...you can if you want but actually that's just me talking to myself. A 31 July deadline for four academic papers (three conference papers, two of which were co-authored and which admittedly are constructed only to a 'this will get past the referees even if they will have objections' standard) and a book chapter. All that stuff in parentheses actually makes it all seem a little like, well, it's not as good as all that but really, perhaps counterintuitively I don't know as I have no intuition on this any longer, it takes a lot out of you to do these things.
It was a humbling experience earlier this year when we received referee reports on an ARC application wherein one referee suggested I didn't have a high publication rate for someone at my level. Fuck's sake! I have a hundred journal article-conference paper-book chapter publications and there are ten books with my name on them, give or take, sometimes as editor and sometimes as author or co-author. It's not something I dwell on (except when someone says something like that) and I suppose ultimately it just leaves me completely baffled as to what they meant, the only explanations I can think are either that they're in one of those STEM fields where papers all have seventy authors often added without their knowledge (either that, or half the effort of writing the paper is contacting all the authors and saying 'you OK to be on this? We'll let you know when it comes out') so twenty years into your career you have ten thousand publications, or they weren't paying attention to my publications, or they were trolling me. I don't really know.
An academic I encountered early in my career, to whom I took an unreasonable dislike very early because he was clearly predatory of the young girls in a way that surely has had the powers that be at his university periodically tut-tutting and hoping that no-one complains or that if they do it'll somehow be manageable (for all I know it's been 'managed' many times) published one book, that's it, one book. That was the basis for a career. It still gets mentioned periodically, and it leaps out at me from time to time in other contexts, so I know he has yet to be cancelled. I mean I also liked the book when I read it, and I suppose the author has to be detached from the text eg Lewis Carroll. But my point is not (I had to remind myself what my point was) that he was a predator but that some people, admittedly people who made their mark in the twentieth century when things were different, can sustain a career off one freakin' book. I guess I have yet to write the career-defining book! Probably never will and in fact would prefer not to, not that I haven't tried in the past.
Anyway, all I really wanted to say was that finalising (let's say) 20 000 words of text on three different topics in a week isn't easy. I am pleased with myself, even if at the same time I am very cognisant that the two sole-authored ones in particular are very flawed, in a way that only their author would really know, there's no mystery to them, and that's what a good piece of writing needs I think, a bit of artifice, I can't enjoy that when I know what happened on this side of the curtain.
Here's a goat I met yesterday. Actually, one and two thirds of two goats.
'WINGS is the ultimate anthology of the band that defined the sound of the 1970s. Personally overseen by Paul, WINGS is available in an ...
