I'm being published in TEXT!

The paper my colleague and I submitted to the call-out for the special edition on poetry for TEXT (an A-ranked writing journal) has been accepted! The process has taken quite a while with us submitting a proposal ten or eleven months ago, and then submitting the paper in April (or was it May, I forget). Finally, tho, the word came through yesterday that our paper will be published, and with that the seminal peer reviewed article in English (possibly in any language, I don't know) addressing the difference between prose poetry and flash fiction. I'm proud as punch as there are very few journal articles about flash fiction in the English speaking world, this one being one of a very, very small number doing something other than defining the form. Of the papers I have been able to find (and I've done a lot of hunting, a lot!), I'm the first to have my name on more than one paper. Perhaps other researchers aren't interested enough in the form to do more than one paper, I don't know. They may specialise in other areas and Flash just came along related to whatever else they were researching?

I need to follow up on the proposal I submitted last Friday. I really hope it was added to the pool of proposals but I haven't heard anything. I have another journal call-out I can submit the proposal to if this one falls through, so that's okay.

With the book publication, the new job, the peer review job, and the being published in TEXT, I'm having the best year I've had in over a decade.

I can't help but run over the conversations I had at the beginning of the year with the head of school about withdrawing from the degree. He'd said I was giving up on a great opportunity. That potential employers would be impressed by a PhD - to which I'd said that outside the academy no one really cared about PhDs. He'd said publishing wasn't that important, finishing the PhD was important. He simply not taken my issues with my supervisor, and my concerns over being denied opportunities seriously. I guess they thought I was bluffing, or maybe worse than that, that I just didn't have the goods to produce work that would be quality enough. Maybe that I couldn't do the thesis and write a paper at the same time.

Well, I'm working a full time job (which isn't just walking in, shuffling papers, and leaving - I'm project managing, liaising with councils, and working on panels and network committees, and learning a whole range of new tech at the same time) and still managing to write creatively and professionally. They should have had just a little more respect for my abilities and dedication. In any case, I feel quite vindicated now.

On-wards and ever upwards!