The first week of January is traditionally International Blog Delurking Week, but it slipped my mind so we ‘re doing it a little late.

Without further ado…

*drumroll*

Delurkpalooza 2024!

Show thyself, dear blog reader! Whether you’re old or new, whether you commented before or not,  please stop by and tell us a little about yourself. Are you a student, faculty, or staff? Are you someone in a line of work outside academia? How did you find the blog? What do you most like to read about here on xykademiqz?

How was 2023 for you? What lifted your spirits? What are you looking forward to in 2024?

Come say ‘hi’ — we’d love to hear from you!

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? 

When you become senior enough, you get to (kind of) be temporarily in charge of other senior academics, generally as chair of a committee, or seventeen.

I don’t know if I am finally achieving new levels of maturity, but I’ve acquired some unexpected insights from chairing one important university committee. One such insight has to do with having always felt like I was too uncouth for academia. It turns out there is (probably) nothing wrong with me. I have witnessed people lauded for their tact and composure do stuff I never would, or stuff that, if I did, I would beat myself up over for half a decade. Yet, these other folks don’t seem to be plagued by guilt or shame. It truly is all about how one sees oneself.

Senior academics feel very strongly about things and believe they know best, which makes them challenging to lead. With some, the knowing best manifests as belligerence. With others, it presents as excessive proactiveness, doing something far too soon or doing something that turns out to be a bad idea, then backtracking and causing things to fall into disarray.

I’ve had the previous committee chair, now no longer chair but still on the committee, all but scold me over doing something that is not procedure, just something this person individually feels should be done a certain different way. I responded to the barely disguised written snark with a thank you, then took the issue to the whole committee, where we collectively decided how it would be handled in the future. I owe the former chair some deference, but not limitless deference. Former chair is still just a faculty member, just like myself.

Overall, as challenging as herding cats might be, it has made me feel better about myself as a grownup academic. Seeing others lose their cool, do (minor) imprudent things, and say stuff that is not perfect for the occasion feels vindicating. It also makes me resent all the more the person who, years ago, when I was first starting out as faculty, flat out told me I didn’t have the personality for administration; since the words played into my existing insecurities, I took them as the truth. I hope the person was simply wrong, the way people with big egos are wrong when they assume they know things well beyond the realm of  competence, and not that they tried to manipulate me. Because it turns out my poker face has gotten good over the years, my written-communication game is on point, and I have just the right amount of not giving a fuck on account of my gooey center no longer being beholden to academia that I might be ready for larger herds of academic cats. I might even enjoy the challenge.

Happy Turkey Day!

I cooked all day yesterday, I have to grade a midterm all day today, and then cook all day tomorrow because it’s spouse’s birthday and there’s a labor-intensive dish he wants. Then on Sunday I grade the midterm for another class.

***

I finally picked a notes app and entered all the stuff I need to do in a checklist and then cackled like a helpless psychotic witch because of how long the list is. Reader, I am overcommitted.

***

I got a bite on my short-story collection. It’s a cross-genre collection organized around a cool theme and I think it works well, but, alas, the cross-genre-ness of it is a problem, as I suspected it might be, because most publishers are genre-specific. So this publisher wants to nix some stories and do some other stuff, and while what they ask is reasonable, most of what I feel is exhaustion. Like, can you just take it, OK? I wish there were one thing I could do and it was done, and I wouldn’t have to go back and endlessly tinker. Obviously, I am not communicating any of this to the publisher, and I will do the right thing eventually,  and in any case the book is with a few other publishers so we will see what comes out of it all, but the wave of exhaustion is real. Like—one more thing? I can’t just get an unqualified win?

***

Man, I’m whiny. I don’t like feeling whiny.

***

I’ve been thinking about the field of modeling and simulation, and about recipes, and about cranberry sauce in particular because it’s Thanksgiving. The base of the cranberry sauce is simple: you need cranberries, water, and sugar. The sugar and the pectin from the burst cranberries thicken into a sauce; that’s the sauce essence. Now, you can add orange zest or cinnamon or replace water with orange juice or whatever, and these certainly might make for a more interesting-tasting sauce, but the sauce essence is the same and it is simple. The small list of critical ingredients necessary to achieve the essence of a dish is something that experienced cooks understand, which is why they are able to throw together delicious meals from whatever they have on hand. They understand the chemistry of cooking, how ingredients interact, and what effects their interactions have. (Incidentally, the show Lessons in Chemistry, starring Brie Larson, is pretty awesome.) They don’t waste time or money on procuring 2 milligrams of powdered bat wings as per some random recipe because they understand it’s a completely optional element to the dish.

