My friend and I were waiting in one of those lines that wrap around the block at a BBQ joint with a few friends and colleagues from grad school after our presentation at the National Communication Association’s annual convention in Dallas in November 2017. As the din of the restaurant picked up, we spent a few minutes talking shop—specifically, about how to get this paper we’d just presented published in a journal worth reading. The presentation went pretty well. We got some great feedback from the respondent, who was gracious even though we clearly had not read her book (yet… I’ve since read it and find her arguments compelling). The after-panel chatter was energetic and thought provoking. We were feeling pretty good.
As we stood in line, my friend broached the sometimes-sticky issue of authorship. In the academy, credit is the coin of the realm. Authorship, and the order of authorship, is often how that coin gets sorted. Simply, being the first name listed matters, and it can matter quite a lot in a tenure and promotion case. Both of us had something to gain depending on whether the published version appeared as her name & my name or mine & hers.
It came as quite a surprise when she offered, “You should be first author.”
Until that point, she had been the first author on the project. This made sense to me because although we’d split the writing more or less evenly—I did more of the editing/organizing work, but word count was pretty even—the biggest idea in the paper was hers. This is not to say that I didn’t contribute anything to the essay, just that what we expected would get cited by other folks came out of her primary area rather than mine. As far as I was concerned, she had a lot more to gain by being first than me. I also had the benefit of not needing the essay for my tenure and promotion dossier—which, by that time, was pretty much sewn up on the scholarship front. I was in a rather convenient position to decline her generous offer to swap places in the by-line. And so, I did.
We argued about it for a few minutes, but eventually, she relented and agreed to keep top billing.
After the conference, we sent the essay to a really good journal. It was rejected—swiftly and thoroughly. This was not surprising. We had presented an earlier version at a different conference in 2016 and submitted it to the conference proceedings a few months prior. It was rejected there, too. It was a good idea, but it wasn’t ready for publication yet. Turns out the distance between pretty good conference paper and published article is a lot farther than we hoped, even though we had convinced ourselves otherwise.
We met sometime in January to strategize revisions and refocus the essay. We had a new venue in mind and a pretty good plan to turn out a new version of the piece.
Then plans changed.
On February 6, 2018, my friend died unexpectedly. She was 36 years old. Her husband called me that morning to share the news. I spent the day calling our grad school colleagues, choking down sobs, and ugly crying.
The essay has haunted me since.
Once I could finally bring myself to work on it again—I can’t remember exactly, but it was sometime in summer 2018—I started prepping the piece for another submission. I redoubled my writing efforts convinced that the piece was at once pretty solid scholarship and, more importantly for me, the best way I could honor my friend.
That summer, I went (back) to school on digital rhetoric and online activism. I used the feedback from previous rejections to guide a doctoral seminar worthy reading list. I dove in and lost myself in the literature. It felt good. I was learning something new. I was starting to understand the vitriolic commentary in the reviews (okay, they weren’t that bad). I could see the questions and the answers more clearly. More importantly, I was still in conversation with my friend—even if that conversation was occasionally cursing her for leaving me to read a pile of books that I wouldn’t otherwise pick up, let alone page through and annotate.
Upgrading my theoretical tool kit took about a month. Revising the essay with the new literature and thesis took two more. The rewriting was excruciating. Every sentence I deleted was a little bit of my friend. Were those my words? Where they hers? It didn’t matter. Every change felt like a betrayal. It was hard to see the essay slowly change from our voices into my voice. It was hard to the cut arguments, especially the one from her dissertation, and subarguments that we had debated over for weeks (sometimes months) before her death. It was harder still to put my name at the top of the paper.
Those revisions had to happen, though, because nobody remembers the research that didn’t get published. I had to change the piece. I had to get it to print. So, I cut words. I changed phrases. I deleted citations. I restructured the argument. I didn’t feel good about any of it.
The end product wasn’t half bad.
