Why is the end of the year always so tough??! We're moving back to Hobart next year, so next week I'll be away on a road trip looking for a house there. So you'll have to excuse me if I'm not around much. This sorta thing is always stressful; will we get a good place? Will it have a good studio for me to work in? I completed Hollow Fields volume 1 in a house which had a nice big spare room to work in, with a great view (and a neighbour's cat that kept visiting). Volumes 2 and 3 though were completed in a much smaller house with cramped conditions and bad insulation - the tiny room I worked in was an oven in summer and an icebox in winter. Plus we lived next to a guy who had a fascination with Guitar Hero, which could be heard through the incredibly thin walls. Horrible! Only sheer force of will and wanting to do a good job on my series kept me in there all day!

So now we are scouting for a place that will hopefully offer a good room for me to create manga in. Wish me luck! The annoying thing about rentals is, you often don't get a good idea of what's wrong with them until you've lived there two or three days. We've had two houses where the toilets kept bumping and hissing, two houses with poor insulation (as I mentioned above, this is VERY important if you work from home), THREE houses with ovens that are at least several decades old and have broken hotplates, one house that was so tiny people constantly crashed into one another when trying to maneuvre around in it, and one house that nearly caught fire due to an electrical fault(!). Ahhhh, to be able to buy a house...wheee, I can dream! My house would be a ridiculous steampunk clockwork nightmare perched high atop an ancient elm. And the council would battle me day and night with their robotic cranes, trying to tear it down...bring it on!!