I resubmitted the Heartbreak Paper today.
Do you remember the sad tale of the Heartbreak Paper? Four years ago I gave an interdisciplinary conference talk that I wanted to turn into a paper. I emailed one of the leading lights in Discipline #2 and said, "Hey, would you like to write a paper with me?" To my surprise and delight she said, "Sure! You write the first draft and I'll write the second."
In the spring of 2014 we submitted it to a Discipline #1 journal; in the summer, we received a cautious revise/resubmit decision. Oh, boy, did I revise. Hours and hours and hours and hours invested in making the changes that the reviewers requested. Almost exactly three years ago, I resubmitted it. In the winter of 2015 it was rejected. When I got the decision email I closed my office door and cried.
Because it's an interdisciplinary paper, it was hard to find a good alternate home for it. Also, I was crushed like a weeping bug who was paralyzed by impostor syndrome. One really sad bug is what I'm saying here. But I kept looking, and sent it off in 2016 to a lower-tier journal that had responded favorably to my initial query.
Rejected again.
In 2017 I got some outside feedback on the Heartbreak Paper. I thought about pitching it as a book chapter. I thought about self-publishing it on my university's online archive. I thought about interdisciplinary journals. But dernit, you guys, I wrote this paper for service providers in Discipline #1, and they won't read it if it's in some backwater interdisciplinary journal that wants to charge them $45 for the privilege. And do you know what? They need to read this paper. I am the most self-critical person you have never met, and yet every time I come back to this paper I think, "Wow, this is an excellent paper. This is the best damn thing I have ever written for an academic audience and it deserves to be published."
So. I reworked it for still another publication. This one has a much lower word limit, so I hacked away great chunks of the paper. "Killing my darlings," said my email to the writing challenge coordinator. "Still killing those darlings," said the next email. Today I extracted the remains of the paper from the bleeding wreckage of dead darlings scattered round about and sent it off into the ether.
And if it gets rejected again, I might have to set something on fire. Wish me luck. Or pass the matches. One of the two.
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