I was disappointed, but not deterred. I felt like the reviews were good enough that it might land an R&R with a different outlet. So, I sent it out again after cleaning up a few typos and integrating the handful of changes indicated by the review. This time, I sent it to a journal with a very different audience, but every bit as prestigious as the one that just declined to review the piece again. About a month later (which is crazy fast), I got another rejection. Another split review—one reviewer liked the piece, one reviewer hated it. At least I only had to wait a month.
I spent the rest of the semester tinkering on the essay more and debating about whether or not it merited another shot a national level journal or if I should step it back for a regional. The feedback thus far suggested that it was a slam dunk for an R&R at a regional, but I really hoped to place it more prominently. This one was personal. I can’t put my friend’s name in lights, but I at least wanted to put it in a good journal. So, I took another shot.
In early Spring 2019, not quite a year after my co-author passed, I revised the argument again with an eye toward yet another set of reviewers and sent the essay to another really good journal. This one, too, has a very different audience, but I thought the piece was appropriate. A couple of months later, I got this response:
“The reviewers, however, do wish to see another version of this essay and so offered revise with major revisions.”
There it was. R&R achieved—and with a really good journal! Next step: satisfy some mostly straightforward revision requests, cut a bunch of words to get under the word limit, and revel in the glory of our scholarly success.
I worked on the revision for the next couple months and submitted the revision in summer 2019. I felt good about it. The feedback was clear—cite this, add a discussion of this to that section, cut that stupid argument—and I handled it about as well as I could have.
A couple of months later, my inbox chimed and I saw the editor’s name pop up. This was it. The reviews were in and we were closing in on publication. I felt great. I opened the email. I read it. My heart dropped into my stomach. Another split decision, this one an outright accept without revision coupled with an outright reject.
“I'm sorry to inform you that your manuscript has been denied publication”
The editor was gracious, kind, and encouraging. Hell, he even asked for a third review—also a reject. He did what he could, but I didn’t do enough to get the piece where it needed to be conceptually.
This one hurt. I was so damned close. I thought I did it. And then, just like that, I was two years out from our initial submission with nothing to show for it but a fistful of rejections and the sudden urge to scream, or cry, or scream and cry at the same time. I was angry—at all those editors and reviewers, at myself, at my friend, at whateverthefuck killed her. I was disappointed in myself. I felt like I let my friend down. My imposter syndrome was in hyperdrive. I had a good cry. Or two. Maybe three. And then I shoved the essay a drawer for a while and walked away.
Publishing is hard.
This essay was particularly painful because of the personal connection I have to the piece, but the process, even under normal circumstances, is brutal. The essay that we submitted to the conference proceedings and really, really good journal in 2017 wasn’t great. It needed a lot of work. The essay that we submitted to two different, but good, journals the next year was quite a bit better, but it, too, still needed work. Comparatively, the one that landed the R&R was pretty darn good and the final revision was even better (“a very good revision” and “very fine analysis” according to the editor who nonetheless rejected the piece). Unfortunately, that’s all meaningless if it doesn’t make it to print. We could fill libraries with really good essays that didn’t make it to print in the pages of our journals for one reason or another.
To be clear, the essay wasn’t perfect, and the editor and reviewers weren’t wrong (well, not entirely wrong). It still hurt like hell.
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A few months of sulking later, I got back to work. After revising the style manual back to APA format for the second time (originally written in Chicago, then APA, then back to Chicago because I’m a glutton for punishment), I submitted the essay again just before the two-year anniversary of my friend’s death. This time, I relented in my Quixotic quest to place it in a top-tier journal and sent it off to a regional—a good one, but still not the level of prestige I hoped for. I knew that it didn’t suck. I knew that it had a pretty good chance of at least landing an R&R. It was better than it was a year prior and the new outlet had a higher acceptance rate.
March 2020 arrived and two things happened. First, I interviewed for and received a job offer from a University back in Indiana. Second, the COVID-19 virus hit the US with the ferocity of a thousand “reviewer twos.” Life on the East Coast ground to a halt. Literally, the day I was on campus in Indiana interviewing for a new job, I got an email explaining that spring semester and summer term (which I was scheduled to teach) at my job in Pennsylvania would be entirely online. Schools and daycares closed. Everything changed.
