Paper in

My stomach just flipped over.

After weeks of sitting at my computer, eyes bugging out, nerves frazzled, butt flattened, today my friends, merely moments ago, I pressed the big "Submit" button and sent my paper off. This time I am first author and all of the work inside is mine.

I feel a bit ill.

After one week I will know if it made it through the first round of the editor and got sent off for review. If it makes it that far, it will be a couple of months before it gets rejected. Sorry. I should be less pessimistic. A couple of months before we know.

It was a real hassle this time picking some of the references in the introduction and choosing who our suggested peer reviewers could be. Although there were important key references that had to go in, there are always some choices to be made, especially in the introduction, about which references to put in and which ones to leave out. It can be a game of politics which the boss plays well, but I am still a novice. Basically, while making your point and setting precedent for your experiment and findings, you have to subtly cite all the people you suspect might be chosen as reviewers so you pump up their egos if it ends up on their desk.

But also, the editor looks at the reference list to come up with reviewers, so you have to avoid citing people whom you think are hard-asses and won't like your paper. In fact, in the very last version, only this morning, one reference got the boot (well, more like a swift kick to the delete button) because the boss thinks the first author is a "loose cannon" and perhaps he might have even used the word "jerk".

But the biggest battle is always perfecting the text so that it reads just-so. You might have noticed that I like metaphors. My PhD boss and I would always fight over my uses of metaphor and figurative meaning. In a talk abstract I once wrote "the field has recently been resurrected to the forefront of research" and he said "what did you do, crucify it?" and made me take out resurrected.

The new boss is no different. The lovely and colorful "marriage of two concepts" got changed to the dull and lifeless "combination of two concepts. " Equally, "girth" got switched to "circumference."

The funniest one came when I described something as worm-like. The Boss didn't like that but I recalled that the name wasn't mine. I pulled out the paper from where I got this worm idea, and sure enough the boss was right. They didn't use the word "worm". They used "vermicular." After I explained what that meant to the boss, "vermicular" got the veto too.

Oh well, at least I can use as may metaphors as I want here. My blog editor, the Chicken, isn't that picky.