(Update #1: I TOTALLY need one of these samplers. Except, I'd need to have prairie plants or mycorrizae or ordination diagrams on mine. I know I do whine a lot about publication and its travails, but it does seem to me like it's a needlessly Byzantine process.)

I rewrote a manuscript this morning. It was one that I submitted somewhere, got rejected, submitted somewhere else and never heard back from (either the reviewers flaked out or the e-mail letting me know ANYTHING got caught-up in the "Great E-Mail Sweep Of 2005" which allowed virus-carrying e-mails and spam to come through at my work address, but dumped several important e-mails).

(Update #2: He e-mailed back, had no record of the pub. So maybe it never even got sent out. Sigh. Well, at least I can try it there FIRST, I suppose...if it's good enough. I don't know. I don't know any more. I'm no good at self-evaluation.)

Yeah, yeah, 2005 was when I last thought about this paper. I'm usually not that much of a slacker but I got all caught up in FINALLY getting my dissertation work published, and this was just a side-project. (I have an e-mail in to the journal editor asking "Dude, where's my paper?" I figure there's one of two responses:

1. "Go ahead and resubmit; we were close to publishing it" which would be very good

or

2. "No, we don't want it" Which isn't so very bad because I've identified a small regional journal that probably WILL. But I have to do due diligence before sending the MS out again.)

I also have two other submitted-and-rejected articles I want to rewrite (the problem is, I had a former co-worker who always encouraged shooting for the moon. And no, if you miss in this case, you don't "still end up among the stars" or whatever that stupid aphorism says. I mean, I'm all for ambition, but I'm also for realism and actually getting something DONE during what remains of my lifetime). One will (probably) go to American Biology Teacher; it's a pedagogical-oriented thing. The other will take more work (and I'm not sure at this point where to send it; it's kind of an oddball project).

This burst of activity came courtesy of something that happened over my break. I had sent a "final" draft of yet another paper to my co-author on it. And - instead of saying, "Yeah, it's good, submit it" (which was what I was primed for because that seemed to be what he had been leading up to with previous drafts), he basically said, "No, let's dump it. It's not going anywhere."

I would be lying if I said some hot tears didn't ensue after I hung up the phone from talking to him. All that work! All those months! (and all those months he had the paper and was "too busy" to look at it!).

I pretty much lost a whole day of my break because it put me into a spiral of:

1. I suck
2. I can't judge my own work objectively at all; papers I've thought weren't that great got accepted and papers I thought were pretty ok got rejected
3. I'm never going to make full professor; I'm going to languish forever as an associate professor and thus be thwarted in the one life-goal that seemed fairly attainable to me.
4. I am so sick of writing up data and trying to get it published somewhere.

Well, I've pulled out of 1-3 (I STILL might rewrite the $#($*# paper and send it back to him to see what he thinks again. I'm stubborn that way), but I still kinda always feel #4.

I hate publishing.

Oh, I love having an article come out - I love being able to stick a copy up on my door (for a little while at least; I like to boast a little). I love the reprint requests. I love being able to add it to my vita.

But I hate the process - it's long, and painful, and needlessly drawn-out and seems designed to negatively affect the self-confidence of people who don't have heaping helpings of it to begin with. And it costs lots of time, and lots of money (there are page charges with a lot of journals: YOU pay THEM to publish your stuff, not the other way around. And it costs to subscribe to the things. And it costs if you want reprints because the journal now owns the copyright to YOUR paper [and that is something that chaps my backside to no end: imagine a knitting designer making a sweater pattern and then having to GIVE it, free, to Vogue Knits, and on top of it, Vogue being allowed to sell reprints of the pattern for whatever the market will bear. Because Vogue owns it. I mean - Knitty and MagKnits may not pay but AT LEAST THEIR DESIGNERS GET TO RETAIN COPYRIGHT. And that's a big thing to me. It really does chafe that I've signed over what is essentially my BABY to a journal, and they can do with it what they will. But you have to do it; it's part of the game.]).

So anyway. I'm biting the bullet this summer and sending off three articles. Or trying. I just hope that IF they all get rejected, I don't get all three rejections in the same week, because that might just drive me over the edge and make me quit my job and start raising geese and speaking in some kind of mumbly Sussex dialect like Adam in "Cold Comfort Farm" or something like that.