I sat down to update my CV tonight. As I was working on it, I griped to J (via Skype) about that book notice that I’d written maybe four years ago–it had been accepted but had never gotten published. I wondered aloud if maybe I should just delete any reference to it, given that it seemed absurd to use the phrase “in press” year after year next to its entry on my CV. Maybe in the transition from one journal editor to another it had gotten misplaced? For a year or two, I’d dutifully checked the journal every month or so to see if my book notice was there. And it really was just a book notice, and why keep it in there, when it was never going to get published at this rate. After a while, I’d pretty much forgotten about it, except on those rare occasions when I read over my CV. And by now, four years later, the book that it was about (Europe and the politics of language: Citizens, migrants and outsiders, by Máiréad Nic Craith) was no longer new, so did it really matter?!
As J was reminding me that–while these academic publishers are not the speediest in the world–they do eventually get around to publishing things, I opened up Firefox and looked for the journal. When I got to the eLanguage homepage, I typed my name into the search box, just to prove to her that it still wasn’t there.
Except it was there. In print. Or as close as things get to actual print nowadays–online and available for all to see. And it looks like it’s actually been there for 11 1/2 months. Must have slacked on my checking for it in the last year or so. And if they wrote me last year to let me know it had been published, they undoubtedly would have used my grad school email address, which no longer exists. So that’s why I hadn’t heard from them when they’d published it. Wisely, whoever put the book notice online must have done some sort of search for me, because they inserted a link from my byline to my linkedin page.
So, I’m academically published! That feels good. Haven’t actually sat down to read it through yet, but I will read the whole thing through tomorrow, just for old time’s sake. If you’d like to take a gander at it, just click on this link to it in eLanguage. A bonus–unlike the Ya! article that I posted about the other day, this one is in English, so a little more reader-friendly for some folks.