Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Still too much mundane stuff to deal with

  HIATUS IS CONTINUING TO LATE DECEMBER
  Mid-November has come and gone and I still haven't posted. If you don't care why, you can stop reading or skip to the end (there's nothing Sarmatian or SCA in this post). If you want an explanation, here it is:

   I've unfortunately had more work than I expected when I set the date. I've had to reformat and resubmit a paper several times now for different journals. I was expecting it to be in review all semester, but the first journal rejected it straightaway as "nothing against the paper, but it's inappropriate for this journal; submit it to a paleo journal instead". Which was crap because that journal publishes paleo papers all the time. One of its top three downloads last year was a paleo paper on a group with no living relatives. It's published a description of a single specimen in a group with no living relatives. Unfortunately, there's a not-insignificant portion of neontologists who have it out for paleontology, and I suspect the editor who was assigned to my paper may be one of them.
  The second was also rejected as not right for the journal's focus, but that time it made sense. I really only tried there because I was in the middle of finishing things before two close deadlines and it didn't require a ton of reformatting.
  The third was sent back by a technical editor because I missed a bunch of the formatting changes, so I'm currently working on that so I can resubmit it to that journal. At the same time, I'm playing massive catch-up on both the grading I've gotten behind on and my gross anatomy class. My grade is uncomfortably low because it's not the sort of class you can take and not spend oodles of time studying- but unfortunately I've had to spend all my time writing a massive grant proposal so I can go do research in Europe and Asia next summer and fall, reformatting and resubmitting the paper so I can tell the grant committee that no, really, I am trying to get a paper published on the work I did with the money you gave me before, and doing research and making a poster for the academic meeting a month ago. Which left me with no time to do anything else. With rare exception, I even cut out all the things I do for fun at the beginning of the semester- no dance class, no video games, no arts & crafts, no SCA, no birding, no Pathfinder... It's royally sucked and I'll be glad when it's over...so long as I can pull my grade up in anatomy.

  My anatomy final is December 19th. I'll probably want to take a few days to rest and recuperate before diving into SCA research. We aren't going anywhere or having visitors for Christmas, so that won't keep me from doing research. But it does take quite some time to research and write each of these posts. My goal is to get one out before the end of the year. If I'm feeling motivated, maybe it will be two.