bad news, good news, arχiv as crowdsourcing?

the bad news: 17 months & counting

i submitted a paper in march 2009, as cut from my ph.d. [1] barring a few non-committal replies when i wrote the journal, i still haven't heard anything.

i know mathematicians are generally a laid-back group of people, but ..

[sighs]

i guess it's time to write the editor again. who knows? maybe the referee will want to take care of this thing before fall term starts. (i would.)

[ponders]

maybe it was a bad idea to put everything in one paper. thinking about it now, there are two separate, nontrivial ideas contained in it, from essentially two separate fields. at the time i thought that neither idea was strong enough to warrant its own paper, but ..

1. maybe it would have been simpler to referee, had i cut two papers instead of one;
2. in light of the forthcoming job search, i could really use two more accepted papers instead of one. \-:

the good news: they said yes!

i also submitted a paper last year, in october.
they wrote me back today: accepted! (-;

maybe i'll now put it on the arχiv. i could use the publicity [2], now that somebody impartial has bothered checking the details. besides,

in the event that both the referee and i missed something -- a gap or error in one of the proofs -- then maybe someone else will pick up on it.

if it is truly serious, then at least i'd know to retract the paper before any publication.

[1] had i known it would have taken this long, i wouldn't have bothered polishing the preprint as much. i could have submitted a quick and dirty draft in october 2008 (5 months earlier).

[2] actually, i've added it to the CRM Preprint Series at universιtat autònoma de barcelοna, as a gesture of thanks for their hospitality last summer.