With the one ancient language that I've been studying for several years now and have made myself into quite the expert in, I continually worry that I'm going to get "scooped" on project-ideas that I have developed pretty far or am almost on the point of putting out there, but haven't been able to put out there yet.
Like, I have two big ones that are claimed and ready to go and ready to write up, but there's also around six smaller ones that I have a list of.
I've found ways to tentatively claim stuff when I'm sure enough of the overall findings, but it takes time to chase down research around the edges, and although I'm moving forward as quick as I can, threshing out that stuff and consolidating it and putting it out there in my name will still take quite some time, like easily this won't happen for all of that list of six ideas for the next year, at least.
When I first started realizing what big stuff was being missed in the field and how bad the scholarship was, my one linguist friend who works on a better-studied language family made this side-comment during one of our talks, that "at least you don't have to worry about anyone breathing down your neck."
And, that's very true, but still, I worry.
The funny part, too, is that these are all decently major steps of progress where I'm making decisive moves forward, but they're not even book-length, they're all the size of an article or a double-article, only, the content between each project doesn't always overlap all that much, so it takes just a f*ck-ton of time to pull together your thinking and the previous studies into a densely-cited piece of prose like that, for every single project.
If you're the kind of person who has just one project and milks it forever with diminishing marginal returns, you just don't have that kind of problem, though you do likely have tenure (lol -- people who "made it" can be such uninspired and lazy jokes).
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