On faking your death in SL

Here's my December column for AVENUE magazine, the last for a while whilst AVENUE takes a break to consider a change of format.

There ought to be a word for when a comment left in response to a Facebook friend’s post piques your curiosity enough that you click on the commenter’s name to see what other sorts of thing they’ve written elsewhere (I make no apology for this snooping; I’m endlessly interested in how people express themselves online)… and a resulting chain of profile hopping ensues as you move from comment to profile to comment to profile, a sometimes hour-long exploration of random people you’ve never met connected only by the thread of your happenstance curiosity. ‘Browsing’ doesn’t quite capture it for me, somehow. ‘Browsing’ implies you’re waiting to find something of interest, whereas this little bounce from personality to personality reveals new fascinations with every single step.

One such carefree hop and skip across Second Life® Facebook profiles a few months ago led me to a comment about a man who was described as having died in RL some time ago, only to return in SL about a year later. I’ve heard about this sort of thing before, but never actually met someone who did it. Also, I was under the impression that people who ‘came back’ tended to do so in a new account so that they didn’t get found out (although, of course, they usually did get found out because they just couldn’t resist getting in touch with old friends in their new persona and giving themselves away through their textual mannerisms; it would be nice to think that the number of people who use ‘u’ instead of ‘you’ in SL do so only to distract from signature phrase slippage and that it hurts their soul to do this just as much as it does mine to read it). I did a web search on this returned avatar’s name and found several posts across various forums about his RL death, plus a couple of later – less than complimentary – confirmations that he was, in fact, alive. I looked up his profile inworld and saw that he is indeed currently active. He made no comment there about his earlier ‘death’, but there was a mention of sending those who didn’t “understand” him to a dark and fiery place.

Season's greetings 2013

NaNoWriMo 2013 update

Yesterday, at about 5:40pm, my latest novel, NaNoWriMo attempt and entry in the AFK series (yes, yes; I'm now the author of a 'series'), 'AFK, Indefinitely', passed the magical 50,000 words mark.  It was a brutal month this year; my RL work schedule hit an even busier peak than usual and my word count suffered massively during the week.  Some seriously focused weekends and a hell-for-broke dash yesterday of 5,000 words in under six hours, however, saw me cruising across the NaNo finish line with over six hours remaining to the month.

As is often the case come 1 December, the book is not yet actually finished.  Last year, 'AFK, Again' ended up consisting of 54,000 words once the polish was done, and I suspect 'AFK, Indefinitely' will end up a comparable length.  Expect a release early in 2014 and, for now, here's a copy of my 2013 certificate for you to stroke.  OOOooo  AAAaaa  And so on.