Rejection

I had been on a good run recently.  I had a couple of articles accepted on material I am strong on, stuff that was an extension of the work I did for my PhD and for my first book.  I had been asked to do two radio interviews on suburban modernity.  So it was with some eager anticipation that I opened an email from a journal editor to whom I had sent a prospective article.  It was a rejection.  A bit of surprise, but it shouldn’t have been.  I know that rejection is statistically far more likely than acceptance, but I had got used to the idea of succeeding.   This particular article was in a new, but cognate, field from my previous work and with this result I was forced to learn again some lessons that I already knew. 

The first of these was the danger of unconsciousness ignorance.  In my field, I mostly know what I don’t know and can carry out whatever extra research is needed to fill the gaps.  If I have missed something, the referees will tell me.  It turned out that I didn’t know what I didn’t know. 

Secondly, I had become complacent, thinking that if I was capable in one field (which took ten years to master) then I would be successful in anything else I was interested in. 

Thirdly, I fell in love with my research.  This is something I was warned about many years ago, and in turn, I warn students of today.  My research was so intriguing that I failed to place it into its historiography in a convincing way. 

I read somewhere that if you keep getting your articles accepted then you are not trying hard enough, meaning you have to keep pushing the boundaries.  It turned out that I wasn’t trying hard enough in a different way.  After a bit of sulking, I got engaged with the topic again and was quite excited to learn from my referees that I had a lot of new reading to do and new ideas to absorb and that, if I did that, then I had the possibility of producing something worthwhile and different.