3-year Writing Productivity Report (2020-2023)

I did one of these writing productivity reports three years ago, and they're basically  my way of cataloguing how much I've produced in a particular time span. As an academic, writing for publication is part of the job .... although technically, as a contingent academic with no research support and who teaches a 4/4 load (and sometimes more), all this work goes uncompensated and mostly unrecognized. Still, I keep track, because that's what I do. So, in the three years since my last writing productivity report, which postdates the quarantine, I've written:

• 6 articles (although two are quite short)
• the editorial materials for 1 forthcoming book
• 3 book reviews

The total word is officially 100,298 publishable words, or 92 publishable words per day. That figure, however is honestly somewhat depressing given my work ethic and how I've basically stopped "wasting time" by reading actual fiction. In my previous 3-year productivity report, my total word count was nearly 150k.

I can't blame the lack of research support, since I've never had that. However, my administrative duties as Director of Undergraduate Studies have clearly taken their toll. The anthology involved a ton of searching for permissions and editorial correspondence with authors and publishers as well. The two articles, "Dating Sweet Desire" and "Carved in Granite," required a substantial amount of rewriting, and I had to learn an entirely new subfield: alliterative poetics. In fact, "Dating," "Carved," and "A Schema for Artorius" all basically had to be written twice. I also spent three months prepping for a class I was only half-qualified to teach, ENGL 373a: Beowulf to Milton, although I'm extraordinarily proud of how well that turned out. Overall, in total labor output, my last three years at the U of A has been much more back-breaking than the first, but my writing productivity has declined 32%.

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

Articles (published or forthcoming)

• Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival: A Critical Anthology. An anthology with notes, appendices, and a critical introduction. Forthcoming from Fairleigh Dickinson UP.
• word count: 55,000
• “Dating ‘Sweet Desire’: C. S. Lewis’s Education in Alliterative Poetics.” Forthcoming from English Text Construction.
•  word count: 9700
• “GoogleDocs and Zoom: A Love Story.” Journal for Research and Practice in College Teaching, vol. 6, no. 2, 2021, pp. 1–4.
• word count: 1300
• “Just Reading Piers Anthony’s A Spell for Chameleon: An Appreciation, with Caveats, and an Elegy.” Mythlore, vol. 40, no. 1, Fall/Winter 2021, pp. 85–102
• word count: 8000

Articles Under Review

• “A Schema for Artorius: John Heath-Stubbs, History, and the Last Modernist Epic.”
• word count: 8700
• “Carved in Granite: The Revivalism of C. S. Lewis in The Nameless Isle.”
• word count: 10,000
• “A Tale of Two Essays: The Inklings on the Alliterative Meter.”
• word count: 1800

Book Reviews and misc. writing

• A Sense of Tales Untold: Exploring the Edges of Tolkien’s Literary Canvas, by Peter Grybauskas. Journal of Tolkien Research, vol. 14, no. 1, 2022, pp. 1–5.
• word count: 2,158
• The Tragic Thread in Science Fiction, by Robert H. Waugh. SFRA Review, vol. 51, no. 4, Fall 2021, pp. 263–67.
• word count: 1,985
• Hidden Wyndham: Life, Love, Letters, by Amy Binns. SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 1, Winter 2022, pp. 271–74.
• word count: 1,655

Conference Papers (excluded from total word count)

• “C. S. Lewis, the Inklings, and The Nameless Isle: A Reassessment in Light of the Modern Alliterative Revival.” ICFA, 2022. 
• “Treating Contingent Labor with Compassion: Strategies in Journal Publishing for Reducing Wait Times.” MLA, 2021.