Dr Amanda Dillon

And I'm also not in charge of the university, but I also feel like maybe the people who are in charge of making financial choices for the university should be the ones who face the consequences of these horrible decisions. Not staff, not students, not faculty, not the community.

This is horrific. Docking all pay for refusing to reschedule teaching due to strike action (for which pay has already been docked).

Since yesterday, many people have DM’d to say that they were strongly affected by my essay & wished they could share it.

So I've revised, expanded, & posted it for free on both Substack & Patreon.

Please feel free to share.

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TL;DR: If you don't want to be part of reject day: submit something good to the right journal. I can't promise it'll work - some journals just can't consider every submission - but the vast majority of rejects I do are neither especially good, nor fit the journal's remit.

(cont) Make sure you bring your A-game when you submit something. Otherwise - reject day. :-(

(cont) Journal level peer review should not take the place of immediate peer review - I *hope* we all have networks of colleagues and friends who, even if they don't work on our direct area of interest, can give suggestions on our work. Our referees are giving up their valuable time for free! (cont)

Number 4: Submit something good - not half baked, not mid-way through your process. I get this isn't always possible when funders and employers are breathing down your neck, but as much as possible: submit something that's been seen by someone else's eyes and that they've critiqued. (cont)

Number 3.5 - If you're not sure about this, *talk to people* who've published in similar journals. Or just ask my equivalent, who should be able to give you a rough run-down of what's expected.

Number 3: Be aware of the academic conventions. Not all academias are identical, and there is an (unfortunate but very real) set of values and standards unique to each style of academia. No matter how well written for the standards you were trained in, it may not translate well for the journal.

Number 2: I repeat: make sure you understand the journal's remit properly. Don't assume anything from the journal's title. For example: history journals often have chronological and geographical remits. Don't submit a paper on Britain to a journal about Chinese history. It ain't going nowhere.

Number 1.5: If you're not sure about the journal's remit, contact my equivalent and ask if your paper fits the remit! Soft submissions save everyone LOADS of time, you included!

Number 1: Make sure you submit to the correct journal. Duh, right? Well, apparently not. Don't submit medical papers to literature journals. Don't submit literature articles to The Lancet. Like. Just don't.

BUT! The good news, oh friends who are reading this far, is that you can avoid a lot of journal rejections with a few hot tips.

I give a similar workshop for the MAs at my institution on how to publish, beeteedubs - this is no secret. And it's all logical.

And that leaves me with 'reject day' once every few weeks. Which feels like bad karma day to me, every time, because I genuinely don't like telling someone their work isn't up to snuff, that they haven't understood the journal's remit, or they've just... not understood Western academic standards.

So I tend to let them stack up a little - it doesn't take much time, maybe a few weeks, because we reject a LOT of submissions. It also means my editors have time to read them, too - and they DO. Genuinely, my editors read all submissions. Even the likely desk rejects, just in case.

I don't *make* the decision: I only communicate it with a few keystrokes. But it's a task that weighs heavily on me, because I've had rejections of all sorts over the years, and I know how much it can sting, particularly if you really, really thought the piece had found its home.

I hate reject day.

Lemme back up.

One of my jobs on the journal is to send out the desk reject emails. As a working and publishing academic in addition to being a managing editor, I am keenly aware that these emails go to human beings, and that I'm about to make their day very bad indeed.

I don't talk about my 'other' job publicly very much, because I work as a managing editor for an academic journal, and honestly there's not much to talk about - it's very task-and-finish, and I obvs sit in an odd position re: for-profit publishing, as it *pays my rent*.

But today was reject day.

Because it's absolutely true: if there's no point in doing anything at all, why would you do it? It's humans who make meaning. The events are just events. We make them mean something. What that is is entirely up to us. Story is uniquely human. Story is our one superpower.

The Guardian view on universities: Labour needs a clearer plan | Editorial Editorial: Ministers promised a ‘change of approach’, but their new tax could tip weaker institutions over the edge

'Despite all their difficulties, universities remain an enormous and irreplaceable national asset. As well as educating millions of people, they generate about £24bn in export earnings, which is about 1% of GDP – more than aircraft manufacturing and legal services combined'. 1/2

Imagine running a higher education system/country so badly that you actually can't afford, or refuse to fund, research that is *literally defined as* "internationally excellent".

Stupid, stupid, stupid country.

happy ‘i will reply to your email on my return’ day to all who celebrate

That's my top... 9 for the year. A lot of everything else was either deeply disappointing, mediocre at best, or re-reads.

I have not YET read (but expect to enjoy) Katabasis, Helm, The Everlasting, Ripeness, and Paris Adrift.

I loved John Wiswell's Someone You Can Build a Nest In SO MUCH that I immediately went out and bought it in physical form after reading it as an ebook. It's not as good as everyone says. It's better.

I'll die on the hill that Ashley Poston is the *most* interesting romance writer working today, and A Novel Love Story is proof. It's meta, thoughtful - readerly but also writerly in the Barthesian way. It works on multiple levels, and shows Poston as a writer to reckon with.

[...] the immigrant experience. The idea of another time being a different country is inflected and reflected throughout this novel in ways that I suspect only fellow immigrants will fully grasp. It's not really about time travel, at its heart - but it's still wonderfully readable.

I'm interested in time travel in general, so I knew I had to read Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry of Time. I'm not a huge fan of the final act - I think it could have done without - but it is clever, and deserves all the hype. But the most interesting thing about it is its commentary on [...]

I knew I'd like Peng Shepherd's All This & More - it's 100% up my street in every possible way, but more than that, it's incredibly incisive and critiques the 'chose your own adventure' idea (the format AND the idea of fully free will) in a compulsively readable way. Read it physically, if possible.

Xiran Jay Zhao's Iron Widow was one of those rare books where I basically dropped everything to read it in a day and a half. I don't DO that anymore. I don't have time. I'm saving the sequel for when I can do it again. Wonderful, fun stuff.