Well, that's done.

Manuscript of my little paper on soil invertebrates is done and ready to submit. (Probably will submit it Monday, I don't like to send stuff on weekends when there might be no one around). I had my mom read it as an 'educated non-expert reader' (she is a botanist so she knows science but is not familiar with the taxa of soil invertebrates). She found a few unclear places and typos, so those have been fixed. And I did the cross-check-the-references to be sure there's nothing referenced in the paper that's not in the Literature Cited and vice versa.

I....think....I'm done with this. Satisfied with it, I mean. There's always ways you can rewrite and rearrange and a lot of it will come down to whether the results I have are considered important enough to publish.

But at a minimum, I can stop fretting about it for a few weeks while it's in the review process. If it gets shot down, it gets shot down and maybe I turn it into an oral presentation for the next meeting, or hang on to the data in hopes of generating more. If it gets accepted, fantastic.

I do need to start thinking about "next research project' even as I continue to collect data on this one. Time to start reading the cedar papers again, I guess, and think about my "what is it about red cedar litter that seems to be so harmful to savannah forbs" idea that I had earlier....need to do the "prior art" (to use a patents metaphor) to make sure it hasn't been studied to death.

If I do start researching cedar, maybe I will put the bumper sticker a colleague gave me on my car....red cedar is a big problem here and one way to reduce it is with prescribed burning, right? So this bumper sticker says "take me to your cedar" and has an anthropomorphized (face, running legs) lit match on the lefthand side and a cedar tree on the righthand side....

I'm not a big bumper sticker fan (I don't like broadcasting what I believe in soundbite form to the world) but this one did make me laugh. (Maybe I'll tape it inside the rear-window glass so it's a bit less permanent...)

Incidentally, the journal has the 2013 (which came out early in 2014) volume up online now, so you can find my most recently published paper here. It's under "Environmental Science" (it's a .pdf file). Be forewarned that something went really wonky in the electronic form of typesetting with the figures so they are really confusing and don't reveal what I wanted them to. (The stand numbers got left off somehow - I had them in forms that looked okay on the platform I was using, but when it got translated to their program/platform, something went wrong. That sometimes happens when you use specialized software, unfortunately - they were made in a specialized analysis software that didn't translate well, I guess)