Finally...

Well as I mentioned awhile back, I have been busy writing away. Both the wet-lab work and the computer-based results were submitted together to the Journal of Cool Stuff . This was my first time submitting to J. of Cool Stuff. My advisor hadn't submitted there in awhile. The review on the computational work took 6 weeks. Minor revisions, mostly highlighting things for the reviewers that were not as obvious as we originally had thought. Easy fix. It took 8 weeks to hear on the wet lab work. Accepted pending minor revisions which included additional experiments along with curtailing the discussion or doing even more experiments. I took a week did the easy additional experiments (all yielding the negative results I expected with tons of caveats that make it hard to say anything conclusive about them, hence I did not do them in the first place, but we included all of that in the revised paper), and then we curtailed the discussion. The further potential experiments I am now doing and will turn into a short article, which in the end I guess puts me ahead of the game. I guess a thank you to the reviewer is in order.

The work I did for collaborators currently is sitting in their hands as they write their part. Glad there was a delay since in the meantime I wrote a review with another post-doc in the lab for Building Blocks Journal which was reviewed & accepted within the span of two weeks for the holidays. Our lab has submitted research articles to Building Blocks Journal they are also turned around in the same amount of time. We already sent back the proofs. Still waiting on the proofs for the articles for Journal of Cool Stuff. The reviews for BBJ are very complete. Their editors actually push the reviewers to you know actually review in a timely fashion. Wish other journals did the same thing. Nothing worse than waiting, wondering if you are going to have to drop what you are doing to do additional experiments to satisfy a reviewer. Better to get it done sooner rather than latter. You have to be able to move on, move forward, so much better for peace of mind.

And now what? Well, it is work with a post-doc in the lab pushing for a paper, work on the further experiments discussed above for another and then also work on a third project that hopefully will turn out a paper before the year is out. Productive yes, which is good but boy can writing be draining.