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graveyard of DOOM index < | > I get the occasional email from people who've read Man Bites Dog asking if I'm writing any other books at the moment. It's a question that comes up a bit in conversation, too. It's fair enough, too. I wrote one book, I tell people all the time that I'm a writer - so where's the second book? The answer is a little convoluted. I have a tendency to overexplain when talking about what's happening in my life, and this is no exception. See, two years ago I went back to school to study a multimedia course at RMIT TAFE. A friend of mine had done it and I was bitching to him about how poorly paid the life of a freelance book editor was. Paul suggested that if I was to score myself some kind of multimedia design qualification - say, by doing the course that he'd just finished - then I would be able to do pretty much the same kind of writing and editing work that I was doing at the moment, only I'd be doing it outside the publishing industry. Which means better salaries and a better hourly rate for freelancing. The world of IT and multimedia, he said, needs people who know a lot about written communication, but they won't hire someone who's just a writer and book editor. They want someone who's also familiar with the world of multimedia. I hate that word. It doesn't mean a fucking thing. "Multimedia". I could stick a walkman inside a loaf of bread and I'd be able to succesfully argue the case for it being considered multimedia. I could put a single hyperlink into the entire text of Man Bites Dog, upload it and it'd be multimedia. An emptier and more malleable phrase there never was. Multi = lots. Media = stuff. Yeah, I'm studying "lots-of-stuff". Anyway, that's how I find myself now six months from acquiring an Advanced Diploma of Multimedia (code name: ADoM, which is kind of cute - I'll be "Adam Ford, ADoM" when I graduate). That means that for the last eighteen months and the next six to come I'm up to my neck in homework of the multimedia variety. Thus there has been absolutely no time at all to work on my ostensible novel-in-progress. And let me tell you, there are times when not having time to write chafes like a sonofabitch. I haven't put finger to keyboard on this novel for nigh on two years, apart from maybe six weeks of that time, but with all of the multimedia work I needed to do, I wasn't really able to concentrate on writing, so to be fair to myself I've called a two-year hiatus on writing. That probably makes the last couple of years sound more negative than they have been. To be honest I've been having an ace old time making cartoons in flash and weird pictures in photoshop and illustrator, and so on. There's something special about drawing a bunch of stick figures and then making them run or dance or jump up and down. And the joy to be had from creating a crappy flash game cannot be underestimated. To prove my point, here's a dumb little thing I made last semester featuring robots and magnets. It isn't a second novel, but it's fun all the same. Enjoy.
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