One Less Item on My Academic Bucket List
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 first peer-reviewed article on Cook, which is awesome.
The story of this particular article, now titled "History and Precarity: Glen Cook and the Rise of Picaresque Epic Fantasy," may be mildly interesting. Back in 2015 or 2016, I submitted an article to JFA on Cook's The Instrumentalities of the Night. The two peer reviewers, who both recommended revise and resubmit, were overly kind in their evaluations, as I realized in retrospect -- when I re-read the article several months later in Fall 2017, intending to perform the revisions, the amateurishness of the piece actually embarrassed me. I dropped the article, read more widely in fantasy literature, and didn't return to the manuscript until January 2019, when I was much better equipped academically to write something intelligent. This second round of peer review took about 6 or 7 months, but I'm pleased with the article's final form, and of course ecstatic about appearing in JFA.
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 first peer-reviewed article on Cook, which is awesome.
The story of this particular article, now titled "History and Precarity: Glen Cook and the Rise of Picaresque Epic Fantasy," may be mildly interesting. Back in 2015 or 2016, I submitted an article to JFA on Cook's The Instrumentalities of the Night. The two peer reviewers, who both recommended revise and resubmit, were overly kind in their evaluations, as I realized in retrospect -- when I re-read the article several months later in Fall 2017, intending to perform the revisions, the amateurishness of the piece actually embarrassed me. I dropped the article, read more widely in fantasy literature, and didn't return to the manuscript until January 2019, when I was much better equipped academically to write something intelligent. This second round of peer review took about 6 or 7 months, but I'm pleased with the article's final form, and of course ecstatic about appearing in JFA.
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