My 3-year Writing Productivity Report (2017-2020)

Academic efficiency is a topic that obsesses me. Although academic culture contains a fair amount of underground animosity against "productivity pressure" and the Protestant Work Ethic -- The Chronicle of Higher Education is full of it -- I'm still continually strategizing ways to be more efficient with my working time. This attitude has gotten me through grad school and a full-time contingent faculty position without any mental health issues, so there's that. Plus, I just love working for its own sake. 

Anyway, here's my latest attempt at self-assessment. In my last year of grad school, I used to keep of yearly productivity record for my writing (see here and here). Once I began publishing regularly, though, I soon found yearly records impractical. After all, you can wait up to 11 months to get back a journal's reader's reports**, and the revisions sometimes take as long as the original submission.

So, here's my first ever three-year productivity report. It tackles my publishable work from July 1st, 2017 through July 1st, 2020. That beginning date starts about two months after graduating my doctoral program at MTSU and, then, submitting my essay on J.R.R. Tolkien's nomination of E. M. Forster for the Nobel Prize to Mythlore. Hence, this report covers my University of Arizona period. During this time, I've been a NTT (non-tenure track) contingent faculty laboring on a 4-4 contract. 

Final results? In three years or 1,096 days, I've produced

• 14 articles (eleven of which are set for peer review)
• 6 book reviews
• 8 encyclopedia entries
• 1 conference report, plus several conference presentations.

Taken all together, the word count for these writings equals 143,853 words. On average, that's 47,951 published words per year, and 131.25 publishable words per day. (Nota bene: I write every day, including weekends or holidays).

Takeaways? Well, first, I write a lot of 9,000 word articles. Second, putting that total word count into perspective, it equals about 2 monographs' worth of text during just three years. Third, I can't muster up much compassion for TT faculty on reduced teaching loads who complain about "productivity pressure."

For those who are interested, here's my breakdown of written work and word counts:

ARTICLES

• “Just like Henry James (Except with Cannibalism): The International Weird in H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Rats in the Walls.’” Forthcoming in Gothic Studies. 
• words: 6725
• “Globalization, Depth, and the Domestic Hero: The Postmodern Transformation of Tolkien’s Bard in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit Trilogy.” Forthcoming in Tolkien Studies. 
• words: 8046
• “Utopias Unrealizable and Ambiguous: Plato, Strauss, and Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.” Forthcoming in Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin, edited by Christopher Robinson, Sarah Bouttier, and Pierre-Louis Patoine. 
• words: 6346
• “History and Precarity: Glen Cook and the Rise of Picaresque Epic Fantasy.” Forthcoming in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
• words: 9200
• “The Image of Law in Donaldson’s ‘Reave the Just’: Agency, Blame, and Sexual Assault.” Law & Literature, vol. 32, no. 2, 2020, pp. 1-20.
• words: 9160
• “On Ways of Studying Tolkien: Notes Toward a Better (Epic) Fantasy Criticism.” Journal of Tolkien Research, vol. 9, no. 1, 2020, pp. 1-25.
• words: 10073
• “‘Violations as Profound as any Rape’: Feminism and Sexed Violence in Stephen R. Donaldson.” Extrapolation, vol. 60, no. 2, 2019, pp. 133-56.
• words: 9094
• “Paul Edwin Zimmer’s Alliterative Style: A Metrical Legacy of J. R. R. Tolkien and Poul Anderson.” Mythlore, vol. 37, no. 1, 2018, pp. 183-201.
• words: 8044
• “Delving into Nome Man’s Land: Two Traditions in Baum and Tolkien.” Forthcoming in The Baum Bugle. (Non-peer reviewed)
• words: 4821
• “L. Frank Baum and PYRZQXGL: Or, How to Do Things with Magic Words.” Baum Bugle, vol. 63, no. 3, Winter 2019, pp. 7-16. (Non-peer reviewed)
• words: 5039

ARTICLES UNDER REVIEW (these will require revision down the road, though I'm not anticipating big revisions)

• “A Brief History of EPVIDS: Subjectivity and Evil Possessed Vampire Demon Swords.”
• words: 8994
• “The Hesitation Principle in ‘The Rats in the Walls.’”
• words: 3952
• “Poul Anderson and the American Pulp Alliterative Revival.”
• words: 9511
• “From Unknown to the Society for Creative Anachronism: The Alliterative Inheritance in Modern American Speculative Poetry.”
• words: 9372

BOOK REVIEWS

• The Shape of Fantasy: Investigating the Structure of American Heroic Epic Fantasy, by C. Palmer-Patel. Forthcoming in Fafnir: Nordic Journal of SFF Research.
• words: 2114
• “Unhuman, All-Too-Unhuman.” Rev. of None of This is Normal: The Fiction of Jeff VanderMeer, by Benjamin J. Robertson, Extrapolation, vol. 61, no. 1-2, pp. 238-42.
• words: 1836
• Sub-creating Arda: World-building in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Works, its Precursors, and its Legacies, edited by Dimitra Fimi and Thomas Honegger. Journal of Tolkien Research, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 1-9.
• words: 3691
• Okja (film), directed by Bong Joon-Ho. Science Fiction Film and Television, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 290-94, doi.org/10.3828/sfftv.2019.16.
• words: 1860
• The Return of the Ring, volumes 1 & 2, edited by Lynn Forest-Hill. Journal of Tolkien Research, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 1-14.
• words: 5771
• Alfred Bester, by Jad Smith. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 332-35.
• words: 1490

ENCYCLOPEDIA ENTRIES

• Poul Anderson, 2020, The Literary Encyclopedia
• words: 2037
• The Broken Sword, 2020, The Literary Encyclopedia
• words: 2412
• Peter S. Beagle, 2019, The Literary Encyclopedia
• words: 1612
• The Last Unicorn, 2019, The Literary Encyclopedia
• words: 2585
• The Dispossessed, 2019, The Literary Encyclopedia
• words: 2497
• The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, 2018, The Literary Encyclopedia
• words: 2521
• Stephen R. Donaldson, 2018, The Literary Encyclopedia
• words: 2522
• “Donaldson’s Amnion and the Dangers of a Posthuman Future.” Aliens in Popular Culture, edited by Michael M. Levy and Farah Mendlesohn, Greenwood, pp. 107-09.
• words: 1048

MISC. ACADEMIC WRITING

• CONFERENCE REPORT: “Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin—June 19th–21st, 2019.” Fafnir: Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research, vol. 6, no. 1, 2019, pp. 132-34.
• words count: 1480

CONFERENCE PAPERS (excluded from total word count)

• “Unrealizable Ambiguous Utopias: Reading The Dispossessed through Leo Strauss and Plato.” Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin: Science, Fiction, and Ethics for the Anthropocene. 
• “Between Ancient and Modern: A Straussian Approach to Tolkien’s Medievalism.” IMC (International Medieval Congress). 
• “‘Sing, Muse, the Wrath of Boromir, Denethor’s Son’: Thumos and Lofgeornost in J. R. R. Tolkien.” 53^rd International Congress on Medieval Studies. 
• “Gender Violence and Feminist Thought in Stephen R. Donaldson’s ‘Reave the Just.’” ICFA (International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts). 

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**Ahem, I'm looking at you, Gothic Studies.