Stratofanatic's Emporium

One thing that's occurred to me: many ECRs and grad students have probably never seen a good response from an author to an editor over a peer review. It's not a genre of writing commonly shared. So this message (see below) is something I just submitted to a journal editor. The peer reviewer was thoughtful and considerate one -- believe it or not, these are more common than the other kind! -- but I wasn't thrilled with the direction the reviewer was suggesting I go. This is a successful example, too ... the journal editor was cool with this proposal, and I suspect most journal editors would have been: they just want to see a sincere engagement by authors with their reader reports. Btw, nota bene: when I'm doing a blind peer review, I personally don't necessarily expect authors to follow my suggestions. As a reviewer (and as with teaching), you offer authors/students suggestions in order to jumpstart their thinking. The important thing, as I suggested above, is that ...

Well, that was a nail-biter!  So, yeah, sure .... I may have known I was going present at MLA today for nine months, but that didn't stop me from only starting my conference paper yesterday afternoon. Luckily, I knew exactly what I wanted to say. The subject is an easy one for me: serving in departmental leadership despite precarious employment. And like most of my conference papers nowadays, it is a (self-professed) hilarious one. A chuckle-riot of a story about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer somehow doesn't interfere with me carefully laying out many issues faced by a contingent academic serving in a leadership role. I've uploaded it to academic.edu , and although I now wish that I'd called it "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Contingent Academic," it's officially called, " Above and Beyond: Joining Departmental Leadership while Contingent ." Also, the weird thing about doing a hilarious presentation on Zoom is that there's no real-time audience feedb...

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 wa...

Welp -- so, I just sent out over 100 200 emails (!) to non-majors who took our Gen. Ed classes last year, inviting them, "Hey! We're cool! Get a second major with us!" Already had two nibbles of interest, and we'll see how this works out. This isn't the first time we've tried this sort of direct advertising before, but this is larger scale than anything we've previously done. Our department actually has three separate majors -- English literature, Creative Writing, and Professional & Technical Writing -- and tons of bells and whistles: scholarships, study abroad, newsletters, publications, and so forth. We have a lot going for us, honestly, but of course the English major has been on a precipitous decline for well over a decade. So let's see if this direct advertising is brilliant, or merely desperate.

Yeah, this maybe will be a weird post, coming from a Tolkien scholar. Still, reflecting more on John M. Bowers's excellent Tolkien's Lost Chaucer (2019), I realize that Tolkien would have struggled badly as a modern academic ... and that I, most likely, would have resented him deeply as a colleague.  Not as a person , mind you; Tolkien's a decent enough fellow. But my feelings are very much the product of academic labor under the modern neoliberal university. Thousands upon thousands of academics in various states of precarity: contingent laborers who, despite exceedingly high competence in every area of academic labor (research, teaching, and administration), and despite no research support, poor wages, and stressful labor conditions, nevertheless toil in precarity while certain excessively privileged faculty (certain tenure-trackers, Ivy Leaguers, etc.) muddy along with at best middling competence. Don't get me wrong -- as a philologist, Tolkien was brilliant, and he ...

Recently, a book reviewer for Fafnir  approached me with a problem. His first draft was vague and meandering, but that isn't necessarily unusual, as  most of our reviews need revision. Still, this fellow was a good academic, and it turns out his first draft was messy for a reason. Namely, he was floundering on the ethics of critically reviewing a book whose politics he so ardently supported. Although there  were  criticisms that he considered valid concerning the book's structure, he didn't feel right about expressing them. I appreciated his reaching out to me. I'm a relatively chatty kind of editor, though of course many don't have the time. And the ethics of book reviewing is a real thing. My own viewpoint is slightly different from James Gifford's , who among other good advice nonetheless recommends Books that fulfill career requirements simply cannot be read the same way as those that come after tenure and therefore without the same material demands on the a...

So, yeah, this is my first (and only) fiction reading list update for 2021. Normally, I read enough that I break the year  into two halves, but that wasn't practical this time around. Oh, not because of how awful 2021 was, since it wasn't, but mostly because I exclude academic titles from these productivity lists, and academic reading seems to have monopolized my time this year -- a product of all the research I did on the anthology. The end result is a very  un impressive fiction reading list for the 2021. In fact my fiction reading has been so sparse of late, I deliberately volunteered to review a biography of John Wyndham, a writer I'd never heard of, just to force myself to read more fiction books as research. ... and ended up loving Wyndham, by the way. FINAL STATS FOR 2021 : 6,155 pages (or 31 books) over 365 days,  which averages out to about 17 pages per day. For reference, last year in 2020 -- the real year of the pandemic -- I read over 16,000 pages of fiction. ...

Here's something cool by Contingent Magazine .... a list of books and articles  published in 2021 by non-tenure-track literary scholars. (There's a distressing number of us, alas.) Because of the unbearable slowness of academic publishing, I had a relatively ridiculous seven (!) peer-reviewed articles come out in 2021 -- not to mention 2 non-peer-reviewed articles and one book review, but I didn't bother including those. Overall, it's been a wonderful publishing year, and something of a mental relief to have my insane backlog of academic scholarship taken out of publication limbo.  Still, the high number of quality monographs from fancy university presses by contingent scholars is, I think, a source of legitimate despair for the future of academia.

