five

31 March (Saturday) is my fifth rez day.  To celebrate, I'll be reading a half hour of my poems from the last five years as part of the Milkwood Poetry Festival.  Milkwood was the first place in which I read in SL and this is likely to be my last reading for some time, now that I'm rarely in SL.  My slot will be at 12:30pm SLT.  Do come along if you would like to listen.  http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Milk%20Wood/142/221/24

31 March UPDATE: Due to illness I will not now be attending this event.

I've also put together a book to celebrate my five years of SL.  A collection of my SL pictures, poems and excerpts of the six novels I've written during this period, 'five' is an Issuu only publication and can be browsed here.

Second Life is a place we visit

Here's my March column for AVENUE magazine.

This is a column I’ve been meaning to write for a while now, and what better time than March 2012, the very last day of which denotes the fifth rez day of Huckleberry Hax?  That’s right: five years of writing novels set in Second Life®.  Five years of doing open mic poetry and live readings, and being told what a wonderful voice I have (calm yourselves, it’s just the southern British accent).  Five years of occasionally building 60s and 70s furniture and never quite getting around to finishing that shop I keep on saying is just around the corner.

Double doubled doubled (part seven)

Part seven

Honeycomb was suddenly silent.  I ran through the workings out she’d be going through in her head, wondering how quick she’d be.  After about a minute, I asked her, “You still there, sugar?”

“It looks like you were right, Mr Luck,” she said finally.  If my hunch was correct and she was bright, there was only one conclusion she could come to (other than it actually just being some innocent newbie with the right numbers in his name): I’d recruited someone to pose as Alton74.  Always assuming, of course, I was the first private detective she’d come to with this case.

Double doubled doubled (part six)

Part six

I got there at six, which is four hours earlier than I usually like to reacquaint myself with the world of consciousness.  I guess Honeycomb took the exact same view of mornings; the proprietor of Frederick’s turned up at quarter past nine, by which time I’d casually chatted with all eight of the regulars and greeter staff who rezzed by.

Double doubled doubled (part five)

Part five

It was a little bit frantic for a while, what with all the back and forth trips across my lounge to attend to Burnished’s increasingly short and urgent typings and the status of Baggage at the bar.  Within five minutes he was approached by – wait for it – Cassandra, mysteriously returned from her boyfriend love-in, but now wearing a different outfit (perhaps to give her a few extra seconds of non-recognition time in case Trigger should show up again).  She picked me up with the exact same line she’d used on me before, further reinforcing my theory that the (presumed) rewording earlier implied the (presumed) dual driver’s suspicion.  This time, however, she couldn’t possibly know I was the same guy.  I accepted her offer and let her lead me out onto the dance floor.

Double doubled doubled (part four)

Part four

I told Honeycomb I’d take the case, but could make no promises; she agreed and left.  Cassandra apologised for the crosspost – making out it was meant to be to her boyfriend who’d just come online for the first time in a week, but she’d felt bad about abandoning me – and excused herself quickly to take care of him.  And then Burnished typed in, “Take my bra off, baby.  Take it off now.”  Which was, of course, mistake number three.

Double doubled doubled (part three)

Part three

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” I asked Honeycomb.  “What do you mean by you thought I’d think you a drama queen?”

“You know how things work in the metaverse, Mr Luck,” she said to me.  “I start talking about my customers leaving due to an extortion racket and the next thing you know the blogosphere is lit up with talk of the paranoid rationalisations of a failing manager.  Gossip is the true currency of the virtual world.

“This group is very secretive,” she continued.  “It of course does not officially exist.  The guy who visited me was a one day old newbie and the very next day his account was deleted.  He told me I’d be visited on the third day of every month by another newbie – a different one every time – with the characters 4 and 7 somewhere in their name.  I was to pay them without any conversation, and within five minutes of them entering the venue.”

Double doubled doubled (part two)

Part two.

I of course have – as would any good metaverse detective – a veritable army of alts.  I have to use an Excel spreadsheet just to keep track of them: in addition to all the IDs and passwords, there’s their gender, sexuality, appearance, age, attractiveness, species and identifiable personality traits to record.  Then there’s the places they hung out in on previous cases and the names of key people they met (with one asterisk to denote if I they might be inclined to try to kill me if they ever met me in RL and two if I had sex with them).  I try not to take them where they might be recognised.