Russell KirkPatrick.com

A new semester has started, and I am lecturing students in Research Methods. They have to choose a topic to research and put in a proposal by next Monday.

Aside from the students who have been invisible until now and therefore want me to do all the work for them (ha!) the main problem is actually a very complex and deep-seated one. Students hate uncertainty.

Here's how it works. Many of these students are teenagers or in their early twenties, have asked the hard questions, have spent the last few years evaluating their home environments and have in most cases struck out on their own.

Yet when they get to my class they just want to do what they're told. They don't want to think of a topic for themselves. They don't want to come up with a method. They especially don't want to think about theory. Just tell us what to write down and we'll write it down.

They say things like 'Is what I'm doing right?'

Well, there's no right or wrong in choosing a topic. Is it interesting? Is it of a manageable scale? But no, they still search for certainty.

I'm worried about the kind of students we send out into the big bad world of employment, where there are seldom right or wrong answers to be copied from the blackboard. This class is such a lot of work for me, but it is so, so, so important for the students. The more uncertainty the better.

Oops, better go. Here's another student now. 

So after a hard day's work, and within minutes of posting yesterday's blog entry, what happens? My network crashes and I lose the internet.

It's taken until now, eighteen hours later, to get it back up.

What happened? A bizarre set of coincidences, actually. It began when I created a new mailbox for Dorinda so she could use Entourage on her new laptop. I accidentally erased the primary mailbox password, overwriting it with hers.

A little while later my wireless network dropped out, so I restarted the router. Trouble is, the change in password now meant the router would not recognise the network. Nor could I get into the router and authenticate it. It wasn't until I figured out I had to reset the router to the factory settings that I could get things going again.

Just what I needed. I have deadlines that are months and in some cases years away, but already I feel them crushing me like a garbage compactor.

Sorry I haven't blogged in the last week. My days are packed. Up at 5am, ten minutes on ebay - could be rare cornishware, but no - last minute lecture and workshop preparations, a few minutes' reading, breakfast, shower and stuff, and off to Uni just after 8am. Workshop from 9 till 11am, including a videoconference link to our satellite campus in Tauranga. Five minutes in the staff room followed by an hour with a lecturer with ideas about maps as crazy as mine. I'm going to guest lecture for him Monday after next.

OK, home by 12.30. Now the fun begins. Accounts, letters and other boring parts of running a business. Lunch with a book on my knee. Editing of the 1:50,000 NZ topo database river coverage. Whee! Then some initial work on a national cartogram by Census area unit for the 2007 edition of my Contemporary Atlas. Take an hour to make a few notes about the next novel, tentatively titled Dark Heart. Quick trip to Harvey Normans to check whether they have the Office software I was supposed to get with my latest laptop. Yes, they have it, and apparently rang to tell me so - on Sunday July 2nd. Thanks. And I suppose they would have rung again in a year or so. We need a TV cabinet so I checked three stores - all about $1000 or more for a wooden unit. Cheaper to lop off my son's arms and legs and sit the telly on his bleeding torso. Back home for more cartogram work, then dinner and the last of the torte I bought for Dorinda's 50th birthday last Saturday. I decide I need graph paper, so off to the mall. End up chatting to the book seller for a while. I've just arrived home. It's half past eight. I need to wind down, but I can't bring myself to stop working.

Writing this blog isn't exactly helping. 

Spent time today looking over the last five years and planning the next. It's been an interesting exercise.

Five years ago I was a newly-published non-fiction author and still had ambitions of creating a bright, shiny academic career. I was only forty and had plenty of energy.

Now I have three separate careers. My non-fiction atlas production has turned into a business employing myself and two others. I continue half-time at University. And I'm writing fantasy novels.

So where to? The problem is I don't have time - or energy - to give to all three.

I have plans for four more atlases in the next five years, including a complete rebuild of my New Zealand atlas, one of Australia and a World atlas. Two of those will be done 'on spec' - i.e. not commissioned by a publisher. But I expect to sell them.

I'm a third through a fantasy trilogy. Plans are well advanced for a standalone sci-fi novel, which i imagine I'll have difficulty placing with a publisher. I don't care; I'm writing it because I damn well want to. I'd also like to write fantasy in a completely new world, on a scale and with characters not seen in the genre. And - why not? - I dearly want to do a space opera.

Five years is probably optimistic.

Now, where does that leave University? My plans are so wide-ranging I find it hard to concentrate on the academic journals.

Here's the equation bothering me. Readership for fantasy novels: 60,000. Readership for atlases: 300,000. Readership for academic articles: 100 if you're lucky.

Russell has a decision to make. I will struggle with it for a few more months and then make it. You'll hear about it first.