Stratofanatic's Emporium

Exciting news: my article on Glen Cook, history, and picaresque epic fantasy has just been formally accepted for publication in The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts , and it'll appear in about a year or so. This acceptance means a lot. Not that I don't feel like a real academic, but it's always important to get these affirmations, especially in a profession like ours where the major markers of success -- passing prelims, the dissertation defense, publishing articles -- arrive so few and far between. With this recent acceptance, my work now appears in 3 of the 4 most respected journals relevant to SF and fantasy: JFA , Extrapolation, and Tolkien Studies . The fourth journal, of course, is Science Fiction Studies , but since I don't really do SF criticism, I might simply have to adore that journal from afar. It's also really nice to publish something on Glen Cook, who for years has been the writer most personally addicting for me. And this will also be the fir...

So, I've been doing some background research on Peter S. Beagle for an encyclopedia article, and I found the following gem of a story while browsing through this interview: Aaron [interviewer] : I’ve actually seen this so I know that this is true—when the original L ord of the Rings movie came out, The Fellowship of the Ring , the Peter Jackson version…somebody, one of the publishing houses, commissioned a writer to do the novelization of the movie. Peter [ S. Beagle ]: I heard that story! Aaron : And got seven chapters in before somebody said, “You do know it’s a book, right?!” And I’ve read those seven chapters, and they’re terrible…! Connor [Cochran, PSB's business manageer : I have not heard that story! That’s wonderful. That’s absolutely wonderful.  That's the main Tolkien-related bit; the whole long interview is here . It's actually a pretty fascinating account of the financial side of contemporary book publishing and licensing. Beagle, apparently, despite his...

Just had an article returned back to me with a classic case of academic schizophrenia. You know what I mean -- one reviewer plays Good Cop, the other plays Bad Cop. One loves me, the other loves me not, etc. In this particular case, the first reviewer thought highly of the article. Although they had some recommendations for improvement, as a good reviewer should, the phrases "groundbreaking" and "well-written" nonetheless did make an appearance. Reviewer 2? Alas, not so much. They opened their commentary with, and I quote, "I dislike this essay on a number of fronts." And, 500 words later, that was still the nicest comment they had to give. The whole experience leaves me somewhat bemused, I must say. Don't get me wrong -- in the past I've received reviews, incompetent or negative or both, that really have angered or irritated me. This one, not so much. Part of that, simply, is Reviewer 1 being -- clearly! -- a brilliant and percipient scholar...

So, last spring, I was given a development grant to convert my ENGL 160D course on Monsters, Ghosts, Aliens, and Others to an online version. I'd just begun teaching online the previous semester, so while I grasped the basics, teaching literature is still a vastly different kettle of fish from teaching composition. Thankfully, I had my lesson plans from my face-to-face course, and some D2L content carried over. Anyway, I finished Monsters Online yesterday -- one whole day to spare, even, before classes begin on Thursday. All told, my best guess-timation puts my total work on the course anywhere between 110 and 120 hours . . . or about $25 per hour, given the development grant was a flat $3k. All that work  came in about 13 or 14 days of effort (the last seven of them in one brutal yet continuous stretch), so I didn't miss out on too much "real" academic work, i.e. research and writing.  Would I do another online course? Sure, if asked. But mad respect to those ...

"Academic efficiency" is my internal term for maximizing the use of one's time. Oftentimes, I think the people who succeed best in our world are those with a knack for self-organization, not to mention self-motivation. For a graduate student, this means juggling classes, both teaching and taking, thinking about your next step in the program, and dealing with graduate school's needless and seemingly mandated endemic poverty. For an early career academic, efficiency means constantly -- and I mean constantly -- thinking of new additions for one's C.V. Since I've finished up my encyclopedia entry for The Literary Encyclopedia on Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed , I've been pondering "academic efficiency" once again.** The chain of events leading to this entry is pretty awesome and amazing, but think about this -- out of that one Paris conference on Le Guin, I've squeezed out the following publications: 1 conference presentation (plus ...

So, early last month, Fafnir published my conference report on the Legacies of Ursula K. Le  Guin, a 3-day conference in Paris, France at the Sorbonne over the summer. Incidentally, there's a book coming out of that conference, and I just submitted my revised presentation for that 2 days ago. Anyway, though, I was randomly trawling the interwebz, and I discovered another summary of that confererence ! It's written by David Creuze, a professor at the Université de Lille, whom I remember chatting with briefly right before the big shindig began. Whereas mine is mostly creative non-fiction (which is what we encourage for Fafnir **), though, David's is a more bare-bones descriptive summary of the various papers. Pretty fair summaries, too, I might add. And he summarizes all the presentations, too, whereas I skipped quite a few for space. -------------------------- ** And by "we," of course, I mean "I", since I seem to have been put in charge of the con...