Monday, March 26, 2007

The Longer You Wait, the Harder it is.

My supervisor caught me in the hall the other day to ask me how the essay I've been working on is coming. (I swear to god, it's going to be done by the end of the day today) But he also asked, "And you don't have anything else in the pipeline right now, right?" For those non-philosophers among you, the pipleine refers to having a paper out there, under review at some journal, at some stage in the process of getting it published.

Here's the thing. It took me a few seconds to answer his question. I couldn't remember whether I had another paper under review. I do, as it happens. And it's a paper I really wouldn't expect I'd forget about, since writing it felt like passing a grapefruit-sized kidney stone slowly over three months, and then dealing with two senior faculty members--both on my committee--telling me entirely different things about what changes to make to the kidney stone. That paper hurt like a motherfucker. So much so, in fact, that I'm starting to get a little nauseous right now just thinking about having to revise it more.

The point is, I'm not going to be doing that revision anytime soon, and for the same reason that I forgot about the paper. Because I sent it off to a journal almost five months ago. Five fucking months. And according to this wiki, I can expect to wait at least another four months before hearing an initial verdict. Seven to nine months between your initial submission and an initial verdict. Assuming that verdict is either a revise-and-resubmit or an outright rejection (my specialty!), that means it'll be another bunch of months to get it accepted somewhere. So it can take well over a year to get a paper accepted at a philosophy journal.

This is really fucking discouraging, because the section of my CV that needs more ink on it comes under the heading "Publications."

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