Musings on Writing a Book and Publishing a Book: Another Chapter in Life as Crisis Management

As I have grown older—I am now retired, am sixty-nine, and will be seventy in November—one thing that has become quite clear to me is the fact that life, or more specifically a significant part of life—involves managing a never ending series of life crisis. Looking back I can see that a lot of my after I became a teenager was about managing crises: relationship crises, financial crises, and intellectual crises. All of these crises were made even more daunting by the fact that I have long been humanophobic, I have long had health problems, by the fact I lived and live in a core nation that transitioned from a modern industrial capitalist economy to a postmodern capitalist with all that entailed including deindustrialisation, globalisation, bureaucratic downsizing, and by an increase in poor paying and short lasting jobs. My England, Australia, Canada, and America was not my Dad’s England, Australia, Canada, and America

One of the many crises in my life, one that ebbed and flowed between the early 1990s and the early 2020s, involved a book I began writing on Mormon Studies in 1991 or 1992. It ebbed and flowed for a number of economic and cultural reasons including the fact that it is a book as much if not more about social  and cultural theory than it is about Mormonism, something that made my book project an even more daunting and difficult project particularly after I switched from graduate work in Anthropology and Sociology, social science disciplines with a strong emphasis on theory, to a discipline that is a social science to a few and a human science to the many and which has little interest in theory, History.

Another reason the project ebbed and flowed was technological. When I began work on my book the computer and its word processing programmes was in its infancy and had only recently replaced the typewriter, typewriter paper, and liquid paper for typewriter paper. Can you feel my pain? I initially learned computer on a Mac in the 1980s. Because I was a graduate assistant on a newsletter in Latin American Studies which was done on a PC, however, I had to learn PC and its Microsoft programmes. I would later learn the PC version of WordPerfect. I remained wedded to the PC until the early 2000s when, after a number of crises associated with PCs and particularly a Dell PC—I got an error message when I turned it on for the first time—I went back to Macs, a decision I have never regretted though it easier to do these days—now you can get Word for Macs, for instance—than it was in the early primitive days of computers. 

Doing my book at first on a PC led to a number of crises. Initially my book was typed in Microsoft Works. When Microsoft Word replaced Microsoft Works I transferred my book into Word. In the process, however, I lost every other of several hundred footnotes and parts of the text itself were sometimes made into an ugly mess. Don’t you just love it when one product of a corporation isn’t fully compatible with another product of the same corporation? To fix this problem, of course, required, the expenditure of a good deal of time, time limited by the fact that I was a graduate student and worked part-time because I needed the money. Despite the limitation of time and despite the fact that I had to use computers in a computer lab on campus since I did not own a computer, I did begin to try to reconstruct the missing footnotes.

Another crises related to the book was associated with the fact that I have never really been all that enamoured of graduate school education. I knew given my age—I started college late in life, something I am glad I did since I really wanted to go to college when I went and was serious about it—and left college because of relationship, financial, and intellectual crises related to that bureaucracy on several occasions. My ambiguous feelings about academic bureaucracies was the product of several things including the too often soap opera, Machiavellian, and limits on valid critical discourse atmosphere of post-graduate education, by my alienation from a bureaucracy where what one did was regarded as more of a job than a calling, by my alienation from the higher education stratification system, by a dramatic decline in my romanticism about academia, by the fact that I knew my chances of getting an academic job given my cultural capital was about nill given my post graduate educational background—I really didn’t want a full-time job in the academic beast anyway—and by the fact that I got a job as an acquisitions editor at a university press in 2000. All of these contributed, along with the technology issue, to me putting my book on hold in the late 1990s and the early 2000s.

After getting a job in academic publishing my intention was to make a career of publishing. However, as I have written about elsewhere, my life in publishing was cut short thanks to the economic downturn after 9/11, and thanks, I suspect, to my ideological iconoclasm, an iconoclasm that didn’t play well in the publishing corporation in which I worked any better than it did in academia, As one of the last hired I was one of the first to be let go by the press. 

Though I tried to get another job in academic publishing and had two interviews with publishers my lack of success in getting another job in publishing led me to give up the search for another publishing position. As a consequence I decided to return to teaching as an adjunct and eventually I decided to finish my doctoral degree. By 2011 I had earned my doctorate and had a published a papers on the culture war surrounding the 1969 Woodstock Festival and on the theoretical problems associated with Buffy Studies, both of which required extensive effort and both of which I remain very proud of today. Another paper I wrote on Downton Abbey was slated for publication but I pulled it out of consideration for the anthology when the editor of the collection drained, from my perspective, all the life and soul out of my prose in his edits.

During my adjuncting years I started work again on the book, mostly because the manuscript was there, when breaks from work and energy permitted. It was work I did without support from foundations, the US government, or the administrative staff at the college at which I taught, perquisites that full time faculty sometimes get. The pandemic in the early 2020s helped me get the manuscript into shape. Footnotes were reconstructed and rechecked. Text was checked and rechecked, written and rewritten, and moved from one place to another. I then started to send the manuscript around to publishers. 

Several publishers were interested in it. Mormon Studies, after all, is a money maker for academic presses particularly for those that also target faithful demographics with what amounts to polemical and apologetic work. A few sent it out for review. As peer reviews sometimes are, one was one of the oddest I ever read but then so much criticism is not about the book someone else wrote but about the book the reviewer would have written.

Finally a publisher accepted the book for publication. There were some problems, however. My health has never been good. I have had serious asthma that hospitalised me regularly before the advent of Advair and Singulair, which have allowed my asthma to be finally controlled and allowed me to lead somewhat of a “normal” life. Additionally, once I hit my fifties and sixties I have been beset by muscular-skeletal arthritis, acid reflux, increasing difficulty breathing deeply because of chest and abdomen tightness, increasing vision problems, and bowel problems, all of which complicated working on the manuscript in a number of ways. Isn’t old age wonderful?

With the manuscript approved for publication I sent it in. The publisher wanted me to change the manuscript's English into American. I did it though I found this a ridiculous demand since academics are used to reading English English as well as American English given the global nature of the academy and intellectual life. This along with the occasional idiocy that is spell check, my haste due, in part, to the college I worked at eliminating my access to Word after I retired (my reward, along with the meagre remuneration I received for twelve years of teaching 100 and 200 level classes), and my problematic eyesight—I should have increased page size—made fixing the errors in the manuscript difficult if not impossible even though I did have someone else read the manuscript as well. It is always difficult, particularly with computer manuscripts, to see the errors of one’s manuscript ways. 

My haste to finish the manuscript also meant that I did not add material on anthropological studies of Mormonism that I wanted to particularly once I gave up hope, given how physically and intellectually exhausting doing this book was, that I would or could write a follow up book on Anthropology and Mormonism. There were also other things I wish I had added to the manuscript. Speaking of manuscripts, one can acess a more cleaned up and expanded version of the book in English English in the BYU Special Collections at the BYU Library. I am quite proud of this manuscript and regard it as the authoritative version of the book.

The book has now been out for almost four years. It has not gotten much critical attention though I have gotten three royalty cheques so presumably someone or some institution is buying it which is not a bad thing I suppose though it does make for more work at tax time. This state of affairs has not been unexpected. I am not an insider-insider, an insider-outsider, or an outsider-insider in Mormon Studies. I am not a member of the Mormon History Association or any other “professional” organisation and I am retired. I really don't want to be identified as a Mormon Studies scholar anymore than I want to be identified as an academic. I am, as I was in academia, an iconoclastic outsider-outsider and I like it like that.