Oh, and I took that job in Indiana. March through May became a flurry of planning, packing, and preparing to move during a pandemic. It was crazy stressful. For a while at the end of spring term, my in-laws stayed with us to help get the house in order. Then, right before summer session, they returned to Indiana with my spouse and kids. I stayed behind to finish up a handful of projects and get the house ready for the market. We accepted an offer on the house in early June and I packed up a suitcase and left to join my family in Indiana for the month or so before closing.
Did I mention that this was crazy stressful?
About a week after arriving in Indiana for what would become a summerlong extended stay, I got an email from the editor of the regional journal:
“All three reviewers suggest, revise and resubmit, and I am happy to offer you the opportunity to do so”
To be fair, interviewing for and getting a job, selling a home, spending a summer doubled up in someone else’s home, starting a new job, and finding and buying a home are all good reasons not to be especially productive. Nevertheless, I felt guilty for not having this damn thing published already. It’s not like I wasn’t thinking about the essay—I thought about it all the time—but mostly I thought about it in the abstract as fodder for my imposter syndrome, not as a puzzle to solve or as a specific argument to bolster or reframe. If I’m being honest, I the guilt about not writing more/better/sooner/whatever still lingers. The productivity guilt built into the academy is real.
Over the next nine or ten months, I read the books recommended by the reviewers and revised every section of the essay to reflect more clearly where I thought the essay contributed to conversations about activism, digital rhetoric, and satire. It was painful.
It’s always painful.
Every change to a tightly written argument has a ripple effect that plays out over the entirety of the essay. Adding a citation may seem simple enough, but only if the addition is made merely to satisfy a reviewer. Taking a new citation seriously—even a minor one—means attending to how each addition and subtraction pulls on threads in the prose that must be stitched back together for the sake of the argument. It always takes more time than I think it should. It always hurts more than I think it should.
In the end, I rewrote every section of the piece (again) and resubmitted at the end of April 2021.
A little over four months later—a much faster turnaround than I had managed as an author—the essay came back with another request for revisions. For the second time, however, the essay managed to convince one reviewer to recommend publication. Lucky for me, this time the other reviewer requested revisions and not flat-out rejection like the previous journal. It wasn’t in print, and wouldn’t be anytime soon, but was still good news.
In August 2021, I received word that I had earned yet another invitation to revise and resubmit the essay. This time around, only two of the three original reviewers agreed to re-read the paper. Reviewer 2 was entirely satisfied, but reviewer 3 wanted to see clearer connections between thesis and analysis—picky, picky (also, I say this all the time to my students). In all, these revisions were pretty straightforward, and I had another version of the essay up and ready to submit by the end of September.
During finals week of December 2021, I received word that my revisions had finally landed out paper an “accept with minor revisions.” I still had work to do, but at least this time I had something to show for it. With a request for a two week turn-around—meaning the essay would be due in the days between the Christmas and New Year holiday—I got back to work.
This version of the essay—the 4,972nd by my unofficial count—had reviewer 2 “impressed by the depth and rigor” of the arguments and ready to “cite it in the years to come.” Read that again, reader, for me.
Of course, reviewer 3 was nowhere near as enthusiastic—it’s at this point that I think the absence of reviewer 1 for the latter revisions necessitates reviewer 3 filling in the stereotypical role of reviewer 2. I had, by this time, had more than my share of reviewer 3. I was also grateful for their comments because, frankly, they were right, the essay benefitted from their push to tighten things up.
After finalizing and submitting my grades for fall 21, I got to work on the little changes necessary to get the essay over the finish line. I submitted the essay just before Christmas. In mid-January 2022 it was, finally, accepted for publication. In October 22, it finally appeared online and in early 2023, it should appear in print.
The first final draft was written for a conference in spring 2016. God willing, the essay will be in print seven years later. I miss my friend, but I'm grateful that she helped me get this one to the finish line. I just wish she could've read it.
