Remember how I was feeling pessimistic about a manuscript I resubmitted at the beginning of June? I had labored over that sucker, but rejection seemed like the most likely outcome. I was trying to view it as an opportunity for spiritual growth, by which I mean I've been attempting not to react physically when I open my email, with flinching body, wincing grimace, and squinting eyes (so I could sort of see but not very well).
In the past few years I'd had two bruising rejections from journals published by my professional organization, one of them especially heartbreaking. I'd published elsewhere in the meantime; I'd also published in both of those journals with a different first author. Even so, I was still feeling gun-shy about submitting a first-author manuscript to the flagship journal, and the tone of our initial reviews did not help at all. I knew that I could find a home for it in a lower-tier journal, but I really did not want to rewrite it for another editor.
Then! Today! The email came! The subject line set off an immediate adrenaline response, so potent that it took me a minute to calm down and figure out what the decision actually was. It was...(hurray!)...minor revision!
Reviewer 1 is happy. Reviewer 2 is nitpicking. The editor even said, albeit more diplomatically, "Reviewer 2 is nitpicking." I can do some nitpicky revisions to get another first-author pub in the flagship journal. I won't even complain about them. I am so relieved. It's still not 100% certain that they'll accept it, but it's a whole lot more likely now that this paper will appear where I hoped it would appear. (It would be pretty weird if they rejected it at this point -- not impossible, but pretty unlikely.) Big thanks to Our Lady Untier of Knots for her intercession.
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