NaNoWriMo 2014 update

It was a tough one again this year, with a busy work month, a streaming cold in the last few days and the 2014 series of 'I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here!' all conspiring to prevent 'AFK and Avengement' from accumulating 50,000 words by 30 November.  Thankfully, the conspiracy failed and another mad final dash (nearly 9,000 words written over Friday, Saturday and Sunday) saw 50k reached and breached.

As has been the case for the last few years, there is still a fair bit of work to do before the book is actually finished (I added another 10,000 words after 30 November last year).  If you're a fan of the series, keep an eye out for the publication of this, the fourth installment, early in 2015.

NaNoWriMo 2014 update

NaNoWriMo 2014 is now well underway.  There was a good turnout for my talk on Wednesday at Milk Wood (as usual, I forgot to take a photo until a few minutes after the event had ended and half the attendees had left; never mind).  My own novel today passed the 20,000 word mark and now has a working title - 'AFK and Avengement'.

I'm pretty pleased with the book so far, though initial feelings about one's writing being good should rarely be trusted.  As an appetiser, here's a short excerpt from the chapter I wrote today.

She left the house at about noon, climbing into her red Volkswagen Polo and driving off in the direction of town.  We followed from a distance.  She was a dark-haired woman; she wore it straight and shoulder-length.  She had on skinny jeans, tall boots, and a green and purple Orla Kiely raincoat.

“What if it was her?” Spence asked.  “What would you do?”

“Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it,” I told him.

She drove into town and parked in a pay and display.  We stood behind her at the machine, where she purchased two hours.  Then we followed her to a coffee shop, where she met up with a woman who was sitting at a table with a toddler beside her asleep in a pushchair.  They kissed each other on both cheeks.  Mrs Herriot took off her raincoat and put it round the back of the facing chair.  Spence and I took a nearby table and sat side-by-side on the sofa; he took out his laptop and put it on the table in front of us so it wouldn’t look odd that we weren’t facing each other.  Then he went to get us coffee.

It wasn’t noisy in the coffee shop; all the same, it was difficult to make out individual words any distance away.  The woman with the toddler stood and said something, to which Mrs Herriot nodded vigorously and said, “Of course!”  Will you watch him for me a moment whilst I join the queue?  Whilst I make a call?  Whilst I use the loo?  She headed for the toilets.  The latter, then.

Spence came back with a latte for him and a skinny cappuccino for me.  “Look at her, how blank her expression is now,” I said to him, “compared to how it was when she was talking to that woman.”

“How do you want her to look when she’s not interacting with anyone?” he replied.  “Should she have a book of poetry open in front of her and a thoughtful, reflective expression on her face?”

“Look at her eyes,” I said.  “They’re anywhere but here.”

“So she’s thinking about other things,” he said.  “That’s hardly a crime.”

“Any individual behaviour can have a thousand explanations,” I said.  “Our job is to join up the dots.”

“No picture forms from a single dot,” he said.

The friend returned.  She sat, opened her handbag, took out cream and rubbed some into her hands.  Mrs Herriot smiled in the direction of the toddler and said something that made the other roll her eyes and reply with a sentence that contained the word ‘now’ emphasised in it.  They both laughed.  The friend bent over the buggy to check on something.  The smile slid from Mrs Herriot’s face.

“See?” I said.

“And again I say, so what?  Maybe she doesn’t like this person.  Maybe it’s an old friend she feels obliged to keep up with, a passive aggressive acquaintance who counts the number of texts she gets in a month and then halves it when she tells everyone how little she matters.  Maybe – just maybe – Mrs Herriot had to cancel a meeting with her lover to be here.”  I looked at him.  “Why not?  Why are we assuming this to be a simple matter of a good person and a bad person – why shouldn’t it be mixed up a little?”

“This is pointless,” I said.  “Why are we here?”

“Why indeed?” he replied.  “You wanted to see her.  But I get it now.  I get why it was different for JP.”

