I also have somewhere around 200 previous unfinished articles or outlines for articles

Just curious to know why academic journal publications are your main focus. I mean I understand the thrill of writing/researching for academic peers/journals (honestly), but not being in academia what's your angle? Why this particular medium?

I also understand well the unfinished articles, even book projects, conundrum. I too have many many unfinished projects on my computer. Much of that is unfinished because having been in academia I am now not (unfortunately) and so my main impetus for doing such work is, well, not at the forefront of my needs at the moment, and again I might add, unfortunately this is so.

Unlike many of my graduate peers so long ago, I was actually very interested in academia because I loved the research and writing component of what I was doing, and much of modern biblical scholarship, at least in this younger generation, has shifted away from historical-critical, philological, and textual work towards sweeping modernized agendas such as feminism and the Bible, eating habits, social analysis, etc. when I always felt there was much much more to be done with the text and its cultural underpinnings. Anyway, my point is as a professor (when I was one) I soon became distraught by the fact that much knowledge (what scholars do know with a fair amount of certainty) about this corpus of ancient texts had not even been disseminated to a larger public audience, so I soon shifted my interest in journal writing to trade-book writing, in the simple hopes of being able to share this fascinating knowledge with the public.

Needless to say I sort of botched up both trajectories. Having published 6 articles by the time I got my PhD, I soon found myself working on my many trade-book ideas in my first university position, bouncing from one to the next. Basically I still loved learning. So having received a PhD in Early Christianity I have since bounced myself over to OT research, primarily on source-critical scholarship on the Pentateuch. In sum, I neither finished the publication of my dissertation (which would have made a substantial contribution to Pauline studies (if I may conjecture), especially in regards to his OT hermeneutic, which I think much of mainstream scholarship has misunderstood and misrepresented), and neither have I been successful in my trade-book endeavors (1 flopped book I would say). Had I to do over again, I would have keep my ambitious journal publication goal (2 articles a year) when I was a professor and rewrote my (French) dissertation as a monograph. . . and then pursued the trade-book field.

Now, although I enjoy (or perhaps enjoyed) the academic aspect of writing, not presently being in academia, and not having properly published my dissertation (as many of my colleagues warned me to do), the only future avenue seems the trade-book one, where I have about a dozen unfinished projects. But alas, there too, I fear that that audience that really needs to learn most about this field of knowledge doesn't really care to. Most trade-books are done by non-academics and have subjective angles to them---my experience de-converting for example, or in this perverse society, certainly what Ken Ham has to say about Genesis is more important, or garners a much larger audience, than what any specialist has to say about it. But I'll keep chipping away I suppose.

Anyhow, that' a long way of asking again why the academic angle interests you most. For right or wrong it's sort of a closed, and at times pompous (which is thoroughly enjoyable too), conversation among academics. What do you hope to gain out of it?