Thankfully, I completed my writing assignments in the time I ended up being able to devote to them – one article was actually in by the requested deadline (!) and the other one was late, but not so late that the editor gave up on me. Phew.
This is what comes of promising people an article/chapter/white paper when there’s no fee-paying work in the pipeline… and then having to deliver after said fee-paying work has turned up with its own little set of imperatives. Still, such is life; no-one said it would be easy, and – as the archetypal British infantryman puts it – “if you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t have joined up…”.
I’ll let you know when the articles in question are in the public domain – though, of course, the other thing I’m learning is that they end up hedged about with copyright clauses limiting what I – the author – am entitled to do with my output. What’s that all about, in the age of personal internet publishing?
One is about “What’s happened to PETs?” (Privacy Enhancing Technologies) and the other is a more general look at Identity Management: where is it, how did it get here, and where might it be going next.
The last thing I’m finding is that the whole process of doing the research (literature review, collecting references and citable material) – and then reviewing your own thoughts in the light of other people’s – is a sure-fire way of generating yet more thoughts which just add to the backlog of papers to be written. Sigh. That said, the next paper should be a cracker. As to its subject – well, given what I’ve just said about the bizarreness of having to cede copyright just to have someone else transfer my work to sheets of compressed vegetable matter, you’ll just have to wait and see. I may just crack and publish it here first.
Robin Wilton's Esoterica 