For a while now, I've been planning to write a book. Or actually, several books. I like to write, and I believe I have produced something like two or three rather hefty, WoT-sized books if I add up all my writings on Calcuttagutta, so I feel pretty sure I have it in me to write one or more books. I just haven't had time yet. And thus, my plans to become an author have remained at more or less the same level of completion, or rather uncompletion, for years. However, I have recently realised something important about the nature of things, and this discovery has the potential to make me start writing, although not one of the books I originally planned to write.

I am currently lecturing a physics course at the university. I lectured the same course last spring, and I will lecture it again next spring. This is the first time I'm lecturing a course for the second time, and while preparing my lectures over the last few weeks, I have discovered two things:

Firstly, it is seriously awsome when you are able to find your notes from last year, and even more awsome if you are still able to read them.

And secondly, the probability of finding, and indeed being able to read, notes written one year ago would be greatly increased if I had typed them up nicely in LaTeX and kept them on my computer.

In other words, what I have discovered is an excellent incentive to write a textbook for the course I'm teaching. And when I think about it, I seem to remember rather a lot of my textbooks saying something in their preface about how the athour essentially expanded the lecture notes for their course a bit, and that was that.

Of course, the problem, as Camilla pointed out to me earlier, is that if you publish your lecture notes, then you can't really use them as lecture notes anymore. Or, you can, but then you will be one of those boring lecturers who read aloud from their book, and we don't want that. Never the less, I might actually be closer to writing a book than ever before. Exciting, isn't it?

-Tor Nordam