I see a book in my future

Now that it looks like things are falling into place, I dare talk about some parts of my longer term plans.

This spring I had a phone call from, of all things, an editor at a small Norwegian publishing house (yes, that makes it miniscule). She told me she had heard loads of favourable things about me (good beginning), and was I interested in writing a book on computer games for the Norwegian college/university market?

Was I? I was.

But since offers like these don't come with big advances attached, at least not in Norway, to be able to do something like that, I have to incorporate it into the responsibility we have at the college for communicating both our own research and that done elsewhere, and making it available for scholars in Norway, in Norwegian. This is normally done through shorter articles or simple lectures and teaching, but one way to do it can be by writing a text book. So I applied the college for time to do so. I wanted to have 6 weeks this fall to prepare for the book, and the spring term to write the first draft. I have been negotiating the work-load this autumn to get that much time for my own research, and kind of got that into place today. Then I heard that I got the spring term for research and writing.

Step one in the stairway to my big work has been built. In the next year I can walk up on it. Bootstrapping my own thought-processes, as well as my academic publishing, if everything works right.