One thing done

I made the final corrections and additions (incorporating my co-author's comments) to the manuscript this morning and sent it in.

As I said to myself sending it in: "Godspeed, little manuscript*, may you be accepted with minor revisions"

(Accepted with minor revisions is about the best you can hope for. There is straight acceptance, where you need not make any changes, but that is vanishingly rare, and perhaps actually, making revisions makes for a stronger paper. Minor revisions is good because that usually means just stylistic things and maybe adding a statement or two here or there. Major revisions is less-good, you must overhaul the paper and often do additional data analysis and it can slow down publication a good bit, because often there's ANOTHER review process. Revise-and-resubmit is "rejected, but you can try again" and that's where you decide "is it worth it to me?" Outright rejection is the worst....I've received several of those in my career. Not as many as some people, because I don't aim all that high with my publications. It's a matter of philosophy - my advisor always believed in shooting for the most-prestigious and widely-circulated journal where your work might fit, and expecting to be rejected a lot of the time and having to drop back to a "lesser" journal. Me, I care less about prestige (and in the era of online availability and things like JSTOR, circulation numbers might matter less) and what I care about is the minimum of psychic pain to me, and the maximum of being able to count another paper "done"....so I mostly go for smaller, regional journals that are more likely to accept a solid but unexciting paper, where for the "big" journals you have to either have something really special or somehow catch the attention of an editor or reviewer....a lot of good papers get rejected for lack of space but I just don't want to deal with that)




(*I am specifically referencing the old, old Simpsons episode where Homer and Ned are leading some kind of Scout troop camping trip, and they get lost in a rubber raft, and are trying to catch a fish with the literal last piece of food they have - a cheese doodle. And Ned puts it on the hook, and before throwing it into the water, says, "Godspeed, little doodle" because yeah, I often feel like there's a certain futility to undertaking academic publishing just like the futility of that little doodle catching a fish to save their lives...)




And I also got to thinking about the figurative nature at that statement: we all want to be "accepted" in one way or another.

But the truth is: the best we can hope for in this world, I think, is "acceptance with minor revisions" - meaning we do have to sand down some of the rougher corners of our personalities or take out some of the dumber pop-culture references**

(** I am eternally sad I didn't stand up more for secretly leaving "huge tracts of land" in a paper I wrote; my co-author suggested editing it to "large areas of land" and while I guess he had a point....I really kind of wanted to be able to say I had a paper published with a line from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" in it)

And I also find myself thinking again of the Molly Wolf essay on knitting, and her comment that

"I wonder sometimes if, after death, God frogs us - holds us firm, undoes the

years of pain and wrong and suffering, reknits us together in eternity's womb,

so that we emerge in glory, just as we should have been if this life weren't

so broken and bloody imperfect."

 

 

And yeah. Though I think there's a difference between being made perfect by a Higher Power and us trying hard to edit ourselves down so that we are found acceptable....we can never really do that second, or so my faith teaches, so we have to rely on the first....