"A Brief History of EPVIDS" published in JFA

Sometimes, you want to write academic articles brimming with social justice issues, critiques of capitalism, and trenchant analyses of our current culture situation. Other times, you just really want to write about evil possessed vampire demon swords.

The idea for my latest publication in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, "A Brief History of EPVIDS," began as something of a joke idea. You see, not long before, while doing some work on Paul Edwin Zimmer, on the last day of 2018, I'd read Blood of the Colyn Muir, the novel that Zimmer co-wrote with Jon DeCles. This novel is cheesy pulp sword-and-sorcery fiction, but I enjoyed it, and the the battle scenes are hardcore. Anyway, not long after, I'm walking to the gym, and this idea just sorta pops into my head: the all-powerful sword in Sword of the Colyn Muir sure had an uncanny resemblance to Michael Moorcock's Stormbringer from his Elric of Melniboné stories. (I really don't like the Elric tales, but any good fantasy critic does have to know about them.) 

Well! That connection got me thinking about all the swords similar to Stormbringer that I knew in fantasy fiction. There's Poul Anderson's Tyrfing (The Broken Sword), which was an explicit influence on Moorcock, and of course Tolkien has a talking killer sword in "The Tale of Turin Turambar." Both got their inspirations from medieval literature. But, years ago, I'd also read -- and loved -- Glen Cook's early fantasy novel The Swordbearer, and both this novel and Zimmer and DeCles's are clearly hopping on Michael Moorcock's coattails.

So I started thinking about how there seemed to exist an entire subgenre of evil, possessed, vampire demon swords. And indeed there was ... and this subgenre, I discovered, had a surprisingly clear literary genealogy. One issue remained: a thesis. I figured I needed something stronger than, "Wow, this is cool!" so I picked the first concept that came to me: the implications these soul-sucking evil swords had on the personal subjectivity of their bearers.

Anyway, the idea percolated in the old noggin for about a year or so, and I started drafting the essay several months later, while doing my postdoctoral research fellowship on Poul Anderson in summer 2019. The finished article was Reviewer 2'd by the first journal I sent it to. After a few quick revisions, I sent it out again. At this time, I already had my "History and Precarity" article on Glen Cook going through JFA's review process, so I was a bit worried about having two articles under review by the same journal at the same time. That, luckily, wasn't an issue, as it turned out. What did become an issue was how they completely lost my submission. 

Honestly, I don't know what happened. I have a receipt from their submissions system. All I can say was that the tail-end of this resubmission coincided with the onset of COVID-19 and quarantine, so that threw quite a few academic journals through a loop. In any event, I resubmitted the article to JFA again. What else could I do?

This time, luckily, I only had to wait another three months for this second resubmission, and when the reports came back, they accepted the article with only minor revisions. This was summer 2020, and the article has just now appeared (April 2021). So there you have it: a brief history of EPVIDS.

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