Stratofanatic's Emporium

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.

So, after sending back the proofs of a recently accepted article within 8 hours of receipt, the editor wrote to me: Wow, that is the quickest turnaround where we know you actually looked at the proofs in journal history. :) Which, of course, is nice!  I do try, after all. But it also makes me reflect that, really, there's no real reason any stage of the academic publishing process has to take so long (besides the writing and revision stages.) When I receive reviews for Fafnir , I return commentary within 24 hours. And my peer reviews are finished in a week -- not the months it normally takes others -- unless I need to consult some special hard-to-get source. It's just a matter of staying on tops of things. No wonder academics are so stressed all the time.

So, the website academia.edu tends to be highly panned by real academics -- it's free to upload your papers, but the website's attempts to get people to buy subscriptions are pretty desperate. (For instance, their myriad notifications that "Someone just viewed your paper X in an academia.edu search" give a misleading impression that more people are reading your work than truly are.) But one nice feature they have: if you download a paper, you can leave a note to the author explaining your reason for downloading. And I just received the following note: I am taking a class about The Hobbit at my local bookstore in DC with Verilyn Flieger and she recommended this article. Which is amazing that Dr. Flieger actually knows the article and recommend it to someone -- a lay reader, no less.** That really bucks me up. The essay in question is " Unraveling The Hobbit’s Strange Publication History: A Look at Possible Worlds, Modality, and Accessibility Relations ," ...

Well! I applied for -- and received -- a preceptorship from the U of A Writing Program to help train and mentor incoming graduate students, who will teach English 101 and English 102 online. Initially, I didn't even think of applying. More than enough things currently on my plate, you know, including teaching sections of Honors module for incoming freshman in the Fall, but I applied when our WP director suggested the idea to me. Overall, since our GTAs will be teaching the program's pre-designed online courses, which I know inside and out, I was pretty sure that I'd get the position. Still, it's quite nice . . . and I'm slowly growing more excited about the prospect.** So, for the rest of August, I'll help prepare our Orientation Week for graduate teaching assistants -- the first time, in fact, I've ever been on the other side of one of these things. Teaching everything through Zoom, though, is disappointing. I'd love the energy of meeting all our ne...

It still hasn't really sunk in yet, but our academic journal, Fafnir , has just been nominated as a finalist for the 2020 World Fantasy Award in the "Special Award: Non-Professional" category! I'm just blown away by this nomination. Sure, we've worked hard the last three years to professionalize Fafnir, and there's been tons of improvements. But . . . honestly, as an academic, it just never even occurred to me that I'd be engaged in something that falls under the World Fantasy Award umbrella. So, needless to say, I'm still processing -- but in a good way.  ;)

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, ...

We all know that he first published the novel in 1954 . . . but when did he write it? The question came up because my two latest entries for The Literary Encyclopedia , a biographical entry of Poul Anderson and an account of his best fantasy novel , just went online a few days ago. There, I mentioned that Anderson began and completed The Broken Sword in 1948. Well, no sooner did that happen than another scholar sent me a message asking for my source. And, wouldn't you know, I can't find it now. The issue's seriously bugging me.  It's pretty well established that The Broken Sword is Anderson's earliest written novel, which he wrote before  Vault of the Ages  (1952). Vault was composed in the 1951-1952 range; it uses an idea similar to one that appeared in "Tiger by the Tail" (1951). Likewise, Anderson mentions in his Foreword to the [January] 1971 revised edition of The Broken Sword that he wrote the original novel "twenty-odd years ago"...