“I was in love then,” I said.  “I didn’t see anything clearly.”

“But he fit, didn’t he?  Just like this woman of quickly fading smiles fits the general picture you’re looking for.  When you saw him for the first time, he was everything you wanted him to be: old and overweight and worn out.  How dare such a man assume a character of vitality in the metaverse?  How dare he pretend to be not old, not fat, not a person who got out of breath climbing the stairs to his apartment?  The very sight of him made you sick.  The very sight of him made you furious.  This was the flesh behind the pretend man that Inch had chosen over you?  If only she knew.  If only she knew!”

“Please stop talking about this,” I said.

“Look at that fat woman over there by the window and tell me what you see,” he demanded.  “Don’t stop to compose your words.  Tell me what her story is and why she’s here by herself.  I want to know.”

“How the hell would I know?” I said, the words catching in my throat.”

“Don’t edit!” he barked.  A couple of heads turned in our direction.  “What about the youth with the hoodie looking in through the door right now?  You just know he’s wondering if they keep cash on the premises overnight, don’t you?  What about the guy taking orders at the till – is it me or did he have a touch of yellow to his skin?  You know, it’s his kind that are turning this glorious country into a state of woman-stoning, halal-slaughtering, tower-block-destroying jihadists and if he was actually opposed to any of that he’d be sticking his head above the fucking parapet instead of hiding away from his kind in here, serving overpriced coffees – which, by the way, is a job that a proper English person could be doing.”

I got up, shaking.  I picked up my coat and bag.  He rose too, knocking the table and sending his latte to the floor.  “And just look at that guy in the corner!” he shouted, pointing.  “I do believe I just saw him twirling his fucking moustache!”

“Leave me alone!” I shrieked, backing – stumbling - away.  Customers were gasping.  Men were standing.  The guy at the till came across and put himself between us, his arms stretched out, his palms open.  “Calm down, alright, mate?” he said.  “Just calm down.  Just calm down.”

“Fuck this!” Spence spat.  He slammed shut his laptop, picked it up and took a direct line to the main doors.  He didn’t look back.

A hand touched gently my shoulder from behind.  “Are you ok?  Did he hurt you?”  Mrs Herriot handed me a tissue and stroked my hair back out of my face.  “It’s okay – he’s gone now.  Come and sit down,” she said.  Then she put her arms around me and held me whilst I sobbed.

“Is he alright?” the till guy said, presently.  “Is he likely to come back?  Should I call the police?”

“He won’t come back,” I said, hoarsely.  “He made his point.”

He was waiting for me when I got back to the car.  “So, did you get to speak with her?” he asked.

“I did,” I said, coldly.

“And?  Theory supported?  Hypothesis rejected?”

“She was lovely.  It tells me nothing.”

“Of course it tells you nothing.”  His voice went suddenly gentle.  “Of course it tells you nothing.”

Free novel covers for NaNoWriMo and indie authors

For a while now I've been building up a small collection of photographs I think might make good backgrounds for a novel cover.  I thought I'd share some of these today.

If you are an indie author - and most especially if you're publishing your NaNoWriMo novel - please feel free to use any of the images below for your cover.  You may alter them as you please.  In return, please attribute me in your novel (a line like, "Cover photography by www.huckleberryhax.blogspot.co.uk" would be perfect).  You do not need to let me know that you have used one of my photographs, but it would be nice if you did - and if you did so as a comment below then you'd also be getting a bit of free publicity for your novel (feel free to include a link to the book on Amazon or elsewhere).

Just one limitation: you may not use any of these images for the cover of any writing which promotes any form of discrimination or prejudice against any group of people.

You can scroll through the covers below and they can be downloaded from Flickr here.

Created with flickr slideshow.

