacing a phrase with a less (politically) contentious one; and 
- "strengtening the conclusion if possible" so that it's as strong as the intro. 

Not half-bad for a neurotic grad student who hates theory, eh?! 

They didn't give me a deadline for returning it, but the last (and thus far, only) time I was in this position, I had virtually no work to do, and I still dragged my feet. I hope to knock these changes out in the next, say, three weeks, so the article can get slated for an issue. Scholarly publishing takes FOR-EV-ER, meaning the sooner I get this back to them, the sooner it will see the light of day (that is, the pages of a pretty darn good journal!).

Taking a quick break to ponder a career change

Okay, not really. But, I am taking a momentary break from writing a paper (not fun) to muse about how I would have loved to be a historian. For the paper I'm currently working on, I've been reading chunks of the National Book Award-nominated Land of Desire by William Leach. It's about the rise of consumerism and the department store in America, and it's the sh*t! Well-written, engaging, super smart, and without the slightest hint of judgement on its part, the book's even managed to make me feel shallow, materialistic, and ashamed of my love of stuff. This is economic, social, and cultural history at its best, if you ask me. And I'd rather read this than a book of literary criticism any day. 

The problem with the become-a-brilliant-historian plan, however, was the usual problem: I couldn't imagine ever coming up with an idea to write a dissertation about. (Yes, as a 21- and 22-year-old undergraduate, I was already thinking things like that). So that got checked off the list with psychologist and all those other things that required original ideas I'd never have. 

Plus, there was this bizarre instance my junior year: 
(Me:  me; Professor H: history professor who taught my junior seminar and from whom I earned an A and wrote a long-arse paper on Patton, Montgomery, and WWII). 

Me:  Would you be willing to write me a rec. letter for law school? 
Professor H:  Sure, I'd be glad to. Your paper was really good, by the way. Law school sounds like a great idea. The market for history jobs in the university is so bad right now, I don't really recommend that people go to grad school for history unless they're really really the top of bunch. 
Me:  Right, cool. 
Professor H:  Yeah, like Jackie, she's got a great idea about WWII and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. 

I mean, was it really necessary to shoot me down when I hadn't even suggested any interest in pursuing graduate studies in history? Was I really that bad!? 

(I would like to note that I took two graduate courses during my MFA program, and the teacher of one of those classes - from whom I earned my only A- during my three-year program, grrrrr - recently published an essay in an OXFORD collection in which he credits my paper for his class with providing some of the ideas he "adapted" for his paper. Isn't it lovely that he cited me by name only after noting that I had been a graduate student in his class? That is, only after basically trying to say he was responsible for me having had the ideas in the first place!)

On waiting (in the academic world)

In early November (of 2010), I submitted an article to a journal for consideration for publication. And by "article" I mean a completely unrevised paper from a seminar that I took last spring. I did this on a whim (literally, I was bored and Brad was napping on the couch diagonal to me), fully believing the paper would be rejected quite quickly, but maintaing a glimmer of hope that it would be, if nothing else, at least sent by the editor to reviewers and maybe I would get some feedback about how to improve it. 

(You might well ask why I didn't, before sending, use my teacher's feedback to improve, and you would be right to ask this. I could, however, only respond with a very unsatisfactory answer: laziness. That is, if it turned out the paper was too terrible to even be sent to reviewers, I didn't want to bother spending any time at all on it.) 

I guess before coming to my point (which is always a long and digressive task with me), it would help to explain the process of publication (or not-publication) in a peer-reviewed journal. Although journals vary, the basic rigamaroll looks something like this: 
    1.  you submit an unsolicited article (either via an online system, e-mail, or snail mail); 
    2.  an editor of one form or another makes an initial judgement (reject it or send it to reviewer/s); 
    3.  reviewers, who are experts in the particular area of your article, are invited to read and "score" your article; and 
    4.  based on the reviewers/ scores, the editor makes a decision about your article (reject/accept/accept with revisions/revise and resubmit). 

This process can take anywhere from 5 days to maybe 6 months. (The first place I ever submitted an article to took three months to reject it without even having sent it to reviewers. That same article was then accepted by a different journal in five days - of course, I had to stop wallowing and send it out again first, which took me a few weeks to do.) 

The waiting room at a doctor's office:  a fitting metaphor for 
the academic world, ugly decor and all. 

The present article/paper/potential piece of nonsense, is at a journal that has a typical 6-8 week response period, a factoid I got courtesy of the MLA Directory of Periodicals, that dear dear database. For some reason, I was expecting 8-10 weeks. But yesterday marked week 14. And since about week 8, I've been checking the status an unhealthy (obsessive?) 2-3 times a day. 

Currently (and for the last week and a half), my diamond-in-the-potentially-really-rough is in the reviwer's hands (or, rather, his/her inbox) and my online status on the journal's site is "awaiting reviewer scores." And although I probably shouldn't, I'm taking it as an encouraging sign that the editor sent it to a reviewer in the first place. I mean, with the other one, I got rejected at the first journal with as little fanfare as possible. Except for the whole THREE MONTHS thing (yes, I'm still seething just a tad two years later), which in my waiting-to-hear-from-PhD-programs-and-therefore-going-insane-and-hating-the-world mind, was all kinds of fanfare. 

So, basically, waiting sucks. And it sucks even more to wait with your hopes up when at least half of your brain is telling you that your writing stinks, your ideas stink, no one wants to publish your stupid paper, and, oh! by the way, you're never gonna get a job if you don't put out at least one more article before graduation (which, admittedly, is a long arse way off). 

And I've come to the conclusion that working in academia is all about waiting:  waiting to get through coursework to do comprehensive exams; waiting to pass comps to get to writing the dissertation; waiting to get through the diss. to find that ever elusive first job in a super crappy market; waiting to make that first job a sure thing by getting tenure . . . and on and on and on . . . .