XYKADEMIQZ

Happy 2024! May it bring you good health and contentment, and, if you’re in academia, also untold grant riches, high-profile publications, and a teaching schedule that makes you miss the most pointless meetings.

This has been my 2023:

Professional:

• Taught seven million courses, or at least it feels like I did. I taught a large undergrad course in the spring, another large undergrad course in the summer, and two courses in the fall (one large undergrad and one upper-level grad in an adjacent field to mine) because of people on sabbatical etc., so overall I taught twice as many courses as I should have based on how many students and how much grant money I have (I am actually pretty flush right now). I want to be a good citizen and be helpful to the department, but I am also feeling a bit (OK, more than a bit) resentful that I had to do all this because I know a lot of my colleagues would never say yes. I understand the chair needs to staff courses and all, but I wish the chair would put more pressure on the people who would do a crappier job. I am tired of being penalized for good teaching by being given even more teaching. I want to not even be asked, like the disinterested teachers get to never be asked. I want to not always be put in the position to have to say no over and over, and defend myself from repeated requests until I am worn down.
• Did a staggering amount of service, a large portion of which involved evaluating other people’s work in every way imaginable. I don’t want to write any more reports on anyone’s papers, grants, tenure dossiers, promotion-to-full dossiers, or any nomination for anything ever. I want to write optimistic poems about nature and the sun and about bees buzzing, and not have to write yet another takedown of someone’s grant or paper because their claim of novelty relies on not citing relevant prior work, pretending it doesn’t exist.
• Fell very far behind on papers thanks to having been completely blocked by teaching and service this past semester. This is filling me with dread for the upcoming funding cycle. There’s still a year and change before the situation becomes dire, but as we all know, the time to start slinging those white papers is now.
• Traveled internationally for work for the first time since before Covid; one of those trips was with middle kid, and it was honestly great. I am really glad I could do this with him. It would’ve been even greater had I not gotten sick on the way back.

Personal:

• Finished a novel, queried, and ended up with a contract with a small genre publisher in August 2023. The book is now undergoing publisher’s edits and will be out sometime in the first half of 2024. It would be nice if I’d gotten an agent, but honestly I think this novel wasn’t the one to get me an agent anyway. I am taking publication with a reputable genre outlet as a win.
• Wrote and published some short fiction, but much less than in earlier years. Part of it was being busy with work, but the other part was the process of querying the novel, which is pretty soul-sucking. I would say it is even more soul-sucking than writing grants, and we all know grants are a high bar for how much of your soul they can suck away. The whole year, between querying the novel and having so much teaching and service, I felt like my creative well was basically a colander, where I kept refilling it (see next bullet) but barely anything remained inside. But refill it I must.
• Read like a literary speed demon (finished over 200 books on Kindle, with probably another two dozen assorted paperbacks and about as many ebook rereads). I have almost completely stopped watching shows and movies because they make me antsy and don’t hold my attention as well as they used to. These days, I watch a couple of shows once a week with hubs, the rest of the time I read to decompress. And I needed to decompress a lot this year.
• Sent out a collection of short stories and flash fiction to a few small publishers (short-story collections aren’t big sellers, so I didn’t even try querying agents with it). I knew the collection would be tough to sell as it’s cross-genre, but I feel I did a good job organizing the stories around three interconnected themes. I got one serious bite and am currently working with that publisher on a revised table of contents that would be a little better aligned with their vibe and would include more stories.

In the coming year, I plan to:

• Write ALL TEH PAPERZ
• Write ALL TEH WHITE PAPERZ, and then a few grants
• Recruit a bunch of new graduate students
• Stop myself from giving so much of my emotional energy to my work because it has never and will never love me back
• Draft the second novel in the spring. It’s been marinating in my mind for months, but I haven’t had the mental space to start on it thanks to workload in summer and fall. I have a five-book series loosely planned.
• Put out Academadness in spring 2024
• Promote debut novel that is coming out sometime in 2024
• Finalize the edits and contract for short-story collection. Hopefully see it published.
• Write some short fiction beyond flash. After publishing a ton of flash, I think I’m craving meatier fare in between novels.
• It’s crazy that it’s quite possible I will have three very different books (a novel, a short-story collection, and a nonfiction collection of essays on academia) under three very different pen names, all coming out this year. If someone told me this at a party (“I’m having three books under three different pen names coming out this year”) I would think they’re making it up and are possibly a little nutty. Yet, here I am; not making it up, but definitely more than a little nutty.
• It’s so strange to produce so much writing yet have virtually no one IRL know about any of it. My parents knew about Academaze; they don’t know about fiction. I have friends from childhood who  tell me about mountaineering or their toy-car collections, and I basically pretend not to have hobbies. I tried to tell one recently about writing, but it felt so weird and strange and dangerous that I quickly gave up on the idea. I am very, very boring IRL.

How’s your year been, blogosphere? Highlights from 2023? Plans for 2024?