a pleasant surprise.

very strange:

this morning i wrote to a journal, in as polite terms as possible, about my article submission from october 2011 and why i had received no response since then.

(yes, i know: i should have written sooner.)

they replied right away, this afternoon.

apparently they sent a reply last august, indicating that it was accepted, and have been waiting for me to submit the final version under their specific formatting guidelines!

after running a few searches with all the keywords that i could find, there was no trace of that email.

[shrugs]

oh well, it doesn't matter. it's good news .. and i finally have some closure in that part of my life.

you see, it was the only paper i was able to cut out from my ph.d. (as of now) and before that journal, it was stuck for another 18 months ..

.. in a journal that i will not name,
but to where i will never submit anything ever again.
maybe i will change my mind,
but it will be more likely that i leave mathematics,
before i'll place any trust in that journal.

pardon my vulgarity, but fvck them!
hell, i don't know if i'd even referee an article for them.

.. but it's done;
it took .. ye gods .. four years, but up to formatting it is done.

at least the referee has decided that the techniques i used, which aren't terribly standard, are reasonable. it's reassuring, because so far i haven't had much luck getting my work in this area published.

i can move on now, and build on that work. it's not an end, though, but a beginning.