18 August 2010

Should be writing

Writing is one of the least rewarding occupations in the world. You have a moment of inspiration and suddenly you write for hours; you sit for hours, looking at one sentence, nothing coming. You write something and finish it, but it is not finished. It goes to a set of reviewers--they send back comments. You revise, send it back, and you get comments again. You revise, send to someone else, get their comments, revise again, and send back to the initial reviewers. By the time (and if) it is accepted for publication, it is just a shimmer of a thought that you had six months ago and you could really care less about it. There is no grand moment: you hit send on an e-mail, you see it in print, you have a cup of tea.

I'm not complaining: to essentially make my living off of writing is what I have wanted since I was like 12. I get very happy when I write a clever turn of a phrase, or I make something I am proud of. But those moments are few and far between.

All that to say, I am revising my Language@Internet article, hoping to avoid another revise and resubmit. Both of my supervisors have commented on a second article I'm writing, which is looking to become an empirical paper based on the pilot study I did this year. I had planned to send it to a small journal, but yesterday I changed my mind and decided to send it to one of the top discourse analysis journals. My reasoning went something like
  1. The worst that could happen is it gets rejected without comments. In that case I can send it to a smaller journal and I'll have just lost about three months.
  2. They could reject the article with some constructive criticism.
  3. They could ask me to revise and resubmit.
All of these possibilities are good and reading through their criteria for submission and looking at what the article is slowly becoming, I thought, you know, what the hell. We only live once. And, if by some miracle it gets in, I will have a huge gold star on my CV when it comes time to get a job. It's a journal that everyone will recognise as well respected, and I won't have to make any explanations about it.

So that's that.

My weight (the rolling average portion of it) fell below 81kgs, for the first time, meaning that my BMI is now 24.9 — officially healthy and not overweight. I have been under 81kgs for the last couple of weeks on a day-to-day basis, but my rolling average is always about 2kgs behind. Anyway, I'm already thinking about and planning how I am going to maintain this as I am quickly getting to the weight I was hoping to maintain. The weight comes off quicker, according to the numbers I have from the last year, the longer you do it. I will be just on the edge at the end of the month, and then will take another couple of weeks for the average to catch up. I will then have to find some way to introduce more calories into my diet without going overboard or (as weird as it sounds) enjoying it too much. I feel happy and content with the amount that I am eating now--I don't want to fall back into the trap of thinking that when I eat more, I am more happy. I also want to avoid any big fluctuations in my diet, eating 1,000 more kcals one day than the other.
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