Scholarly Rejection? Get Back in the Saddle!

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Brown horse with empty saddle.

Today, after submitting an article to a journal, I suddenly realised that I hadn’t added to my ‘activity log’ for a while. It has been a sombre summer; I went down south twice; did nothing scholarly at all for some five weeks of the summer; and promptly went down with some virus or other when I got back to Glasgow for the second time – so it’s hardly surprising if I took my eye off the ball. Nonetheless, I decided there was no harm in looking out the activity log and updating it. I got quite a surprise. The two rejections earlier this year, coming close after one another, had hurt. I feel a bit sore about the piece I had genuinely thought was accepted one or two years ago, but more recently turned out to be very much not so; and even more sore about the piece that was requested and then kindly but firmly declined. I felt misunderstood!

But it appears that this scholarly year hasn’t been as bad as I thought, notwithstanding those two knocks. I’ve had an article published; and I’ve given a conference paper and two talks. To any ambitious American academic, this probably seems like pathetically small beer, but I’m a British musicologist, I’m 67, and I’m not trying to secure tenure in terms of a full-time academic contract, so it’s all okay. (I could get a dozen articles published in a year, and it would make no difference to my age or status.)

I have a book chapter and a couple more articles accepted and pending publication. Another article accepted subject to revisions, which I’ve submitted – fingers crossed this time! And today’s article just submitted. That doesn’t seem too bad to me. I now have a couple of half-promised articles which I really ought to get on with; another idea for a collaborative article; and the conundrum of a possible third book. (I’m nowhere near writing this illusive thing, but I do have angles to explore, before I can formulate a precise way forward.)

But what I do know, is that the more irons I have in the fire (yes, more cliches – sorry!), the less I mind about the rejections. Maybe I just directed them to a subject area more dissimilar to my own than I realised, so didn’t hit the targets that were expected? In any case, having other things submitted and under consideration at least offers the hope that next time I might be successful.

More irons in the fire …

I wonder what my activity log will look like by the end of the year?!

Image by JamesDeMers from Pixabay

‘You should find that the system is very user-friendly …’

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

I wrote an article. Revised it. Revised the revisions. I have no problem with this – it’s all intended to make it a better article, and hopefully it is now better. However, I feel less positive about the mechanics of submitting it! You have to use a platform called Manuscript Central. Manuscript Central is a product of the ScholarOne platform.  (It was owned by Thomson Reuters, then Clarivate and is now owned by Silverchair.  Still with me?) I Googled it, and one journal publisher described it as user-friendly.

I’ve used it before. Indeed, I’ve uploaded revisions before.  But today, I couldn’t work out how to do all my re-revisions within the platform. After much huffing and puffing, I did submit a manuscript. I’m less confident as to whether I submitted it correctly! And I dislike feeling thwarted by technology. It doesn’t encourage me!

Confused – but no hair was torn out!

On the positive side – I normally have the greatest difficulty stopping research activity when I stop being a part-time researcher for the day, but today I was more than happy to close the document. Gently, if metaphorically shutting the door behind me!

On Thursday, I’ll turn to the next article for submission.  Hmm, which platform for this one …?

Aha! New Arrival all the Way from Arran

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

Once used in an Edinburgh school, a wee Scots song book (pupil’s edition) found its way to a shop on the Isle of Arran, then back to the mainland to me in Glasgow.

1, 2 … still looking!

If you ever find any of these in the back of a school cupboard, or bookshop,  or car boot sale, or Granny’s attic …

… please do let me know!  I’m trying to get complete set! There were four books for the kids, and four for teachers.

Volte Face: Never Think You Can’t Change Direction

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

We drove south last week. No, I drove us south. I missed one turning and mistook another. I’ll never hear the end of it, and I never want to see Pontefract again.  (It did give a certain person the opportunity to deride my own lack of any sense of direction, and proudly show off their own.)

As for me? I am so accustomed to getting it wrong that I just regard it as part of the journey. I get there in the end.  If this sounds like a metaphor for your own career path,  then read on. You’re in good company.

I found a photo last week that revealed my career has been a bit like that, too.  I’ve told my story often enough, so I’ll keep it brief today.

So Young!!
  • Aspiring to a research career, I completed a research Masters then switched topic for a PhD. First mistake.
  • Took fright at the thought of trying to become an academic, and trained as a librarian – without finishing the PhD. Second (big, big) mistake.
  • First (temporary) post in academic library.
  • 2nd post in public library (who says you can’t change sector? Anyway, I needed a permanent job) – and got Chartered.
  • 3rd post in academic library (another switch, see?). This was where I wanted to be: an academic music librarian. The closest (I imagined) I’d get to being a scholar librarian.
  • Boredom set in. I wasn’t very happy. Here’s where the LinkedIn career coaches say you should walk away. Listen, a breadwinner can’t just walk away! Hang in there. Plan, prepare.
  • Mid-career PhD done, whilst working full-time with dependents. Did folk think me crazy? Assuredly!
  • Partial research secondment.
  • Retire from library, hang onto the research – no longer a secondment but a new part-time position. Onwards and upwards.

