2015 and all that

Happy New Year!  This time 12 months ago I was announcing the completion of the first draft of 'AFK, Indefinitely'.  I'm not quite there yet with 'AFK and Avengement', but I'm getting very close. It's already surpassed the length of last year's instalment by a healthy 2,000 words so this is the longest in the series so far.  Stay tuned.

There's a lot to do this year.  I want to release a book of some of my blog articles by the end of June and I still have my novella, 'Sim', to finish.  I'm also hoping to pen a completely non-SL detective novel at some point during the year.

Last year, I took some photos in SL for this blog that I was rather pleased with (for example, The Trace) and I'd like to do this a bit more in 2015.  It won't hurt me to get out a bit more.  SL really is becoming a more and more beautiful place and yet it's still the old 2006 pictures that get dug out whenever a news outlet runs a story on the metaverse.

2015, of course, is currently pegged as the year in which the Oculus Rift gets its commercial release, potentially heralding the beginning of a new era of virtual reality, so get ready for plenty of VR stories hitting the headlines once these devices hit the shelves (my guess is that most of them will be about motion sickness).  How the OR - and, indeed, VR - will fare long-term is a very difficult thing to predict, but I am really looking forward to this release and the directions the industry subsequently takes.  At the very least, I hope that by the time I've written my '2016 and all that' post next year I'll have seen SL from the inside for the very first time.  Fingers crossed...

Images: Top - BBC coverage of the London New Year fireworks; Bottom - Oculus Rift development kit from www.oculus.com.