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.








Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Genre Fantasy Bestsellers through 1990

Image
I've been studying Keith Justice's Bestseller Index , which compiles information from two separate bestseller lists -- New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly -- up through 1990, and the results are ridiculously fascinating. For instance, you wanna take a stab at which SFF author has the most individual books appear on a bestseller list? No, it ain't Heinlein, Clark, Herbert, or Asimov. It's not even Terry Brooks or David Eddings. No, the answer is Piers Anthony . And even if you somehow pulled that name out of thin air, I guarantee you'll never guess how truly dominate Anthony was. Up through 1990, Anthony had more than double than number of distinct bestsellers than the next most frequent bestseller, Anne McCaffrey. Whereas Anthony had an astounding  22 different books appear on a bestseller list, McCaffrey had "only" 9.** Now, caveats. These numbers need to be taken with one (or two) grains of salt. For instance, although Anthony had 22 two dis
Read more

Thoughts upon Reading Tolkien's New & Expanded LETTERS

So, I'm reading through the newly expanded version of Tolkien's Letters. One thing I hadn't properly realized is that these letters were part of Carpenter's original manuscript back in 1981, but Carpenter had to cut them due to cost. Turns out that Carpenter had a pretty keen eye on what could bear cutting -- most of this new stuff isn't terribly interesting, but I discovered a few nuggets. VINDICATED!! (Me, sorta) Naturally, whenever you read new primary material, your first instinct is to check to see if anything contradicts something you've said in print ... especially biographically. Well, I've made three big "biographical" claims, and here's my sigh of relief: Concerning my claim that, in 1954, Tolkien and colleagues contrived to create CS Lewis's academic chair at Cambridge in exchange for them nominating EM Forster for the Nobel Prize. Nothing in  Letters  supports or contradicts this. In my recent article for  Notes & Queries ,
Read more

Uncovering CS Lewis's First Religious Poem

 So, with my article's official acceptance by the journal English Text Construction , it's time to let the cat out of the bag. Using a combination of metrical analysis and biography, I've ascertained with near perfect certainty the first religious poem C. S. Lewis poem ever wrote .... a short poem, "Sweet Desire," that scholars have never previously paid any attention to. This poem is firmly datable to early 1930, probably January or February is my guess, and given the poem's subject matter, it's clearly talking about CSL's fears and intellectual trepidation about becoming a theist and abandoning atheism for good. It's basically Lewis's version of Caedmon's Hymn . The full metrical details will have to await my article, but one interesting caveat on my claims to firstness. In my peer reviewer's commentary, they recommended I contact a CSL scholar named  Charlie W. Starr, who's been working on Lewis's handwriting for quite a lon
Read more