NaNoWriMo novel progress tool

I've updated the Excel Spreadsheet I use to keep track of my NaNoWriMo novel.  It's a cosmetic update which works in exactly the same way as the tool did previously.  Basically, it just looks more cool.  Enter your current word count into the second column from the left (it's labelled 'Word count') and the spreadsheet will work out how far ahead or behind you are, and even plot your progress on a pretty graph.  Tip: stay above the red line.

You can download this tool for free by clicking here.  You'll need, of course, a copy of Excel.  It might work in Open Office, but no guarantees.

And, in case you have any difficulty running it, the old version of the spreadsheet is available here.

Yet more novel ideas

November is nearly upon us, that month when the world’s population of fictional characters is incremented by at least a million as aspiring writers across the globe sharpen their pencils and set to work on dragging the novel inside them kicking and screaming onto the empty page.  If you don’t take part each year in National Novel Writing Month – or NaNoWriMo, as we veterans like to call it – then you don’t know what you’re missing.  What else, after all, is there to do in this muddy, overcast month; this dour, humourless security officer of a month who beckons you in from the warm oranges of October only to keep you waiting in cold, windy dampness for what seems like an eternity before finally unhooking the rope which admits entrance to the delights of December?  In the UK, we try to liven up this bleak collection of days with bonfire night, supposedly once a celebration of a terrorist’s failure to blow up the Houses of Parliament, but possibly actually just an excuse to remember what being warm felt like.  In the US, the artificial bubble of enforced gratitude generated for Thanksgiving collapses so spectacularly on the day after that news coverage of the blood lust of Black Friday has now become important entertainment viewing the rest of the world over.  Anything to make the month pass more quickly.

But November novel-writers are oblivious to all of this.  Enshrined in their little cocoons of their very own make-believe, the only possible relevance of happenings in the real world to them are if these can offer any potential plot devices.  Time passes all too quickly when you’re trying to knock out 50,000 words in a mere thirty days, though this is not to suggest that there won’t be moments when you wish no-one had ever invented the concept of the novel or writing or language even itself, and that an impromptu world war would at least have the silver lining that it might spare you from having to think about any of these things ever again.

For the past couple of years in AVENUE magazine I’ve entertained myself (and, possibly, one or two readers) in November with a collection of potential storylines for Second Life inspired novels, that emerging genre of fiction across the surface of which I’ve vainly scratched away for the past eight years.  For my own amusement as much as anyone else’s, therefore, I humbly present yet another.

Lindependence Day.  The continent of Nautilus decides it wants independence from the rest of Second Life and manages to convince Linden to hold a referendum of its citzens.  The campaign is ferocious.  All attempts by the board of governors to persuade Nautileans to vote ‘no’ only seem to increase the percentage saying to the pollsters they’ll vote ‘yes’ – even Ebbe Altberg’s surprisingly emotional plea not to vote yes just because it represents a possibility to “kick the effing Lindens” has Yes campaign leader Nigelex Salmage claiming that the No campaign is falling apart.  In the end, even Philip Rosedale is wheeled out to make the case for ‘Better Together’.  Salmage is unperturbed; speaking with absolutely no authority whatsoever, he claims that an independent Nautilus would keep the Linden as its currency and that residents will still be able to access Torley Linden videos.  In the end, the reality of independence is brought home to the majority when several high-profile mesh creators start talking about relocating their skin factories to Zindra.

Project Really Interesting.  Comedy. A bunch of high-school nerds create the perfect female avatar and she comes to life in the real world thanks to a keyboard spillage during a thunder storm of something cutting edge (let’s say a memristor-graphene suspension) that one of the gang swiped during a school trip to the local science genius’s laboratories.  It turns out that the very same genius has been secretly plotting to take over the world and our heroes manage to put a stop to his plans through a sequence of contrived events that mostly require one or all of them to be naked accidentally.  A zany caper from start to finish; if this were a movie you could expect it to be advertised on buses during a holiday season.

