Stratofanatic's Emporium

It's official. ... last night I hit "send" on Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival: A Critical Anthology , and it's now in the hands of Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. I'm highly excited about the anthology overall, and while I no illusions about how much any academic sells, I do think the topic fascinating and the scholarship (if I say so myself) pretty far-reaching. 49 different poets 152 poems 53,000 total words of editorial content, which includes 20,000-word introduction 11,000 words of headnotes 5,000 words in Appendix C 17,000 of footnotes. All contracts signed, except for one minor hiccup and one person for whom I couldn't find any contact information. All permission-to-reprint fees paid for out of my own pocket. And I managed all this in "only" eight months. The last three months have been particular brutal since, as Director of Undergraduate Studies, I've been putting in 10-12 hours days for seven days a week, ev

The secret of academic writing is, of course, TONS and TONS of melodramatic pathos! Two quotes from my (now completed!) introduction for Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival: "Much too much Society verse, I fear, has suffered an even unkinder fate than this—surviving, if it survives at all, only in damp basements, dusty attics, and long forgotten old desk drawers."  "Still, generally speaking, most unpublished poetry finds only one fate. It disappears quietly into the night: unknown, unloved, unrecognized." As I put the finishing touches on this sucker, too, I've been reflecting on what makes a final-stage proofreading successful. One thing I think about is reading speed : as an academic, you read papers much faster than you do when composing (or revising) them, and I've found that this changes the actual phrasing a writer should use -- for instance, I tend to remove lots of qualifying phrases since, during a speed-read, I realize that the