So, I recently had (for another context) to articulate my basic philosophy of being a book reviews editor, so thought I'd shared that here.  Basically, my view of what a good book review entails appears in Fafnir's book review guidelines . Long story short, this is what I expect: The reviewer should assess the book’s strengths and weaknesses. . . .  If a book has more strengths than weaknesses, or vice versa, please let that be reflected in your structure. We consider it a standard convention of the review genre, however, that even highly laudatory reviews contain some critique, even if a minor one; likewise, even highly negative reviews should contain some elements of praise. In terms of unwritten policies, I return all submissions -- with comments -- to the reviewers within 24 hours. Besides expediting the total publication process, this is a form of practicing compassion for contingent labor and the busy workloads of all our reviewers. About 80% of our reviews re...

Well, there it is -- my first MLA completed. Despite the unfortunateness of an online-only conference, I'm glad I participated .... although, granted, MLA doesn't have much to offer a scholar of SF and fantasy, as there was virtually nothing worthwhile about those topics there. (The International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts will always be better!) All in all, I attended two panels on Fredric Jameson,* and all the CEJL (Council of Editors of Learned Journals) panels about academic publishing. My own panel, "Publishing While Precarious," was a CEJL panel, in fact. So, since I'm unlikely to ever publish an article out of this presentation, here's my conference paper that I presented at MLA 2021: “ Treating Contingent Labor with Compassion: Strategies in Journal Publishing for Reducing Wait Times ”. At least a few people really liked it ... and one respondent, too, really appreciated the point made between wait times and academic "Quit Lit."...

As per my usual policy, I'm excluding the academic titles I've read -- just fiction here. For this latter six months, I've managed to get through 8,250 pages over 184 days, or 44.8 pages per day. (If you're interested, counts for 2019 can be found  here  and  here ; counts for 2018  here  and  here .) So, how did I do for the year? (The first half-year  found here .) FINAL STATS FOR 2020 : 16,550 pages (or 41 books) over 366 days, which averages out to about 45.2 pages per day. July - December 2020 Robert Jordan, The Eye of the World , 700 pg. Saladin Ahmed, The Throne of the Crescent Moon , 350 pg. Steph Swainston, Our Year of the War , 300 pg. Terry Goodkind, Stone of Tears , 1000 pg. David Farland, The Runelords , 600 pg. Brandon Sanderson, Elantris , 600 pg. Piers Anthony, A Spell for Chameleon , 350 pg Piers Anthony, The Source of Magic , 350 pg Piers Anthony, Castle Roogna , 350 pg. Piers Anthony, How Precious Was that While , 300 pg. Piers Antho...

Although I'm used to working everyday, this summer has been especially crazy in terms of teaching: Directed Self-placement Advising through May and June Three weeks in late June revising my online Monsters module actually teaching that online Monsters module in July and August GAT Orientation and Preceptorship in August plus various professional development workshops. Plus, there was all my other writing/research activities . . . finishing up on long essay in May, writing two encyclopedia entries in June, and thus spending July and August writing and research my research proposal for Specters of Tolkien: History, Totality, and Thymos at the Beginning of Epic Fantasy . (This last one is still ongoing.) Now, though, I've just submitted final grades for my Monsters class . . . on the first day of Fall semester. Thus, I'm about to embark on a luxurious 4-hour summer vacation before going back to the grind. Wouldn't trade academia for the world, though.

As usual, I'm not counting the non-fiction I've read -- just the made-up stuff. Final stats: 8,300 pages over 182 days, or 46.1 pages per days . Counts for 2019 can be found here and here ; counts for 2018 here and here . All and all, not the worst I've done (that would have been the prior six months span), but still not fantastic . . . at least I had the Patrick Rothfuss books upping this term's count a bit. THE LIST (Jan. - June 20202) Brandon Sanderson, Warbreaker , 650 pg. Gail Z. Martin, The Summoner , 300 pg (DNF). Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic , 300 pg. Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind , 700 pg. Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear , 1100 pg. Katherine Addison, The Goblin Emperor , 500 pg. Fletcher Pratt and De Camp, "The Wall of Serpents," 100 pg. Peter S. Beagle, Summerlong , 250 pg. Laura E. Goodin, After the Bloodwood Staff , 300 pg. John Myers Myers, Silverlock & Reader's Companio n, 300 pg (DNF). Clive Barker, ...

Academic efficiency is a topic that obsesses me. Although academic culture contains a fair amount of underground animosity against "productivity pressure" and the Protestant Work Ethic --  The Chronicle of Higher Education  is full of it   -- I'm still continually strategizing ways to be more efficient with my working time. This attitude has gotten me through grad school  and  a full-time contingent faculty position without any mental health issues, so there's that. Plus, I just love working for its own sake.  Anyway, here's my latest attempt at self-assessment. In my last year of grad school, I used to keep of yearly productivity record for my writing (see  here  and  here ). Once I began publishing regularly, though, I soon found yearly records impractical. After all, you can wait up to 11 months to get back a journal's reader's reports**, and the revisions sometimes take as long as the original submission. So, here's my first ever...

