Apparently I’ve been silent since March 2021. I say apparently because it has just become apparent to me when I logged into the website after a pretty long time. Why ? Because the annual renewal is coming due and this inevitably makes me come back to the site and admire what I have achieved during the year, in order to justify the next payment.
This year, I haven’t done much. So I must explain to the reader whom I (assume) reads all my posts. I hope you exist, dear Reader!
The main reason is, put simply, that I have been writing for various publications and didn’t have the energy to devote articles to my personal blog. Between May and now, I submitted no less than five articles, and I still have one more due as I write this. That makes it six articles. Add to them two book reviews submitted in the early months of the year, and a book that I published in the same time period, and you have at least a 30,000 words of final writing (the book was already written, just had to be updated a bit – the book itself is 67,000 words in its final shape).
So why was I writing so much all of a sudden ? Firstly, I didn’t write much in 2020, and had to do some serious catching-up in terms of my intellectual output. Considering that that’s all I contribute to society in terms of new knowledge, falling behind was tantamount to just taking a nap. Not something people appreciate (not even my family members).
The second reason is that my promotion will become due next year. It’s still a few months away, but publication is a long-term process and filled with lots of hurdles, seen and unseen. Hence, a few months grace had to be baked into any writing project. Barring the one that is still pending, the rest have been submitted.
Not all will be published, of course. I already have one rude review and accompanying rejection sitting in my inbox. One article has been published in an edited volume. The rest are with the editors and awaiting their decisions. I heard two of them have been accepted in effect (since they were sent for typesetting) but until I get the pie (aka book) in my hand, I can’t say I have the pie (aka book).
So will things change now ? Kind of. I have hopefully written enough to fulfil the requirements of my promotion, and getting some good feedback that will help me work further. On a more prosaic note, I have run out of material on which to write, and must now rush back to the archives for more material if I want to write more. This is easier said than done with each repository having its own requirements and varying timings. But I will try.
In the meantime, I do hope to write more for my blog. It just can’t be that writing for journals and books dries up my (digital) blog pen, and vice versa. Better time management is a resolution we can all take for New Year’s. Hopefully, I can pursue this noble goal before New Year turns up. As of now, I can only apologize profusely once more and hope the reader hasn’t forgotten about me!