By education I am a Physicist (BAppSci, Physics, QIT) and an Information Scientist (MsInfSc, UNSW) and I started a PhD in Humanities Computing which has long gone by the wayside.
In previous professional lives I have been a lab technician using an automated x-ray diffraction lab at the ANU, a Macintosh computer consultant working in a university college (ADFA, UNSW), a Systems Engineer at UC and a Research Developer for text-based tools for working with scholarly editions of literature. As part of this last effort I have developed software for the stand-off markup of electronic texts (JITM) and the authentication of content within files being marked up with SGML-like languages (JITAM). Both these acronyms will show up in a Google search as I have had papers published on them in journals and web-sites.
Hopefully I will not have to resort back to these endeavours because I always wanted to be ... a LUMBERJACK ...
Well may be not. Perhaps a writer. At least my own boss. So now I try to keep bread on the table by playing the stockmarket with the lump sum I got from my last job of twenty some years, selling second-hand books, comics and magic cards on eBay and being a continuity editor for speculative fiction.
interested in how I came to do professional continuity editing. It's all due to Russell Kirkpatrick, a New Zealand fantasy author. He made a comment on the Purple Zone about how it was good for readers who found mistakes in books to report them to the authors so that they could be corrected in future editions. Having just started "Across the Face of the World", the first book in this first trilogy, I took him at his word and started up email correspondence. Three books and 32,000 words of email correspondence later he asked me whether I would do it for him professionally and I have been involved in the first and second drafts of his book 1 of his Husk trilogy. Russell has been kind enough to tout my services and I have picked up other work, including Donna Maree Hanson who was kind enough to put a plug for me up on her Australian Speculative Fiction web-site. As to whether this leads to something major ... only time will tell ... but it does seem to be something I have a talent for.
With regard to my writing efforts I am embarked on the writing of a 3/4 maybe 5 part fantasy story based on some roleplaying I did back when I lived on campus at ANU. Never being one to use canned modules the world that I designed and ran back then was a low power, low enthropy world well suited for writing believeable stories about. I also applied my Physics background into designing the cosmology and laws of magic and so I hope will have an appeal to other readers of both fantasy and science fiction as myself. Book 1 is currently in search of an agent and book 2 is about 1/3 to 1/2 done in first draft. Book 4 is a logical consequence of the background story of the first three books and book 5 would be only just if book 4 were published.
Well that's enough of me for now.