Stratofanatic's Emporium

Although I'm used to working everyday, this summer has been especially crazy in terms of teaching: Directed Self-placement Advising through May and June Three weeks in late June revising my online Monsters module actually teaching that online Monsters module in July and August GAT Orientation and Preceptorship in August plus various professional development workshops. Plus, there was all my other writing/research activities . . . finishing up on long essay in May, writing two encyclopedia entries in June, and thus spending July and August writing and research my research proposal for Specters of Tolkien: History, Totality, and Thymos at the Beginning of Epic Fantasy . (This last one is still ongoing.) Now, though, I've just submitted final grades for my Monsters class . . . on the first day of Fall semester. Thus, I'm about to embark on a luxurious 4-hour summer vacation before going back to the grind. Wouldn't trade academia for the world, though.

So, after sending back the proofs of a recently accepted article within 8 hours of receipt, the editor wrote to me: Wow, that is the quickest turnaround where we know you actually looked at the proofs in journal history. :) Which, of course, is nice!  I do try, after all. But it also makes me reflect that, really, there's no real reason any stage of the academic publishing process has to take so long (besides the writing and revision stages.) When I receive reviews for Fafnir , I return commentary within 24 hours. And my peer reviews are finished in a week -- not the months it normally takes others -- unless I need to consult some special hard-to-get source. It's just a matter of staying on tops of things. No wonder academics are so stressed all the time.

So, the website academia.edu tends to be highly panned by real academics -- it's free to upload your papers, but the website's attempts to get people to buy subscriptions are pretty desperate. (For instance, their myriad notifications that "Someone just viewed your paper X in an academia.edu search" give a misleading impression that more people are reading your work than truly are.) But one nice feature they have: if you download a paper, you can leave a note to the author explaining your reason for downloading. And I just received the following note: I am taking a class about The Hobbit at my local bookstore in DC with Verilyn Flieger and she recommended this article. Which is amazing that Dr. Flieger actually knows the article and recommend it to someone -- a lay reader, no less.** That really bucks me up. The essay in question is " Unraveling The Hobbit’s Strange Publication History: A Look at Possible Worlds, Modality, and Accessibility Relations ," ...