Missing MLA! (Almost, maybe . . . )

So, I've never been to the MLA conference, my field's biggest and largest conference. Part of the reason is disciplinary. All my major conference activity has focused on science and fantasy, so I've been to ICFA a few times and tagged a few major medieval conferences (cuz Tolkien) under my belt. 

Still . . . MLA, right? Well, the real reason I've never presented at MLA is because of their insanely narrow window for submitting abstracts. The window runs something like mid-February through mid-March, give or take, and basically I've always forgotten. I'm defending my dissertation, or it's the middle of the semester, or I'm swamped with other projects; something has always made the MLA conference completely slip my mind until too late.

Anyway, there's a half decent chance that's happened again this year. I'm been vowing to myself to finally try MLA, so I just had a look-see through their calls for papers . . . and realized that, somehow, I'd been mentally imagining an end-of-March deadline rather than a mid-March deadline. 99% of the panels I'm seeing closed on March 15th. So here it is, March 18th, and dog-gone it all to heck. Luckily, I did find one panel still accepting abstracts (closes today), so I hurriedly scribbled something and submitted, but sheesh -- for realz, now.

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