In 2015, I submitted a paper to a journal. Six months or so later I received the results of the peer review with a lot of feedback. It took me around two months to actually read the feedback properly without a lot of hurt and anger. I realised:
a) A lot of it made sense (one of the reviewers – the notorious reviewer 2? – had even provided me with a list of resources I should be looking at
b) The editor hadn’t outright rejected my submission but left open the possibility that I could revise and resubmit
I decided to give it a shot. I ended up not only rewriting the paper (when I resubmitted, one of the reviewers commented that it was now “an entirely new paper”) but rethinking my entire approach to my thesis. Those two reviewers gave me tough but really constructive and detailed advice on the kind of work I needed to be doing with my project.
A little over one year after I had originally submitted the manuscript, it was accepted.
THREE years after that it has finally been published. By then I had submitted my thesis, defended it, revised it, taught four courses in one semester and decided that version of academia wasn’t for me at this point and moved back into journalism.
The paper I wrote, “Flight from the Womb: Mothers and Daughters in Indian Chick Lit”, which I felt pressure to submit so as to have some published work when I entered the job market (ha!) contains the heart (in kernel form) of the idea I developed so much in the three years after I submitted the revised version.
Anyway, if you’re interested in chick lit, please read it here. If you don’t have access to the journal, please email me at readingchicklit@gmail.com and I will try to send you a copy.
Chick Lit Hall of Fame 