Another summer gone, another school year starting. *sigh* Here are some pertinent news. 

⁕ That leadership position I mentioned before? First I had said no, then the chair came back with data, and I kind of had to say yes. The chair blinded me with science, if you will. So, I guess I’m doing it. Leading and bleeding. 

⁕ So many grants to be written this coming year. So. Many. Grants. 😭

⁕ Recently had a paper rejected after the second round of reviews. The first round was excruciatingly detailed, but, apparently, all the many, many, MANY requested and implemented edits weren’t enough. Basically, nothing is wrong with the paper. It was the case of referees  (one of them, in particular) wanting a different paper. They had issues with several examples and insisted those be changed to their specifications for no reason that was clear to me other than that they’d prefer to have those done in that  way if the paper were theirs. 

I always hate it when this happens, as it’s reviewer overreach. You’re reviewing the manuscript before you, not writing your own. It’s OK if it’s not exactly how you would write it. Assess it on correctness, timeliness, and readability, not on how well it aligns with your particular vision of a paper. 

In the past, I would’ve battled the reviewers, but I just don’t have it in me anymore, honestly. I will take the paper elsewhere, but I hate that we lost all the months to the slow review and lengthy edits, and in the year before I have all the grant renewals. And the combative reviewer said they’d liked the work, so I don’t even think they wanted to see the paper ultimately declined; they just wanted it edited to be just so, and now they’ve screwed us. 

Man, I’m too old for this sh*t .

⁕ Finished second novel (75k words, which is a solid length in the genre). Wrote first draft between mid-May and mid-July; it took less than 8 weeks. Finished several rounds of editing (including incorporating input from beta readers) by mid-August, submitted to the publisher that put out my first novel and has the right of first refusal, and now I wait. The first novel took longer to draft because, let’s face it, I had no idea what I was doing (wrote probably 65% during summer in 2022 and 35% plus over winter break), but now that I’ve had proof of concept (the concept being that I can actually write a publishable novel), I completely espouse the assertion (made by many productive writers, like Stephen King and John Scalzi)  that you can write the first draft of a novel in under three months. If there is more interest in the logistics, I can share it here later, but the main things for me were: 1) I had a rough weekly word goal of 10k words (and a rough daily word goal of 2k words, which was secondary to the weekly goal, and some days were easy and some were haaaaard), and sometimes I exceeded one or both because it was summer, but sometimes I didn’t come close to either, and some weeks I wrote six days and others I wrote two or three, but overall the wins overshadowed the losses; 2) I wrote at a local bookstore in the evenings, after dinner, 6ish to 9 PM, when the store closed. Writing when tired has the benefit of blocking the inner editor and enabling me to get good flow; as a morning person, I have perhaps too much energy when I wake up, and should do math or coding or editing or go kick someone’s a$$ (even though, let’s face it, I mostly waste time on social media or respond to email 😩), and should definitely not attempt to wax poetic or generate fluid, emotion-filled prose. So yeah—writing when tired FTW! My plan is to draft the next novel by the end of fall (good luck to me,  given how much proposal writing I have to do). Basically, banging out a novel per semester (fall, spring, summer) should be something I could do, at least in principle. I know this sounds like a lot, and it sounded like a lot to me, too, until I realized that most people who are serious about writing novels can and do do it, and most of them have day jobs with less flexibility than mine. Also, I’m a pain-in-the-a$$ who says, well, if they can do it, so can I, and, as it turns out, I (kind of) can. 

⁕ Before I get into the next novel, I want to finalize Academadness. The plan right now is to touch up the manuscript and then see if I can get the full wrap cover for the paperback finished, then get the print proofs, and once it’s done, it should be available to purchase. So a couple of months from now, you should be able to buy both ebook and print. 

How’ve you been, blogosphere readers? How was your summer? Any grand or not-so-grand plans for the fall?