Tag / works in progress

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The Ghost of Academia Future Perfect Subjunctive

So another year over, and what have we done…

In the published corner:

  • ‘Disfigured Myth: The Destruction of London in Postmillennial SF Film’, Foundation, 122 (2015): 122-32.

  • ‘Sleeping/Waking: Politicizing the Sublime in Science Fiction Film Special Effects’. Endangering Science Fiction Film. Edited by Sean Redmond and Leon Marvell, New York and London: Routledge, 2016: 117-31.

  • ‘Human Subjects/Alien Objects? Abjection and the Constructions of Race and Racism in District 9’, Alien Imaginations: Science Fiction and Tales of Transnationalism. Edited by Ulrike Küchler, Silja Maehl and, Graeme Stout, New York: Bloomsbury, 2015: 95-112.

  • ‘Iain M./ Banks’, Twenty-First Century British Writers (Dictionary of Literary Biography). Edited by Tom Ue, Chicago?: Gale, 2015.

Somewhere out there — and I don’t like to talk about work in progress before the ink is dry — are chapters on Adam Roberts, British sf short stories, queer YA sf and perhaps one I forget — editorial work on someone.

I am about to put to bed an article on The Clarke Award and a chapter on a period of sf.

Downsides — the article proposal turned down (but there was some small compensation in that the editor reassured me that I might be able to place it elsewhere, may be in a peer-reviewed venue) and the chapter rejected after much time but short shrift (it may well be crap, but it was not a well-handled project).

To do in 2016:


  • I failed to convert one conference paper into a chapter and probably have missed the boat on that book, but it can feed into another commission I have;
  • to convert the paper on Quest for Love into a chapter;
  • to convert the paper on Mieville I gave at a conference into a chapter (I seem to have fallen off a mailing list there);
  • to return to a book that was bounced and needs work;
  • to produce a book proposal that I’ve been pondering for too many years;
  • to sort out two book proposals for projects that came up some years ago and stalled;
  • beer and brewing and drinking research. I need to be priming the pump.

And I need to do some writing on sf film — maybe go back to the Moon paper and the keynote for the CRSF.

Have I missed anything any of you have asked me to do?

Clearly this is too much for a year. We’ll see.

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On the Chin… But Be Prepared to be Patronised

With submission for publication comes the possibility of rejection — and you learn to live with it.

Sometimes you get an explanation — “we wanted to balance the pre- and post twentieth century material” is one I recall from 1999 — and sometimes you don’t. You rewrite and submit elsewhere.

Take it on the chin.

Oddly — and this might sound like a brag — I’m been commissioned more than I’ve cold submitted. If someone asks me to write something, I will ponder whether I want to be in the venue, and more to the point work out if I’ve something to say.

I’m sufficiently instinctive that I often get this feeling that X and Y are connected — say that Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger might be useful for thinking through The Sparrow. At that point, I hadn’t actually read Purity and Danger. It can be a high wire act — and it makes writing abstracts hard before there’s a chapter, although you don’t want to write something that’s going to be rejected.

So, there was a call for contributions, and I sat on it overnight, and applied the tests, and sent an abstract. Meanwhile, I was already thinking there would be other venues I could submit it to, but having written the damn thing.

Ten minutes ago I was rejected.

The editors were apologetic — lots of strong contributions — some hard decisions — consider the overall shape of the volume — it is with immense regret — and…

Well, whatever. That’s the job. You try not to publish rubbish, although that arguably rubs out most of my output…

And then:

“we want to persuade you to develop the proposed chapter into an academic article that will be well-suited to be submitted to any number of peer-review academic journals.”

OK.

I guess they were trying to be helpful. Maybe to soften the blow. Perhaps it was a standard rejection email sent to all.

But.

I’m certainly acquainted with these peer-reviewed journals of what they speak. I even had a list in my head of who to try first, if it was rejected. I co-edit a peer-reviewed journal — but it would be Bad Form to submit there.

Somehow, I think a simple no thanks would not have left me feeling … a little patronised and certainly amused.

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Cogito Ego Operor

So… a couple of days ago I was going through the draft sent emails having realised I’d sent an important email to myself and wondering what else was stuck in the outbox. I found a message about a call for papers that I’d tried to send to myself but had somehow failed.

Doh!

I reread it, thinking, interesting, but who has the time? I forwarded it to a grad student, thinking it might be his mug of Earl Grey.

I looked again — abstract by then, chapters by then, neatly bracketing the autumn term. That’s going to be my heavy term.

Who has the time?

And there I left it, and there was no more, until I was thinking about a book I really have to read Real Soon Now to apply to the Sekrit TTTTTTTT Projekt (or at least the proposal).

A project which overlaps with the Call for Papers.

Uh huh.

I don’t have the time this autumn, but perhaps I should make a start this summer and that’ll have materials that can fit the Sekrit TTTTTTTT Projekt. And again I’m struck how often I chistel away at the block of marble to find the statue rather than build a statue from chickenwire and papier-mâché.