There is usually a small number of reasons why some physical phenomenon takes place. Being able to identify them requires intuition and experience and usually a pen and paper, or a relatively simple computational model. Yet we increasingly see very sophisticated simulation tools used as blunt instruments, simulating everything but explaining nothing. It’s not the simulation tools’ fault. Some people are focused on getting every detail right, presumably chasing perfect agreement with observations, so they  throw everything at the problem and thereby obscure the (few!) critical insights that would have alone explained the phenomenon with ~80-90% accuracy.

We need to go easy on powdered bat wings.

It’s November, the time of NaNoWriMo and NaBloPoMo, and in years past I blogged daily during the month, but this November the idea of blogging even close to every day is so laughable, I might have peed myself a little just thinking about it.

In other words, there’s no way I can pull off every day, or even every other day. I will strive for twice a week, and we’ll see how it goes.

This semester is the worst of all the semesters, ever. I don’t know what the hell is going on (only I know; teaching overload and service overload). It’s just non-fucking-stop.

The workload is so bad I realized there would also be no way I could finalize Academadness by the late November deadline. I need the semester to simply be over. So I have pushed the release of Academadness to March. That’s the only way I will have a fighting chance to do a good job at putting the finishing touches on this collection.

In regular blogging news, plenty of academic stuff comes up and I want to write about it, but the time isn’t there, and then I forget.

Still, here’s one vignette from several weeks ago. We had an important external visitor in the department, a technical person. I didn’t have even half an hour to spare during the day to meet him, so another colleague in a similar predicament and I offered to take the visitor to dinner. I certainly planned to talk shop, and the colleague did, too.

Only last minute we found out that the visitor had brought his wife along and she would be joining us for dinner, and would we mind?

When I heard the news, I felt a surge of anger. It was so sudden and so powerful, that it got me thinking—why such a strong reaction for what is essentially a minor change in plans?

This is what I came up with.

First, I was only meeting with the visitor so we could talk shop. I wanted to talk shop. Shop talk was raison d’etre for the dinner. I had no interest in socializing. I am out-of-my-mind busy, and I am giving up my evening during which I might get a chance to unwind, for this meeting, which is now not what it was supposed to be, and which would instead become an exercise in small-talk inanity. Even at conferences, I honestly hate socializing with spouses; I am there to work, and whatever socializing is for work networking purposes. I am not there to make personal friends.

But there’s another dimension of this all. Most people in my field are men, and all the senior men have homemaker wives. Junior men aren’t quite like that and there are many more professional wives, but the older guard is very traditional. Every time a stay-at-home wife is brought along (and this one turned out to be one such wife), I am reminded of how  unnatural I must appear to her husband. I am some sort of ungodly amalgamation of him and her, a woman like her but not really a woman, because he clearly thinks a real woman stays at home; I do a job just like him, but I bet he does not consider me an equal,  because I am a woman like his wife, and he is definitely the boss of her. The dinner was a reminder of how out of place most people in my field must find me to be.

Anyway, the dinner was fine, albeit boring, but probably not warranting a flareup of fury. The wife was indeed as traditional and demure as they come; her husband, the visitor, was the lead of the household around whose career everyone else’s life had to fit. My department colleague tried really hard to talk a little bit of shop while keeping the wife engaged in the conversation, a feat of great bravery at which he ultimately failed. The conversation then veered into that most annoying of genres—where we have traveled for work and what sights we have we seen, something old-timers fucking love but I will never understand the fascination with—followed by talk of kids and even grandkids. Innocuous and pointless; I’d rather have been talking about work or else at home, relaxing.

How’s your November, blogosphere? As grouchy as mine? 

Whenever I start to leave needlessly elaborate comments on other people’s blogs, that’s a signal I should probably write my own post. The exhausting semester proceeds apace, with the pace being one that gives whiplash. Sunday evening is a time of dread as I face the calendar of upcoming obligations.

Last week, I had a group meeting till half an hour before my afternoon lecture. A normal person would assume I’d use that time to go to the bathroom, maybe glance at my notes, and just generally get in the headspace needed to prance with markers for seventy-five minutes (plus up to an hour after class). Alas, I had to squeeze in another online meeting into those thirty minutes. Yes, that was the only possible meeting time. As they say, FML. I felt so lucky and so grateful that the squeezed-in meeting ended ten minutes early and I could, in fact, go to the bathroom. This is not normal.

