Categories: phd
Date: 07 October 2009 20:34:47
Over the past few months I've blogged occasionally about a paper I was writing which I hoped was going to be included in an anthology based on the conference I spoke at in Finland last December. So it got through the initial vetting and got sent out to peer review in February or March, then in June I got the peer reviewers' comments and I sent the revised manuscript back at the end of August.
Yesterday I got an email from the editors of the anthology. This email told me that they had got most of the papers back, were working on the anthology introduction, outlining the proposed structure of the anthology, and were about to start touting the anthology round a couple of publishers (if these publishers don't accept them then they'll use their own university press, but they're aiming higher to start with, you never know).
But here's the thing. Nowhere in the email does it say that they've accepted the changes I made to the manuscript, or that mine is one of the papers that is going to be included. I'm kind of thinking that if they weren't going to include it then they wouldn't have bothered sending me the email about their next steps, and they did include some encouraging editors' comments with the peer reviewers' comments back in June about how my paper fitted in so well with the overall theme of the book. I'd just really like to see in black and white that they definitely will be including it. But I feel too embarrassed to ask them, in case either a. they decided not to include it after all or (more likely) b. it's a really stupid question as it's actually really obvious. I think instead I will run it past my supervisor (who also submitted a chapter for the same book and went through the same process I did, but who also knows the editors quite well, and who is also more than used to my daft questions and insecurities).
I just want to get excited about getting something published, but I don't want to get excited until I'm absolutely sure, as otherwise I shall feel a bit silly.