I and Atul Mishra are proud to announce that our book Nuclear South Asia: Keywords and Concepts has now been published by Routledge. This was several years in the works and at one point, I had even given up on completing it, until Atul came on board to rescue it. The project started as a dictionary series, which I agreed to join with considerable reluctance and with good reason: a project like this requires great discipline and I wasn't sure I was up to it. After some initial work, I realized that my original doubts were well founded: I would not be able to do this on my own and I was ready to junk it. That was when Atul agreed to join the project and breathed fresh life into it. This was a huge burden for Atul because he was still writing his PhD thesis and this was a subject way beyond his PhD thesis topic. Nevertheless he not only agreed to join but gave me sufficient hope that I could get back to working on it. Once we were finished with our initial draft came the next obstacle: because most of the other authors contracted to write dictionaries on other topics in the same series failed to finish their manuscripts, the entire series was shelved by the publisher. We understood the publisher's point of view -- you cannot have a series with just one manuscript, after all -- but this left us with a more or less complete manuscript and no publisher. We had some interest from at least one other publisher, but they required significant additions and both I and Atul were too exhausted to consider it. Eventually, after more than a year of sitting on the shelf, Routledge finally expressed an interest but because a couple of years had passed since we wrote the manuscript, it required significant updating. After this long journey, I think it would be fair to say that both of us are at least as much relieved as excited that it is now out.
Monday, September 22, 2014
New Book
I and Atul Mishra are proud to announce that our book Nuclear South Asia: Keywords and Concepts has now been published by Routledge. This was several years in the works and at one point, I had even given up on completing it, until Atul came on board to rescue it. The project started as a dictionary series, which I agreed to join with considerable reluctance and with good reason: a project like this requires great discipline and I wasn't sure I was up to it. After some initial work, I realized that my original doubts were well founded: I would not be able to do this on my own and I was ready to junk it. That was when Atul agreed to join the project and breathed fresh life into it. This was a huge burden for Atul because he was still writing his PhD thesis and this was a subject way beyond his PhD thesis topic. Nevertheless he not only agreed to join but gave me sufficient hope that I could get back to working on it. Once we were finished with our initial draft came the next obstacle: because most of the other authors contracted to write dictionaries on other topics in the same series failed to finish their manuscripts, the entire series was shelved by the publisher. We understood the publisher's point of view -- you cannot have a series with just one manuscript, after all -- but this left us with a more or less complete manuscript and no publisher. We had some interest from at least one other publisher, but they required significant additions and both I and Atul were too exhausted to consider it. Eventually, after more than a year of sitting on the shelf, Routledge finally expressed an interest but because a couple of years had passed since we wrote the manuscript, it required significant updating. After this long journey, I think it would be fair to say that both of us are at least as much relieved as excited that it is now out.
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