I wrote on Twitter (that would be my long-neglected xykademiqz/Sydney Phlox account) that, if I could get rid of service in exchange for more teaching, I totally would. In a heartbeat. Maybe I should pitch it, see if my chair would go for it. Probably not, but a girl can dream.

I take Saturdays off (yesterday I had all these relaxation plans, many of which were sidelined by me taking a three-hour nap in the afternoon, like an infant, and still going to bed at a regular hour, and watching more episodes of Invasion with hubs. Today (Sunday) was shopping, cooking, chores, and catching up on work, student question through the discussion portal, random shit I needed to send to colleagues (papers, data, slides), etc. I’m hopelessly behind on everything that actually matters (e.g., papers going out so our grants would get renewed and other “unimportant” stuff).

OK, I’m bumming myself out. Here’s some levity from the platform formerly known as Twitter, where one could previously find a humorous tweet followed by plenty of wit in the comments, but can now generally finds a humorous tweet followed by a trashfire of unrelated comments.

Without further ado, from my bookmarks:

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/how-rock-and-roll-stays-relevant-in-middle-age-and-beyond

This is officially the busiest semester I’ve ever had in my life. 😭

Teaching overload; insane service; the two afternoons I am not completely swamped with the former two,  I’m desperately trying to finish and submit some papers.

I am not twenty or even thirty anymore, and my body no longer tolerates lack of sleep. If I get less than 5 hours, I’m useless the following day; this wasn’t the case when I was young, but I suppose  all good things must come to an end.

Face time with students and colleagues is so much more draining now than it used to be. On days when I teach my classes, I need a good 30–60 min after the last class for the adrenaline high to dissipate before I am human enough to head home.

Bottom line, I really have to do all my work at work and I can’t skimp on sleep or downtime like I used to, because there will be hell to pay if I do. I have objectively more work now than I did before because I’m more senior, and while I am better and more efficient at my job, I also can’t work nonstop like I used to, nor do I want to, if I’m being honest.

How is your semester going, blogosphere? 

Ladies and gentlemen!

Without further ado, I present to you…

*drumroll*

…the cover of Academadness! 

Isn’t it awesome? Adrian Medina of Fabled Beast Design did a smashing job. (Adrian is also an accomplished horror writer and editor of Aphotic Realm magazine and press.) Basically, I told him I wanted a Goosebumps theme, but with academic details, and he ran with it. Werewolves in lab coats might be my favorite element.

Planned release date for Academadness is at the end of November, and there will be preorder links available here and on Amazon in a couple of weeks, so you can treat yourself for Christmas. If you are interested in reviewing an ARC, please sign up using the Google Form below. Most ARCs will be electronic, but a limited number of paperbacks will be available, as well.

Sign up to receive an advance review copy of Academadness

GOOD NEWS! My novel got picked up by a small genre publisher. I’m very excited. The good news arrived during our family’s weeklong getaway to our home away from home, and this is the third year in a row that I’ve received good news while there (the previous two years involved grant money). So, the home away from home is officially a magical place. 

On Tuesday, after Labor day, I will reveal the cover and post the sign-up sheet for ARCs (advance review  copies) for the sequel to Academaze. Trust me, it will be awesome—less a cool didactic breeze and more a maelstrom of midcareer rage. 

I taught all summer, so I am starting a new semester, with a teaching overload and seven gajillion committees, not actually rested. However, the aforementioned weeklong getaway (which I’ve enjoyed more than any vacation in recent memory, and not just because of the novel-acceptance news) did lift my spirits some.  

