I have finally received anonymous peer review reports on my book. To say that they are complimentary is to do them an injustice. I couldn’t even read them in full in one sitting because they made me feel shy. They refer to me as a brilliant visionary, which I kind of think I am, but it does feel weird to see it in writing. To clarify, the reports are anonymous to me, but not to the readers. Unlike with an academic article, with a book, the reviewers know the author’s name.
The readers are not only okay with the conservative aspects of my analysis. They are actually really into them. One reader’s report says that our field is an echo chamber where a bunch of people who consider themselves to be rebellious and counter-cultural spend decades repeating the same old accepted beliefs and gate-keeping any actually original ideas. This is so true. People have convinced themselves that it’s deeply rebellious to denounce endless sexisms, fascisms, and racisms, even though everybody else is doing it all day long.
I now have to prepare an author’s response to the readers’ reviews. For that, I will have to read two books that the reviewers assume I have read, and I haven’t. I always knew I should, and I’ve even had one of them on my Kindle for several years, but somehow it never happened. The publishers gave me three weeks for this, but I need to be done in two because the process has dragged out for long enough, and I really want the brilliant visionary book finally to be in print.
I also have a very hard deadline of September 15th on my article on Chirbes. And another one of October 1st for my talk in Spain. I usually give talks on things that I have already prepared for publication, but this time it’s going to be different. I’m doing something new completely from scratch. Then, on top of all of this is the actual project that I’m supposed to be doing on my sabbatical, which is different from all of the projects I just described.
Plus, since I’m no longer department chair, I don’t have to be worrying about anybody’s enrollment numbers or hiring. Things are really shaping up for this sabbatical.
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