Back to Writing

I was excited to send a reworked article to another journal. I learned this morning it was rejected. I'm bummed out, but not the same way as last time. But I will admit I struggle with sorting out what academic journals want.

I'm not the first person who has done academic articles who has been rejected more than once, I do understand that. But this time, what is different is that I decided to pull in more resource around me while I work on the other article. I sent the article to two historians and someone who works on literature to take a look at it and address the overall critique of it.

I told them not to hold back. With their help, I will figure out how to do this.

It's important for us to be honest about the setbacks to publishing. If you're not careful, you think that no one has these struggles.

I'll just be open about them.

Just sayin'.

I turned it in

Happy New Year!

When last I wrote, I was still licking my wounds. I had submitted my very first academic article to a well esteemed academic journal and it was rejected!

Yeah. That hurt. Badly.

I know I was not the first and certainly will not be the last. But it hurt anyway.

It took me a month to even look at the feedback. They wanted me to refine my perspective on one part of my argument and this refinement was accompanied with an extensive reading list.

Let me say that the rejection did not help with the book writing project either. 

My partner kept saying hurry up and incorporate the edits. Let's just say that rejection and "hurry up" don't go together well.

This summer I plodded through their reading recommendations. I enjoyed that and my mind started grappling with changes in my argument. I loved reading this stuff just for the sake of reading it. It's part of what I live about being an historian. I found the love of doing this part of academic work. And that made the rejection worth it!

By December, though, I realized I had something new and improved! Their feedback did make it a more subtle article. I have lovely people around me and I had another journal teed up. I'm pleased that it is submitted!

I have a four month wait for that article. Meanwhile, the journal that rejected me said that they would be interested in an article using a particular clump of sources, so I shall get to work on that. I have a nice part of a draft, there's more to go. Belcher shall guide me on writing it (How to Prepare an Article  in 12 Weeks or something like that!).

And I know that I very well should possibly expect another rejection. Perhaps a revise and resubmit? That would be progress!

Stay tuned!

Academic Writing Part Who Knows What . . .

I find it ridiculous that I get to incorporate journal writing into my academic writing time. Really! It kind of makes it fun. Besides, check out this article! You heal from trauma faster if your journal about it and download your feelings because you don't dwell on the feelings after you write. Who knew? But then again, I don't consider this traumatic. Finally turning my dissertation into publishable stuff is fun, but it's nice to reflect on what works well and what doesn't about my writing.

So what's gone well over the last couple of weeks? I had a phone conversation with a writing buddy who shed some light on one thing: I have no judgement about what people think about me. What do I mean? I sent inquiry letters to journals to see if they were interested in this article. They all wrote back that they would be interested in publishing it. My response: "That's sweet. They're just blowing sunshine up my ass." My writing buddy's response: "That's awesome! They're really interested! If they weren't, they'd tell you something like they have a serious backlog, or it's not quite appropriate, or they're only having special issues until the end of time. THIS IS GREAT!"

OK, so I think I need to print the emails with responses from the journals. Perhaps I should frame them (no really, I'm trying to remember this is a huge accomplishment!) . . .

I also sent a draft (OK, I'm realizing it's a big deal that I've completed a draft. My initial response was ho hum. Then again, Laura Belcher says that only 25% of academics actually publish. I'm really taking in it's a big deal that there's a draft) to a few people and got responses from two (I suspect the third is forthcoming). Lovely responses.

1. I need to restructure it and make my main subaltern characters the center of the story. I'm doing it (just not this minute - I'm writing this)!

2. I'm making HUGE interventions and I don't make them very clear. I'm doing this as well. This is a huge challenge for female writers (academic and otherwise), so I suspect I have lots of company here. Yes, the things we write make a contribution to some small corner, but often the implications of what we write are much larger and we don't frame it as such. Allow me to place another nail in sexism's coffin and ramp up my discussion of the significance of my article!

There's other stuff as well. But that's what I remember while writing this post!

It feels like the number of changes I need to make are daunting though. However, I've also publicly committed (see my c.v.) to having this under review/submitted shortly. Will do and submit within the next couple of weeks (ideally early next week). That's right (my typo was write, but that's a funny pun . . . ok, I'm suffering from insomnia, anything is funny at this point!), completed academic article ready for submission early next week (oh my . . . I have major citation cleanup to do!)

Cheer me on, wish me luck, however, you think about it, I'll need it. Did I mention that I'm applying for three academic jobs and am still grading midterms?

I have something brewing in my head about Ferguson, but haven't had a moment to write it. Hopefully, I'll get it out soon, but you see I have a lot on my platter that's not getting any larger.

Just saying'.