Not long ago, I attended the abstract-sorting meeting for a conference with a significant industry presence, which was also reflected by the program-committee composition. It felt like the Twilight Zone. I was shocked by: a) the degree to which the expertise of colleagues who submitted abstracts was questioned, as if all those PhD-holding scientists are somehow idiots while those who happened to serve on the committee were imbued with uncommon wisdom by virtue of said service; b) dismissal of interesting, exciting abstracts for reasons of unbelievable pedantry and pettiness; c) people who themselves do pretty unremarkable work being the most negative and dismissive judges of the work of others; d) it is a conflict of interest to read and score a paper where the author is someone from your institution you’ve never heard of but who’d author number seven out of fifteen total, yet it is somehow not a conflict of interest  to read and score a paper coauthored by your former student or postdoc; e) the part I cannot get over is that we had room to accept half a dozen abstracts more than we did, there was still room in the schedule, and I was the only one who advocated that we go back and look again at some declined abstracts that were close—we had a ton of good papers, not that you’d know from all the draconian slashes— because in my apparently unpopular view it is a good thing to have more  people come and present their work, only for my suggestions to be met with complete incredulity. The whole thing had the feeling of an NSF panel, if the panel were at its absolute pettiest, most destructive limit. But an NSF panel will always, always rally around funding as many proposals as possible. If the program director suddenly said, “We have money for two more,” even the most obnoxious panelists would come together with a consensus to recommend two more for funding. 

Anyway, I think I might be temporarily burned out on reviewing other people’s work. 

How’s the end of your summer going, blogosphere? Anything you loved/hated this summer? Anything you’re eagerly awaiting or dreading this fall? 

Over the past few months I’ve been thinking, on and off, about the concept of closure. How people crave it, how often they feel entitled to it, how the popular culture seems to indicate it is both necessary and probable, and how the reality is far from it.

You send a grant to a funding agency, and it comes with brief, infuriatingly vague comments. There’s nothing actionable in the feedback. You wish you could somehow reach through the funding-agency portal and into the past to grab the reviewer by the shoulders and shake them until they tell you what exactly it is that they didn’t like in your meticulously written proposal. The truth is, you will never really  know. You will have to go with your experience if you are to revise. Maybe the reviewer’s own Dunning-Kruger prevented them from admitting they didn’t understand the project. Maybe they didn’t take the review seriously enough. Bottom line is, they didn’t like it, so it won’t get funded. You will never know exactly why.

A friend ghosts you. A romantic partner breaks it off with some it’s-not-you-it’s-me faux reason. They will probably never tell you why. Does it even matter why? You can try to figure it out on your own, but it won’t change the outcome. Ultimately, they’re gone.

Why do we expect closure? I understand craving it, but why do we feel entitled to it? Part of it is not wanting to admit that things are over, and hopelessly so. Part of it is probably because popular culture makes it seem that closure is necessary in order to move on, and also likely. In popular movies, there are no loose ends at the conclusion of the narrative arc. The character faces their nemesis or an estranged parent or a former lover. Everything gets wrapped up, with in a neat little bow on top, because that’s how compelling storytelling works. The movies where things are left open-ended are considered artsy at best, bad and infuriating at worst. But they are closer to reality than the popular fare.

People who are in our lives don’t owe it to us to remain in our lives. Maybe we outlived our usefulness; this is cold and calculated, but sadly quite common. Maybe we hurt them or neglected them; then it’s out fault that they left. The point is, once someone is out of your life and doesn’t seem responsive to nudges, let them be. There’s no point in chasing them under the guise of seeking closure, because you already know the most important thing you need to know—they don’t want to be around anymore. It’s often a small mercy that they don’t relent in your quest to give you closure; are you sure you really want to know all the ways in which you suck?

I have certainly cut off contact with people without pomp or circumstance. If they deeply reflected on our relationship, they could probably figure out what was bothering me and what the reason was behind the withdrawal, but in a true Catch-22 situation, had they been able to reflect to the needed degree, we would not have gotten to the point that I had to withdraw. “But how will they know to do better next time?” you ask. I don’t care; it’s not my problem anymore. I don’t owe anyone an explanation after we no longer have a relationship. They have all they need to figure things out if they want to, but they probably won’t. I don’t owe them more emotional work.

A couple of months ago, a beta reader for my novel commented how a character needed to get closure in their relationship with a parent who’d spent the character’s whole life being avoidant and neglectful. The reader said the character needed a big moment of facing said parent and sharing their hurt. I don’t think so. Someone whose job was to love and cherish you failed to do so for years; you think they give a shit about your hurt feelings? You think they will be shocked and dismayed at the damage they’ve done? Hell no. That is probably what they were going for to begin with, even if it wasn’t fully conscious. No character of mine is going to give a horrible parent the satisfaction of articulating their own hurt. It wouldn’t be closure; it would ultimate humiliation. The parent can go @#$%&#%^ themselves while the character purges them from their life.

What say you, blogosphere? How important is it to get closure? How probable? And how is it mid-August already?