Had fun the last couple of afternoons attempting to knock out an article.

Month or so ago S from TheOldPlace had a request from a journal to write something - the editor had dug up her contact details from an article we co-authored a while back. S, however, didn't feel she could contribute so passed it to me.

I floated three possible ideas past the editor and she like the sound of one. My favorite as it happened as two thoughts would have been a new version of things I've written about before.

This one was to be on a subject I've been thinking about for a while and thought might make an article. Creativity, synergy, consilience - yes, lots of buzz words - and getting even junior staff involved in projects to let them use their creativity and foster professional development.

This seemed the perfect opportunity except that between my vacation and her deadline there was very little time. She needed 1200 words by today and I only had Tuesday and Wednesday at work before two days off now. My bright (and obvious) idea to actually include a junior (non-professional) member of staff in the writing of the article however, meant that she might be able to get just enough done in the way of background reading and interviewing yet another colleague which we needed to do, that two afternoons of solid writing might just get it done.

Better yet, the head of the library and R's immediate bosses okayed her time (one subject of the article!) and she was prepared to do some of the reading at home in her own time.

Having experimented with GoogleDocs before for collaborative writing, we both sat in the same room working on the same document. This wasn't quite the success as when I wrote a sketch with the map librarian. Possibly because then we were both adding to the bottom of the document all the time. This time we were both writing paragraphs all over the place - as they came to mind, as we found a quote we wanted to use, as we helped each other out. GoogleDocs did seem to slow down a little bit under these conditions and I even managed to crash it twice. (Nothing lost though, so no great problem). Just occasionally it seemed a little easier to bash out a complex paragraph in Word and then cut and paste it in so that we could 'share' again. On the whole though, it worked quite well.

And by dint of two really dense afternoons Tuesday and yesterday in which we barely paused for breath - and a bit of proofreading last night - we got it done. With one rather major snag. We'd produced 2400 words and nearly 400 hundred more of references. Oh dear. It said what we wanted to say but could I cut it in half today - supposed to be a day off if required? (One uncharitable colleague said it wouldn't be a problem as I never used one word when three would do.)

But before doing anything rash I had a suspicion it might just be worth submitting. After all the editor could reject it out of hand, in which case I had a plan B for submitting it elsewhere; or she could ask for it to be trimmed; or just maybe she'd have been let down by someone else and be happy to take the whole thing.

As it happened, the final possibility turned out to be what happened. This morning we got an email accepting it as it stood. R now very pleased so have had her first professional publication accepted and given we were told it was 'high quality' I'm now wondering if I should have sent it somewhere peer-reviewed. But the editor did ask for it, so she gets it.

My only other 'worry' is that possibly I've made the whole process look a little bit easy to R who was surprised we did so much in so little time. Partly it's my whole 'motivated by a deadline' personality; partly it's practice; partly it's that a lot of it has been buzzing around in my head for a while and some of it was turning up in the presentations I've been doing at conferences this summer. But I hope I've not given a false impression of the work needed!