I look at that old news clipping (why did Mum keep it? I thought she found my latter research career an embarrassment! All those letters after my name – so immodest) – and I wonder what 22-year old me would have said if she knew how my zigzag career would pan out?

  • Then, not many people did Masters’ degrees. Now, a lot of people do. 
  • Mediaeval plainsong? Completely unrelated to anything I’ve done since 1984! No use in the library.
  • Fifteenth-century English polyphony? Ditto. Although I do feel a bit guilty that I baled out before it was done.

Don’t Look Back

Admittedly, I do wonder what I’d have done if I’d finished the first PhD, and found work as an academic. But there’s absolutely no point in playing “What if?”.  We take the decisions that feel right at the time.

I wouldn’t dare to suggest that I had the model career.  I didn’t aim high enough, lacking self-confidence to a chronic degree; got stuck where I was (see above); and had one helluva struggle rectifying the  situation. Quite a ride! But I did demonstrate both flexibility and determination. I did get what I really wanted all along – eventually.

It all just goes to show that there’s more than one way to get there – if that’s where you want to go. And a few false turns aren’t the end of the road.

Hello to All New Visitors! I’m a Research Fellow

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

I haven’t been posting much this summer, for personal reasons. So – after more than a week of total blog silence, imagine my surprise to find I have had hundreds and hundreds more visitors since yesterday. What’s happened?!

Even if it’s some kind of blip, it gives me the opportunity to introduce myself. I’m a postdoctoral research fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and also, for a few weeks more, at IASH at the University of Edinburgh. I research all sorts of cool stuff (well, it’s cool to me) about Scottish music publishers, with a distinct interest in national song collections, and in early 20th century music education in Scotland.

My second book was published at the end of 2024:-

A Social History of Music-Making and Scottish National Identity: Scotland’s Printed Music, 1880-1951.

That might look like a strange date-range, but my previous book covered Scottish song-collecting up to the 1880s, so this kind of continues in a slightly different way from that point onwards. The 1951 cut-off date is because that was the year of the Festival of Britain. And it was also a good place to stop because I touched upon magic lanterns, gramophones and the wireless, but I really didn’t feel I was the right person to write about early television in Scotland! By stopping in 1951, I conveniently sidestepped early television. There are plenty of people more knowledgeable than me on that front.

My current Edinburgh research entails examining archival records of the Thomas Nelson publishing house, an old Edinburgh firm. The British side of this company has ceased trading – it’s an American firm now – but I’ve found plenty to interest me in the documents up the early 1950s. Education became their focus during the era I’m researching.  Whilst my book mostly covers publishers specialising in music, Thomas Nelson really only published music that would be used in schools – though they hoped a few titles would also attract the general public. (The problem being that if you mention ‘school’ or ‘classroom’ in a title, it will turn off the ordinary member of public looking at books in a bookshop!)

Will there be a third book? Possibly! I’m still pondering.  September is earmarked for concentrated thought about that!

If this sounds interesting, please do come back and visit this site again.

Don’t Give Up Too Soon

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

I have a tiny cutting on my pinboard, which reminds me that,

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realise how close to success they were when they gave up. – Thomas Edison

It’s painfully true in life, but it’s also particularly pertinent in archival research!

Yesterday, I was trawling the most random of files. To be fair, a couple were even labelled ‘Miscellaneous’ in the handlist. However, they date from an era I need to know more about, so I was going to look at them!  I entered a rabbit warren of curiosities.

  • Rejections, marked ‘Refused’, or ‘Returned’
  • Objections:- ‘You interviewed my son and sent him for a medical before deciding he was too old for an apprenticeship. Why?’ [My precis, not a quote]
  • Union matters. ‘If you don’t join the union, you put yourself and us in a difficult position  because we can’t work alongside you’ [again, my summary]
  • Sob stories, like the widow whose friends said her story ought to be made into a film, or a book. Apparently, she was robbed and then incarcerated in a lunatic asylum in America, and now she wanted Nelson’s to publish her story of those calamities … (‘Refused‘)
  • Inks
  • Plant (machinery)
  • An Indian paper mill under the mistaken impression that Nelson’s were interested in a collaboration  …

By 4 pm, I had a splitting headache, and was quickly flicking through pages as fast as I dared – the paper was fragile, and I still  didn’t want to miss something important.

Why not admit defeat and give up on this box file?, I mused. There was nothing relevant in it. Interesting, but irrelevant.

Note signed by composer Peter Warlock
Note from Warlock to a song book compiler

Then I saw it. A beautiful little note from no less than British composer Peter Warlock! In the grand scheme of things, it’s not of huge significance – it’s just an apology for his delayed response,  and a request to correct a small detail before publication  – but it does confirm the editor’s identity (something I hadn’t yet managed to do, apart from finding a footnote in someone else’s biography), and it reminds me  that I should index the Nelson collection that contains Warlock’s unison choral song. 

