In the abstract

After roughly a year of keeping my eyes peeled for conferences into which my subfield could logically be shoehorned and turning up approximately zilch, my supervisor put up her hands and declared that I might as well stop worrying myself and try for publication instead. There aren't loads of journals out there to which my work is especially suited (Religion? Kinda... Education? Also kinda... Censorship? Yes but not the way you're thinking.), but as opposed to calls for conference papers, journals aren't moving targets: I can find one, get my act together, and send them some work without having to freak out about a deadline passing me by.

So I'd gotten comfortably wedged in to spending the next month or two reworking a tiny segment of my proto-thesis into something that might be a good fit for one of the handful of journals that's specifically interested in the interdisciplinary and non-traditional. And then I had coffee with Sara Helen on Monday and found out that there's a call out for papers on (among other things) rewriting and censorship. Which closes at the end of the week.

No, I never find out anything through the formal channels. I'm not sure if this means there's an issue with me, or an issue with the manner in which information on such things is disseminated. Either way, the best things in life are discovered through word of mouth.

Funny thing about paper abstracts - they're short and pithy and, to a great extent, prospective, because they don't really expect anyone to have already written the piece that they're proposing to talk about. But back to short and pithy: the abstract has a limit, in this instance, of 300 words, which is far more difficult than 3,000 words, because there is absolutely no space for fat. So the majority of my processing power over the course of this week has been taken up with shoehorning the most salient aspects of the past two years' worth of work into approximately five very dense sentences. If this bit of writing were a physical object, it would be a brick of gold. A very small brick of gold, but a brick of gold nonetheless. This linguistic alchemy was performed using the guidance of Dr. Karen, whose work is probably going to turn into yet another form of procrastination.

Fingers crossed that something will come of it...