I have been blog-blocked since before December last year and need to make a concerted effort to move beyond it. Part of the problem has been journalistic—I’ve not wanted to write about anything that isn’t (a) news and (b) an exclusive. Considering the proliferation of science blogs, and considering that I too like to read multiple perspectives on different issues, I have no idea why that block took over my brain.

So, onwards.

There’s a real tension in talking about your work and your ideas in a public forum. I have three or four ideas for future projects that I feel quite excited about. One is really relevant to what I’m doing at the moment and is just waiting for me to get my head around some genetics. One is a sortof logical extension of the types of cultural phylogenetic work I do, and I have a masters student potentially interested in getting that strand of thinking out of the abstract and into real work. Another is a similar sort of project that I’d like to write a grant about in the future but I need to do some hardcore networking as it would encroach on other people’s databases. And the final one is totally left-field and while it’s evolutionary anthropology, it has nothing to do with phylogenies, the Pacific, and is only marginally kinship related.

I think it’d help me to articulate thoughts about these ideas, leave me some brain space for the other work I’m doing at the moment. But with most of them I do feel like I’ve actually had original and important ideas, and the urge to be discrete and cautious is winning out.

Still, the aspect of competition is motivating.