This handwritten note from March 1929 was written less than two years before  Warlock died on 17 December 1930, aged only 36.  He is thought to have committed suicide over a perceived loss of his creativity.  I believe he was something of a tortured soul, though I’m not familiar with his detailed biography.

I so very nearly didn’t find this note! Yet again, that maxim has proved true. Dogged persistence wins every time.  The tragedy is that Warlock (Peter Heseltine) was too tormented to be able to keep going at all. What else might he have achieved? How much more might he have written?

Identifying ‘The Large Book on Music’: How Large Must a Book be, to be Considered, ‘Large’?

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

The Music Man

In the late 1920s, Thomas Nelson’s were just starting to work with the music specialist who would turn out to be very helpful to them over the next couple of decades. As I mentioned, I’ve been trying to find the very first letter that passed between them.  Moreover, the Nelson’s editor had told his line-manager at the outset (in the mid-1920s) that he hoped this individual would be helping with ‘the large music book’. Now, this is delightfully vague, isn’t it? Nelson’s wouldn’t be publishing anything that I’d call ‘large’ in the way of printed music for several years.

And Another Music Man!

On Friday, I stumbled across editorial correspondence from 1929 about revising an earlier book about music – one useful to individual students, possibly beyond school age – but not a school classroom text-book. When I get my hands on it, I expect to find that it’s a fairly standard Nelson printed book size. If this was ‘the large book’ (Possibility A), then it was only ‘large’ by comparison with slimmer materials intended for the classroom. Moreover, our music man was NOT the person who ended up revising it. His first contribution was something slimmer, and more classroom-based. But this book does perhaps better fit the timescale of a publication being projected in the late 20s.

It’s so easy to imagine up a sequence of events, with what is really insufficient evidence.  After all, there could be another projected ‘large book’ (Possibility B) that never actually happened!

My working theory for Possibility A, is currently that even if they approached the first guy to revise a book, then for whatever reason, he wasn’t ultimately offered or didn’t fancy the commission. The chap who did do it was certainly a good choice, in any event – a knowledgeable scholar rather than a gifted practitioner and pedagogue.

There’s nothing for it – I must continue leafing through early correspondence in search of that initial letter!  But I’ve also ordered a copy of the book that the scholar revised.  After all, it’s another Nelson music publication.   I need to know about it, too, whether it’s the ‘large’ book or otherwise.

The Man who Turned up Everywhere!

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

Yesterday was my first day back in the archives. My phone was crawling with messages (an ongoing family situation). Then came a phone-call, which I couldn’t answer without running out to where I could talk. That led to another, and another. And another. Back and forth I went.  I can’t tell you what a day it was!

However, I did get through several folders of Thomas Nelson papers.  I’m in search of the first mention of a particular individual who was very influential in Nelson’s educational music output.  I found him mentioned a couple of times in yesterday’s papers, once quite unexpectedly. I need to see how this sits in my timeline.  Honestly, I didn’t expect to find him urging an organist’s wife to submit a book proposal on … elocution!  It didn’t look like choral speaking (yes, that was a thing, which was quite in vogue a little later on). Indeed, a Nelson editor specifically advised his boss that it was about elocution, so I don’t need to wonder.

Nelson’s rejected the lady’s proposal. She found another publisher.  I briefly wondered how the Englishman who basically ended up acting as music advisor to the Nelson editors, came to know a Scottish organist and his wife, quite early on in his professional career? But I think they probably met at a course or conference.

Four Weeks’ [Disrupted] Holiday

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

This is an interruption into the ongoing intermission!

Victorian woman reclining in armchair

I really needed this holiday. I was tired. An ongoing family crisis meant I couldn’t go away, but we’ve been for coffees and afternoon teas. I sewed and knitted. I’ve weeded books, tidied the garden, and we’ve had the bathroom gutted and totally refitted.  (This is not the epitome of restfulness, especially when the loo’s decommissioned!, but the end result is gorgeous. )

Traumatised

But please, never ever ask me about multi-vehicle car insurance.  I do not wish to relive those hours wasted entertaining the thought.  It was a terrible idea. Ironically, I don’t even want to share my experience of finding that my data had been shared without consent, or that a non-existent traffic conviction had also been attributed to me. (The ‘incident’ was my being stopped after the midnight Christmas service.  Doing 30 mph, stone-cold sober, in a fully compliant vehicle, it was a routine check, that’s all. No breach of the law, no points on licence.)

A couple of email exchanges during my vacation have reminded me how far I’ve moved from librarianship to research in just one year, and I’m looking forward to carrying on in this direction now. Anyway, I’m back to research mode on Monday.  The coming week might be as close to normal routine as I could hope for, in the circumstances.  Here’s hoping!

Another Brief Intermission

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
White curtains. virtually closed, with plant on the window sill.

My diary is likely to be a bit disrupted for the next few weeks. I’ll blog as, when and if I can. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

Firs and Hollies Waltz