Finally Making Progress with Oroqen

I've been making extremely slow progress (over the course of the last 19 months!) analyzing the Oroqen data that I recorded with LJW and FL. In the last few months I have been more aggressively analyzing (though still slowly, since it's all in my 'free time' - it's not part of my post-doc work), and in the last few days I have actually started writing! The paper still has a long ways to go, but at least I'm figuring out what kind of structure to give the paper, and getting some of the tables filled in (or at least started) and starting to figure out what figures to make & include. Given the huge time crunch (this should have been turned in about 3.5 months ago), there is a bunch of data that I will not be able to include simply because I don't have time to make all the measurements. But they will come in a later paper, and in the meantime I am feeling more optimistic about the potential for this paper, even though it will not be as complete and comprehensive as I'd like it to be. Funny, my dissertation was the same way - not as complete and comprehensive as I'd hoped - perhaps this is just the way academic publishing works, and something I need to get used to. In the meantime, I think this paper will be solid, and a valuable contribution to Tungusology and (acoustic phonetic) Typology. Right now this paper is my #1 publishing priority. When it's done... I'm not entirely sure what I will focus on next. I will probably bite the bullet and make a bunch new recordings/measurements of F2 transitions and then write up the locus equation paper that I have in mind. It's already partially written and I already have one bunch of data complete and ready to go, but I think I should replicate the same data with a different speaker whose subglottal resonances I already know by independent means. That will form a crucial control that I'm currently missing, and make the paper that much more convincing. After that? There are a few directions I could focus on, but I don't know yet which one I will work on first. I suppose I'll leave off that decision until I have to deal with it (after the locus equations paper is done). Hopefully I'll be working on a paper that is related to my post-doc work by that time! I'm rather looking forward to what I think my academic career is shaping up to be... A string of speech perception papers, a string of subglottal acoustics papers, a (small-ish) string of Oroqen papers, a string of vocal fold papers... They may not all materialize - "way leads on to way", you know. But I'm feeling better now than I was a month and a half ago about my prospects for developing and following up a coherent, interesting, and valuable line of research. For the time being, it's just hard enough to learn biology and condensed matter physics at the same time that I'm trying to follow up on those speech-y research projects... Don't get me wrong - I'm enjoying my post-doc work. But I'll be so glad when I get my first tenure-track faculty position! September 2009 sounds pretty good...