One of the most misunderstood things about academic life is publication. Everybody knows “publish or perish.” Everybody. But nobody knows, or understands, how damn long it takes to get a paper done. They think we are ridiculous: after all, they wrote perfectly good papers in six hours the night before the paper was due! So we only teach twice a week and we write three papers a year at six hours each. Gah! Slackers.

John Whitehead explains the process in gory detail here. My question: he actually gets his page proofs in on time? Really?

Go read.