Rough day yesterday over here at the University of Arizona. The numbers are still in flux, but non-renewal letters went out to around 36 of our 54 faculty in the English Department's Writing Program. All of us were lecturers, all contingent labor. Since fourteen of the people retained were on multi-year contracts (a right instituted just two years ago for promoted faculty), this means that only four out of 38 faculty on the chopping block didn't receive a non-renewal letter. Luckily, I was one of them . . . but only because I teach a really popular online Gen. Ed. course on Monsters, Ghosts, and Aliens whose budget comes from UA online rather than our Writing Program. If enrollment projections increase by the end of the summer, a few of our non-renewed faculty might get offers. But still, not many. Although we had been expecting the worst for weeks, the reality of the layoffs is still a sucker-punch to the gut. EDIT on 6-3-2020 -- the final tally is on: 29 of 54 lecturers w...

So I just found the following: a really cool  S. T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship  that pays a monthly stipend of $2,500 for up to two months of research at the John Hay Library at Brown University. Considering I just got an article on Lovecraft accepted (with minor revisions pending) by Gothic Studies , I'm soooooo tempted to apply for this. But, discipline! After finishing my current two articles, which themselves are coming from my postdoctoral research fellowship from Science Fiction Studies , I really must begin on my monograph. I'm starting to get a bit article'd out, anyway . . . as much as I love the short format, having 6-8 articles "under review" and none of your work for the last 2 years visible does get rather wearying. Books themselves have a long gestation period, of course, but at least they're only one thing to juggle.

This is the second half (July through December) of my 2019 reading list -- the first half may be found here . As usual, I'm not including my non-fiction reading & research, mostly because I've gotten so good at "gutting" those texts that page counts are pretty irrelevant. At least with the fiction. I paid pretty good attention to every page. So, without further ado: Poul Anderson, The Broken Sword , 200 pg. Poul Anderson, Three Hearts and Three Lion s, 150 pg Poul & Karen Anderson, The Unicorn Trade , 250 pg. Glen Cook, The Swordbearer, 250 pg. Paul Edwin Zimmer & Jon DeCles, Blood of the Colyn Muir , 250 pg. Lawrence Watt-Evans, The Misenchanted Sword , 250 pg Michael Moorcock, Elric of Melnibone and Other Stories , 200 pg. Marie Brennan, A Natural History of Dragons , 350 pg. Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens , 400 pg. Trudi Canavan, The Black Magician , 400 pg. Karen Miller, The Innocent Mage , 600 pg. T. H. White, The Sword in the ...

So, in my next-to-last post , I related the rather mind-boggling incident of a young-ish academic who, submitting a review to me, had plagiarized my own review on that same book. Well, I'm happy to report that this situation will apparently have a happy ending. After a few sternly worded e-mails, it looks like the reviewer in question will work diligently to produce a new, better review. I won't know for sure until it's actually submitted, but I'm hopeful. As I mentioned in my earlier post, this was a teachable moment-- that's always my gut reaction in these kinds of cases, whether I'm dealing with undergraduate freshmen or more advanced academics. Sure, it astounded me that a doctoral student could believe I wouldn't notice the plagiarism. But everyone has to learn sometime, and one's first foray into professional academic discourse can be intimating. And while I'm more than willing to use my meager institutional authority strategically to employ ...

"Academic efficiency" is my internal term for maximizing the use of one's time. Oftentimes, I think the people who succeed best in our world are those with a knack for self-organization, not to mention self-motivation. For a graduate student, this means juggling classes, both teaching and taking, thinking about your next step in the program, and dealing with graduate school's needless and seemingly mandated endemic poverty. For an early career academic, efficiency means constantly -- and I mean constantly -- thinking of new additions for one's C.V. Since I've finished up my encyclopedia entry for The Literary Encyclopedia on Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed , I've been pondering "academic efficiency" once again.** The chain of events leading to this entry is pretty awesome and amazing, but think about this -- out of that one Paris conference on Le Guin, I've squeezed out the following publications: 1 conference presentation (plus ...

Advice manuals for people in graduate programs often say, "Avoid edited collections like the plague!"* Submit articles only to peer-reviewed journals, they continue, and don't let some editor get your dissertation chapter for some forgettable new collection. This is good advice, and I know it, but I broke it anyway some four years ago. Saw a CfP for a peer-reviewed collection of essays, and wrote a dissertation chapter with that volume specifically in mind. At the time, the decision made sense. After all, I was currently writing the dissertation, the terrors of the academic job market were looming, and publications are a good line on the CV (or at least better than no line on the CV). Nor did I plan for this dissertation/book chapter combo to survive into my eventual monograph. Hence, I wasn't really "wasting" my research on an inferior publication venue. Alas, 3 1/2 years after submitting the original manuscript, I've finally pulled that book chapte...