Categories: phd
Date: 14 September 2010 14:47:05
[By the way, this blog entry is really very boring, I won't be at all offended if nobody reads or comments! But it's good for me to have a wee record of where I'm at!] I'm just having a break from trying to write a long abstract for the book chapter for the volume coming out of the recent conference in Sweden. I think the reason I prefer writing journal articles (she says, having had none published yet, but bear with me here!) is that I can set the agenda and decide what it's about, whereas in an edited volume there's an overarching framework decided by the editors and then the individual authors fit into that the best they can. Which is fine in most cases, but not always. Last year I thought about submitting an article to a special edition of a journal (which in effect is like an edited volume with a particular focus decided by the editors), even going to the point of getting various people to read it and comment on it before I submitted it for peer review. However I eventually decided to give up without submitting it to the journal as I had to do so many discursive contortions to try and shoehorn in the relevant focus and theory that it just stopped working and felt like it stopped being about my research. It wasn't wasted time as I will rework it without all the shoehorned-in bits for something in the future when life starts calming down (ha!), but it was an interesting lesson in this whole writing-publishing thing. Now I'm in a similar position again, not as extreme as there is a bit more flexibility in this case and they aren't insisting on a particular theoretical focus, but it's still the case that what I'd really really like to do with this paper isn't exactly what would work in this particular book. So I've ended up drafting two separate papers from the same conference talk, one to fit the focus of the book and one closer to what I'd really like to do to write another time. It's a bit sad that at this stage in my (embryonic) research career I have to jump through the hoops that are offered rather than pick and choose what projects to work on, but I know that if I do that now and get a publishing record then it makes the whole writing-what-I'd-like-to-really thing much easier in the future. It's just getting a bit confusing that the what-I-want-to-do-really with this paper (based on the comments of our panel's respondent) is what I'm going to have to do in my thesis as well, but the what-I'm-less-enthusiastic-about-but-will-be-good-for-my-career thing has to be in by tomorrow so I'm having to try and put aside the looming thesis deadline and thinking for the even-closer deadline of the book. It's unfortunate, it would have been so much better if they'd issued the call for papers a month later so my deadlines didn't clash, but unfortunately the world doesn't revolve round me (honestly, the cheek of it!) so here I am. Anyway that's a really rambly and dull way of writing anything else but what I'm meant to be writing! :) Back to it now I guess ....