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The Trail of the Spinning Plates

So, let’s look at the to-do list based on 26 January 2015, updated 15 March 2015, 3 April 2015 and 20 May 2015:

  • a submitted chapter that needs editorial queries answering — answered
  • a keynote to write for the SF postgrad conference — delivered
  • chapter to write for another companion — first draft
  • an article that’s been bounced from a special issue but has been taken up and needs another thousand words adding — apparently doesn’t need those words; edited version submitted
  • two a conference papers to convert to an articles
  • a book to read for review
  • a book proposal to finish — I’ve had some ideas
  • a book manuscript to rescue — I printed out chapter one… somewhere
  • several reference book entries that are missing in action — chased and waiting
  • * new * article on The Arthur C. Clarke Award

Shall we note and celebrate the fact that I’ve completed the first draft of something a goodly way ahead of the deadline? I fear that this is something that happens rarely these days (leaving aside the “Can you write this by tomorrow?” commissions).

I have, admittedly, spotted a problemette in it that I ought to think through and solve, although I can see I need to cut 200 words to fit anything in to deal with that.

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What Does Assume Make?

A little earlier, when looking at the latest to-do list, I thought to myself that I mustn’t forget to do that when I convert that conference paper into a chapter. What that is, I now have no idea, although it might have been something about the nature of adaptation or British cinema. I didn’t, of course, write it down, even though I’d thought about adding it to the PowerPoint slides.

Memory like … memory like … memory like one of those metal things with holes in it.

If there’s one thing I haven’t learnt, it’s that those insights are easily forgotten. If I write them down there’s a hope. I can take a note on the iPad or the phone, but that’s only as good as search software. I have moved from a one-fits-all note book to a Moleskin for each project (on the principle I risk losing only so much research at a time) but I am a bad note-taker and too often finish a project before a notebook. I think I need to think again about that.

As to the insight from three hours ago… lost I fear.

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Editing the Editing

This afternoon’s email brought an edited manuscript of a journal article rejected for a special issue (no biggie — it plainly didn’t fit) but accepted for the journal (yay!). I assumed that at some point this summer I’d spend a week going back to the reading list — and the articles on the matters discussed I’d not fitted in — and a chapter I borrowed some ideas from to add, say, a thousand words. But it’s already at a preferred word count and I guess that’s time I can spend on other projects…

So there’s a new title which I need to decide if I like (or maybe I can propose an alternative if I don’t) and most of the endnotes have been incorporated into the text. It’s also been trimmed, with a couple of things added.

For about thirty seconds, I considered digging out my original file, and starting to compare… but that way lies madness and needless defensiveness. Trust the editor.

Unless you find you are saying something stupid and you have to work out if that’s them or you. They are there to save you from yourself. The piece I finished off this morning appeared incredibly lightly edited, given that it contains about twelve thousand words’ worth of information in six thousand. I suspect if I went back to the submitted manuscript, I’d start getting defensive. It’s not worth it.

(Although, a recent chapter had marginal comments from someone who either didn’t get the joke or didn’t get the joke until too late and left their comments. Ah well.)

So, to edit the edits then…

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Spinning Plates Ride Again

So, let’s look at the to-do list based on 26 January  2015, updated 15 March 2015 and last updated 3 April 2015:

  • chapter to write for companion — submitted
  • a  submitted chapter that needs editorial queries answering
  • a keynote to write for the SF postgrad conference
  • chapter to write for another companion — no further than Christmas
  • an article that’s been bounced from a special issue but has been taken up and needs another thousand words adding
  • two a conference papers to convert to an article
  • a book to read for review
  • a book proposal to finish — I’ve had some ideas
  • a book manuscript to rescue — I printed out chapter one…
  • several reference book entries that are missing in action — chased and waiting
  • *new*: an appreciation of Pratchett — published

I note that after a year of researching stuff that has invoked sexism, racism, homophobia and so forth (and some great books and films [and Quest for Love]), I want to go fluffy when I next have an idea.

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The Good Companions

I have two chapters for companions on the to do list — a chronological survey for one, something meatier for the other, and Current Events seem to be swelling the materials for the latter, which does need to be written first. I would like to write something soon that doesn’t involved holding my nose. Heigho.

In the meantime, the survey is definitely a game of two halves and I’m pondering quite how I swing things around, given that there’s a large no go zone which is the other chapter on the same materials. I am the cause of reaction and a reaction to that reaction. I can see where I’m going to end, but I need to stick the teleology in the mix and work out the route there. All very post hoc, of course. At some point I’ll need to talk to the other writer on the shadow chapter. And work out how much of the three thousand words I wrote in November are usable.

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The Sorrows of (Not So) Young Werdna

Inevitably this contains several plot spoilers

 

In criticism we – I – start from where we know and head into new territory. We have a political or critical viewpoint – Marxism, feminism, aesthetics – and apply it to a new text. Or we use a text to explain an idea or an idea to explain a text. (There’s a line somewhere from Mallarmé – shameless name drop – about the folly of saying clearly what the author has said opaquely.) We needn’t reinvent the wheel, of course, we build on the shoulders of giants. Sometimes people haven’t seen the giants, so we get people suggesting that no one has written about Katherine Burdekind or that everything thinks John Wyndham is cosy, when, in fact, he isn’t.

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