![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Fun with Academic Publishing
Apr. 28th, 2019 08:43 amI have anxiety, and it affected my ability to submit my book manuscript about female comic creators in a very real way. I put it off and put it off and put it off for months, mostly because I was afraid of the reception the manuscript would receive. Blind peer review is notoriously cruel and awful, and people in the field of Comics Studies tend to take the subject way too seriously (the irony of this is not lost on me, by the way). There's also the fact that the field is extremely male-dominated. This requires a lot of unpacking; but, to make a quick generalization, masculinist modes of scholarship view subjectivity and accessibility as weak and careless, and people who don't identify as male in a male-dominated field can have a tendency to justify their presence by overcompensating and "leaning in" to masculinist modes of scholarship even more than men do.
So I was afraid of what would happen once I submitted the manuscript; but, as I continued to work on it, I realized that it was actually good and important. Even though it wasn't perfect, I should submit it anyway. What's the worst that could happen?
( Read more... )
This isn't what I imagined when I tried to think about "the worst thing that could happen." This is actually worse, and it happened.
I've been trying to be more open about my experience of dealing with anxiety, and a lot of people have responded by saying something to the effect of, "But I could never tell! You seem to be doing fine!" I'm not doing fine, actually; it's just that I don't generally talk about things like this when they happen, despite the fact that this sort of thing happens all the time in academic publishing. I therefore think I'd like to talk openly and honestly about how broken academic publishing can be sometimes, as well as how anxiety-inducing subjecting yourself to the gauntlet of other people's egos in the form of anonymous "critique" can be.
But you know what? I believe in this project, and I can, in fact, work with this. Maybe this doesn't mean much coming from me, but this is a solid first book that deserves to be published! It's unfortunate that I encountered this small hiccup with the press, but they do good work, and I'm going to stick with them. Starting tomorrow, I'm going to devote myself entirely to getting this book published, and I'm going to put more effort into communicating with the press. Lord help me, I might even call people on the phone.
I think it might be useful to document the process of getting this book published here on this blog, so stay tuned. If nothing else, I have a lot to say about this whole "'female' is not a valid ontological category" nonsense.
So I was afraid of what would happen once I submitted the manuscript; but, as I continued to work on it, I realized that it was actually good and important. Even though it wasn't perfect, I should submit it anyway. What's the worst that could happen?
( Read more... )
This isn't what I imagined when I tried to think about "the worst thing that could happen." This is actually worse, and it happened.
I've been trying to be more open about my experience of dealing with anxiety, and a lot of people have responded by saying something to the effect of, "But I could never tell! You seem to be doing fine!" I'm not doing fine, actually; it's just that I don't generally talk about things like this when they happen, despite the fact that this sort of thing happens all the time in academic publishing. I therefore think I'd like to talk openly and honestly about how broken academic publishing can be sometimes, as well as how anxiety-inducing subjecting yourself to the gauntlet of other people's egos in the form of anonymous "critique" can be.
But you know what? I believe in this project, and I can, in fact, work with this. Maybe this doesn't mean much coming from me, but this is a solid first book that deserves to be published! It's unfortunate that I encountered this small hiccup with the press, but they do good work, and I'm going to stick with them. Starting tomorrow, I'm going to devote myself entirely to getting this book published, and I'm going to put more effort into communicating with the press. Lord help me, I might even call people on the phone.
I think it might be useful to document the process of getting this book published here on this blog, so stay tuned. If nothing else, I have a lot to say about this whole "'female' is not a valid ontological category" nonsense.
