Progress Update: September 2024

Hello readers! It has been a very busy month, and this is only a short post to give you some idea of what I’ve been up to recently. The fourth book in the Highmoor series is slowly coming together, and I’m gradually releasing more supporting material (art, maps, etc.) for the website. However, I have been rather pushed for time…

New job, new rules

I recently finished my PhD and started a new job. You might think that a proper working schedule would free up some time for me – but no. Why? Because finishing a PhD doesn’t mean that the PhD work is over. If you stay in academia, you could be writing and revisiting sections of your PhD research for months or years after attaining your doctorate. Scientific publishing is a long, arduous process, taking multiple months even in the best cases – and if you reach the end of your PhD with a few papers in the pipeline, it will be a while before they see the light of day. Of course, this is the entirely predictable situation in which I find myself.

For those that aren’t aware, scientific research is published in scientific journals, which are almost always owned by huge publishing companies. To get your work published, other scientists (your peers) have to decide whether it is of a high enough standard. A few people in your field will agree to critique your methods, analysis and interpretations, and to flag any issues. If they find your work to be egregiously awful, they will recommend that the journal rejects it entirely. Otherwise, they might find a few things that need to be tidied up, and ask you to make the necessary corrections. You then submit the new-and-improved work, and it gets reviewed again (and possibly again, and again). Needless to say, this takes time.

After submitting a paper to a journal, you will inevitably spend a few months twiddling your thumbs, waiting in limbo. The fastest turnaround you’ll get is if the journal editor thinks your work is so abysmal that they don’t want to inflict in on anyone else – at which point you will make the perfectly reasonable decision to inflict it on another editor. Most of your time will be spent waiting for the editor to find someone, anyone, in your field who is willing to review your work. It will then take a while for the reviewers to conduct their reviews (unless they deem your work to be sub-standard from only a skim-read), and when their comments finally arrive in your inbox, it will then take a few weeks more for you to fix the errors they found. Or, if you think they’re being unreasonable, it will take you a few weeks to brew a forceful (but polite) rebuttal that accuses them (politely) of being morons.

Why am I telling you this? Because if you have papers in the scientific publishing pipeline, as I do, and you then decide to start a new job, as I did, you suddenly find your schedule looking rather full. You end up spending your working hours working on work, and your non-working hours working on other work. And what time remains for my self-inflicted hobby work? Well, that has to take a back seat. Or at least, it now shares the backseat with the evening work, where the pair of them get into noisy and sporadically violent arguments and demand, repeatedly, if we’re nearly there yet.

Are we nearly there yet?

If you aren’t aware, the Highmoor series now has three books published out of four. By that metric, we’re well past halfway, even in the home stretch. The first quarter of the fourth book now has a first draft. So, although my writing progress has slowed down, it hasn’t stopped. And provided that I don’t lose all three back-up copies in a simultaneous hard-drive and cloud-server meltdown, my writing progress won’t go backwards, either. However, I won’t try to predict a publication date at this stage.

Upcoming blog activity

Don’t be surprised if blog posts start arriving less frequently than usual. I’ll only make posts on Sundays when I have something interesting to say, rather than adhering to an arbitrary weekly schedule. I have a few adventures coming up (some might call them holidays), so you can expect some whimsical travel writing to arrive here soon. There is also some more artwork in the pipeline, to add to the meagre collection…

The obligatory call-to-arms:

Please rate my books on Amazon and on Goodreads. And to anyone out there with an Amazon account, please follow my Amazon Author page – it really helps me out.

In summary…

I have lots to be getting on with. I didn’t even mention that one of my friends has just finished writing their first fantasy novel, and has allowed me to be a guinea-pig and grammar-checker (a dubious choice on their part, given that I can’t spell guinea pig without help). It’s an absolute whopper of a novel, but I am honour-bound to say no more about it (except that it’s good). Happy reading, and have a lovely week!

PS:

As a follow-up to the previous post about ratings, I have recently discovered that Goodreads provides prompts on its star-rating system. So, from five stars to one, the options are: it was amazing, really liked it, liked it, it was ok, and did not like it. If only all sites would be so helpful in setting out the rules… Or is this how most people interpret stars anyway?