Tuesday 16 October 2012

Are you a metaverse citizen?

Here's my October column for AVENUE magazine, which relaunches this month with a brand new look to celebrate its fifth birthday.  Photography is by Ziki Questi.



A couple of Facebook posts by friends of mine recently have got me thinking about the notion of Second Life® citizenship; that is to say, the issue of being an SL citizen as opposed to just an SL resident. We’re all of us SL residents, I suppose; but which of us are citizens? What does an SL citizen do (or not do) that’s different from a plain resident? Is it even possible to draw any sort of meaningful distinction at all?

Sunday 14 October 2012

The Return of Thursday

NaNoWriMo 2012 is just over two weeks away; I'm delighted to announce I'll be entering the annual novel writing contest once more.  My intention this year is to attempt to satisfy the many calls for a sequel to AFK.  It's been five years since I wrote this - my first and most popular (by a very considerable margin) SL novel - and I'm looking forward to putting down what becomes of Definitely Thursday and Inch Sideways... and hopefully avoiding the law of diminishing returns and disappointing everyone.  Just remember - you asked for it!

Written during my very first year in SL, AFK is as much a reflection on the wonder of discovering SL as it is an SL detective story.  A lot has happened since then - both in SL and to my own relationship with it - and it's taken a period of time out of the metaverse for me to reflect on this amazing place some more and come up with some new ideas for exploration.  As with all NaNo novels, of course, a lot of it will also be made up as I go along :p

Stay tuned for exerpts whilst I write and, of course, the completed book (assuming, of course, I'm successful again) will be availble for you to download for free in the new year (or as a Christmas present if I'm extra efficient this year.

I the meantime, if you haven't yet read the original, you can download it (for free) via this page.