The folly of youth may also contribute to blown deadlines

August 4, 2017 9:29 PM

Yes, Your Manuscript Was Due 30 Years Ago. No, the University Press Still Wants It.
posted by Chrysostom (20 comments total)

As someone with a paper from graduate school that was first submitted in 2012 and, God willing, will be resubmitted this year (for an earliest plausible publication date of 2018), this is wonderful news.
posted by en forme de poire at 9:47 PM on August 4, 2017 [4 favorites]

It's like this was written specially for me. (I have a manuscript due to a university press on Wednesday and am very slightly possibly losing a little of my mind.) Thank you.
posted by Aravis76 at 10:22 PM on August 4, 2017 [5 favorites]

You can relax. You have decades to finish it.
posted by hippybear at 10:42 PM on August 4, 2017 [5 favorites]

I’ve spent the bulk of my career working on university press books. Oh, the stories i could tell (but won’t, for privacy reasons).
posted by D.C. at 10:45 PM on August 4, 2017 [6 favorites]

You could change the names to protect the innocent.
posted by hippybear at 10:55 PM on August 4, 2017 [3 favorites]

You could change the names to protect the guilty innocent. FTFY.
posted by Gyan at 5:05 AM on August 5, 2017 [2 favorites]

"Tardiness doesn’t appear to be specific to any single field, Ms. Crewe said, though she did note that authors writing about journalism are better about making their deadlines."
posted by oheso at 5:36 AM on August 5, 2017

Gyan: I believe the phrase "The names have been changed to protect the innocent" is something that was part of the Dragnet television show, back in the day.
posted by hippybear at 7:10 AM on August 5, 2017

It's not quite the same thing, but as I've previously mentioned, there's the Acta Sanctorum, a 68 volume work by the Société des Bollandistes, proposed in 1607, with the first volume published in 1643.

The final folio was published in 1940, 297 years later.
posted by zamboni at 8:02 AM on August 5, 2017 [3 favorites]

There is the story about how paleontologist Jenny Clack couldn't proceed with her work on Ichthyostega because the people who discovered it in 1932 hadn't got around to publishing anything until 1996, so she finally went to Greenland to find another one.
posted by lagomorphius at 8:56 AM on August 5, 2017 [2 favorites]

I wonder if this also applies to Ph.Ds. Maybe I can still hand in mine, 10 years overdue.
And I love that the author's byline to an article on a decades overdue book manuscript is Chris Quintana is a breaking-news reporter.
posted by fregoli at 9:25 AM on August 5, 2017 [1 favorite]

This is just a wee bit too real for me right now. *hyperventilates*
posted by LMGM at 4:15 PM on August 5, 2017 [3 favorites]

Keep thinking about the person who got the call after 30 years. I've had a few projects fall by the wayside for whatever reason, and it's always a relief when other people seem to forget about them.

Can't imagine the nightmare of getting a call about a project abandoned for 30 years. You thought it was long behind you. You've had a great career. Your past isn't going catch up to you. You even think about ditching that box of floppies with the Wordstar files because everyone's forgotten. You're on the verge of retirement and you got away with it. You never had to finish the book. The perfect crime. And then the phone rings...
posted by honestcoyote at 4:24 PM on August 5, 2017 [10 favorites]

I can't decide if it's great that I read this article as I think about something 5 years overdue... or terrible because now I'm all, "hmmm, maybe I have 25 more years!"
posted by TwoStride at 5:27 PM on August 5, 2017

I know a professor who started a book more than 30 years ago. The proposal was accepted around then. It took them more than 10 years to complete... the first volume. By the time they had well exceeded the press's word limit for a single monograph, they had only got through one of the seven topics they had proposed in the initial book proposal. So the publisher agreed to split it into a multi-volume series. They recently completed volume four, I think, and intend to do another three at least. (Assuming they live that long. They 'retired' a decade or so ago.)
posted by lollusc at 5:52 PM on August 5, 2017

So... 11 years on a master's thesis?

nervous laughter
posted by halonine at 6:28 PM on August 5, 2017

lollusc: Charles Stross says that's because occult powers are preventing Knuth from writing the rest of The Art Of Computer Programming for the good of all humanity.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 10:43 PM on August 5, 2017 [1 favorite]

MetaFilter: They recently completed volume four, I think, and intend to do another three at least. (Assuming they live that long.)
posted by hippybear at 12:40 AM on August 6, 2017

Knuth

I'm still hoping for strong AI.
posted by zamboni at 9:34 AM on August 6, 2017

This reminds me of Brian May's long-delayed thesis on the dust that produces the zodiacal light, which he was able to return to and complete after 30 years because there'd been relatively little research performed in the area.
posted by The Tensor at 11:06 AM on August 7, 2017