About...
... freelance writing, this website, & sundries
(NOW IN NEED OF A MAJOR UPDATE, and slowly getting there! - RMS 26/7/2026)
The website and me
My name is Roger Stitson, and RMS Illustrated (renamed from RMS Education) is my website.
Originally the site was set up as RMS Education many years ago to display info about my freelance education writing and personal project work, such as the Text Talks for The Age newspaper, film study guides for Screen Australia and the Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM) association, plus the CD-ROM of Federation-era news cartoons etc.
However, soon the site grew like Topsy as I added material which, at least on the surface, had nothing to do with classroom education but which I thought might be interesting at least to a niche audience, or simply to display some of my other interests and foibles.
This current site is a renovated and reorganised version of that unplanned, higgledy-piggledy, outdated and neglected version, with additional information about my comic book writing and self-publishing interests. [Note: this was wrtten about 2015-2016, and is now being reorganised again, a decade later.]
A potted bio from Back Then to Now
* 1964: Failed Year 12 high school, Yallourn, Victoria. Early 1965, interviewed for a job at Monash University as a laboratory and field technician in Zoology Department - had dreams of photographing animals in the wild. Not accepted for employment. Shunted across to Medical Faculty on the same day of interview for a different laboratory job. Accepted. A week later, went down to Melbourne again, and began work.
* 1965-1970: Employed at Monash University Medical Faculty as a shockingly unqualified Medical Laboratory Technician. Career reached a climax (or nadir, depending how you look at it) when I realised I was more interested in reading books about film directors such as Hitchcock, Ford and Hawks than visiting the local abbatoir for blood, pithing toads for med students to practise on, studying Histology and preparing microscope slides for the electron microscope. Things quickly coalesced after I flooded the laboratory by forgetting to turn off the water distiller before going home at night - twice in three weeks.
* Some time during 1970: Resigned (not sacked) from Medical Laboratory Technician job to complete secondary education.
* 1972-1976: Full time tertiary student - Bachelor of Arts and Diploma of Education.
* Began secondary teaching in 1977. While teaching, did Bachelor of Education in Literature and Film/Media; followed up with a Master of Education in Literature and Film/Media. Eventually went to part-time as a teacher, to continue writing short fiction and non-fiction. Some fiction and items on film, literature and comic books were published in various magazines, newspapers and journals. During the 1990s I completed interrelated courses in Magazine Production, Magazine Editing and Sub-editing, and Magazine Desktop Publishing, and later did a short course in Visual Basic computer programming.
* Took extended leave from secondary school teaching in 1999 to pursue writing 'career', then eventually resigned from classroom teaching (and stress migraines). Continued with casual emergency and sessional teaching while writing until about 2002-2003. Did newspaper indexing of book and film reviews, researched, wrote and edited the Electric Chronicle and put together the CD-ROM of Federation Cartoons, and the Vintage Australian Comics CD (the latter no longer available due to copyright issues). Began writing film study guides and Text Talks (essay-style articles about texts on the Year 12 English course) around 2004-2005. Also worked on online education projects for Film Australia and later Screen Australia.
* 2015 to the present day: Continuing freelance writing for the education market: mainly film and literature study guides. Writing short film scripts between paid commissioned jobs, and developing the script for one of them ('Cut Down') into a comic book, in collaboration with illustrator Dave Dye. Since then many film study guides have followed (mainly for ATOM, some directly on commission from film producers), and I have continued to write and self-publish comic book material (story scripts, plus a small manual on how to proofread comics). I have a weekly serial-length, uncompleted script to finish, while a couple of completed scripts (another serial plus a comic book story) await assessment and/or illustration by other comic book publisher-producers.
At the time of writing this update (late July 2026), a book of my collected comic strip 'horror' stories is soon to be printed. This website, including its top-of-page menu selections, will continue to be updated and renovated to reflect these changes. The process is somewhat slow, as I'm using WordPress, which I've never really mastered, and have to keep looking up simple coding examples..
