Okay, I am calling it good on the research front for 2020.
Of the three papers I submitted early in the semester and revised in November, one was accepted on Wednesday (tra-la-LAA!), one is still with the reviewers, and the other one is going into timeout until next year, when perhaps I will feel less grumpy about the editor's response. I have until January 22 to submit the revisions, which should only take a single-digit number of hours if I can prevent myself from pausing every 15 minutes to bellow "I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS NONSENSE," so I won't worry about them for now.
I also submitted two additional papers this month, so I'm finishing out the semester with five papers at various points along the publishing pipeline. I was talking to a colleague on Wednesday about our 2021 plans to write a grant together. She graduated from our PhD program two years before me, and has spent her career working at more research-oriented institutions with a correspondingly lighter teaching load. She said, "I have never had five papers in the pipeline at once."
I have spent the fall worrying that I should be doing more-more-more, worrying about the time that the kids' transition to (and then from and then to) online school has required of me, worrying about whether I have been accomplishing enough to set myself up for promotion to full professor when I am eligible to apply. When I checked in with my new chair in October and told her what I'd finished so far, she said, "That is an incredible amount of work." Weirdly, this caused me to feel that I needed to do a comparable amount of work in the second half of the semester so she would not think I was a slacker. Even more weirdly, two of the papers I have under review at this time consider the impact of self-compassion on women's mental health. Dr. Gladly, heal thyself.
I am not very far into teaching prep for the spring semester, so I will need to put in some recording time and some editing time before the end of the year. But I am going to take a wee break from thinking about academic writing. It's been a gift to have this semester without teaching and service responsibilities, and it has highlighted for me how much I love to have time blocked off for research. It's hard to explain the geeky thrill I get from exploring a new corner of the literature and then figuring out how my work fits into it-- it's the best way to start the workday.
And at the same time-- I might not submit any new papers for a little while here.
Recent Comments