Due to an inability to read calendar dates properly I managed to miss the deadline for submitting the written version of my paper for the workshop on rumours that I am attending later this month is hot and humid Singapore.
The issue, as some might say, is now fixed.
‘Have You Heard?’ was first presented at the AAPNZ in Auckland three years ago, where it got reasonably good press from the attendees and provided me with a great near miss for its publication, when the editor of the (then) forthcoming Episteme issue on conspiracy theories told me he would have published it had he seen it just a few weeks earlier. By the time he heard it, the issue was already being put to bed (as I believe some publishers say).
I did try to get it published elsewhere, to aggravating effect, and ended up letting it lie fallow in my filesystem, with the notion that, eventually, I’d stop writing such long and convoluted sentences like this one and get on with the task of submitting it elsewhere.
Which was why it was a bit of a surprise to get it requested for the Singaporean workshop; it seems the blog actually does have an academic readership and it seems what they heard of the paper, they liked ((I wish to congratulate myself now for using rumour-locution throughout this post without actually talking about rumours per se.))
Taking a paper overseas is a good reason to have a look over it; you wouldn’t want Customs seizing it for being too rude, or to find that it’s all dusty when you present it at the foreign podium. It turns out that whilst the central thesis of ‘Have You Heard’ is, I think, still strong, the paper itself was filled with grammatical errors. This is most embarrassing; no wonder one of the reviewers asked if English was my second language.
One of the early ‘revise and resubmits’ I received for ‘Have You Heard’ proposed what I thought was a rather radical thesis; remove all the talk of conspiracy theories from the paper and just talk about rumours. Now, I didn’t do that, but, based upon this bout of editing, I think that maybe that is not a terrible idea after all. It’s not the conspiracy theory material isn’t interesting; it just doesn’t play as crucial a role in my analysis of why rumours are reliable as I thought.
So, maybe I will rewrite the paper after all, post-Singapore.
In other news, the season opener for ‘Lost’ was bloody brilliant.