Flourish: An Electronic Newsletter for Scholarly Writers
March 2008

vol. 4, no. 2

My apologies that the newsletter is so late this month, but I was determined not to send it until I had the following good news. I have submitted the final draft of my writing workbook to my publishers!

Today I delivered all fourteen chapters of Writing and Publishing the Academic Article: A Step-by-Step Guide for Sending Your Essay to a Peer-Reviewed Journal in Twelve Weeks to my editor. Wahoo!!

Since I already have a contract, and the peer reviewers already gave their comments in September 2006, there are only three stages left. The manuscript will first go to the Sage developmental editor, who will look at it for overall issues. Then it will go to the copyeditor, who will enter her corrections. I will have a chance to review those changes and then it will go to the production editor. Since the book is a workbook, laying out all the boxes and heads is going to take some time. Sage is aiming for a fall publication date, we shall see how smoothly the next couple of months go.

Right now, I’m not really thinking about these next stages, however, but about how amazing it is that I actually got to the point of sending this book to the publisher! It isn’t easy to wrap up ten years of your life. Over the last year I kept thinking of additional materials that I wanted to add (which was ridiculous given that the book is easily going to be 300 large pages). Then, just in the last month I decided that I needed to send the book and stop messing around. I printed the whole book out and made notes on what remained to do, focusing ruthlessly on wrapping up, not opening up. I still might never have gotten to the point of letting go if my parent had not come to visit and proofread the last version. Their reading allowed me to avoid looking closely at the very last version, which was essential to my setting aside my perfectionist impulses and actually sending it. I just kept telling myself that I will see the book again in copyediting and can deal with any problems then.

I know many of you have been waiting some time to buy the workbook and you should be able to do so soon. I will be keeping you abreast of all developments. More next month and in the meantime–get that work out there!