The Amazing Second Life into Darkness.  In a not-too-distant future, the successor to SL is launched by Linden.  Marketed as a reboot rather than a sequel, ‘Amazing Second Life’ features planets rather than continents and sims, with travel between worlds a lengthy, complicated and expensive affair.  Whilst your initial rez point is officially described as random, it soon becomes clear that Linden are employing a formula which the company eventually fesses up to being derived from your Google search habits, your Amazon spending pattern and the number of times you’ve shared pictures of Grumpy Cat on Facebook.  Group identity being what it is, however, the revelation comes too late to prevent entrenched identities from forming and, within barely a year of the new metaverse’s release, two nearby planets go to war over a mesh body IP issue.  It is the first in a decade-long series of conflicts which historians later refer to as The First Virtual War.  Property is destroyed by missiles which initiate a virus chain reaction when detonated.  The real life media don’t know quite what to make of this, and the novel follows a young intern reporter as she travels around Earth to meet individually in real life the refugees from a virtual planet that’s been almost totally ravaged by the Primfluenza Virus.  Her journey takes her from a French Chateaux to a New York apartment to a bedsit in a Hillingdon council estate.  “It was terrible,” one refugee – a member of the German aristocracy – tells her.  “We were running around in panic because one moment everything was normal and the next it’s all vapourising before our eyes.  All gone, just like that.  All gone.  Everything.”  She then orders her butler to bring more tea and weeps silently for several seconds, telling our bemused protagonist, “You don’t know what it’s like.  You don’t know what it’s like.”

The Time Traveller’s Virtual Partner.  Within hours of meeting and falling in love in the metaverse, Wigander Sansom and Dostree Chan are astonished to find out that they’re communicating from different time periods.  Twenty-two-year-old Wigander is a full quarter-century ahead of the thirty-year-old Dostree’s 2018.  In 2043, it turns out, people have become nostalgic for the good old days of SL and the Ruth look is very fashionable amongst teenagers.  One of many self-proclaimed ‘retronauts’, Wigander was spending his time exploring the thousands of abandoned regions (preserved for posterity by Google as a tax-deductible expense) when he came across ‘Moonstand’, a sim of space-themed fairground rides which – unbeknownst to him – runs on a server which utilises experimental memory chips made from a memristor-graphene composite.  At first, the love-struck pair declare this barrier to the possibility of physical union as a meaningless triviality and rejoice in the universe finding a way to bring them together; a few days later, however, Dostree asks casually if Wigander can research 2018’s winning lottery numbers for her.  A month passes and Dostree becomes a millionaire many times over, but each meeting she has with Wigander sees his recollection of their previous encounters more and more degraded.  Throwing caution to the wind, she buys one last winning ticket, but when she logs in to celebrate with her love, Wigander is no-where to be found.  The reader is then told he was the son of the original winner of that final ticket, an unemployed writer who kept secret his fortune from his family by claiming all his money was from the sale of his Kindle novels.  Without that lottery win, he doesn’t feel able to ask for the hand in marriage of his girlfriend and Wigander is never born.  Dostree, of course, knows none of this; just when you think it can’t get any more heart-breaking, the reader is told how she looks sadly through her apartment window at the statue of ‘The Railwayman’, a newly erected tribute to her town’s local history and the very same statue which – not a hundred pages earlier – Wigander also was noted to look at through his window.  Yes, Wigander was Dostree’s son.

Red Prim Rising.  The Russians launch their own metaverse, Вторая жизнь созданных шахт (Second Life of Crafted Mines).  Derided by western governments, it becomes an overnight internet sensation and populated by millions of disaffected Americans and Europeans.  Everyone becomes friends and world peace breaks out.  Well, I can dream.

Counting down to NaNoWriMo 2014

As we hit the halfway mark of October, it's time to start the clock on the countdown to NaNoWriMo 2014.  This year in November, I'll be writing the fourth novel in the AFK series.  Currently untitled, the book will explain the unexpected twist at the end of 'AFK, Indefinitely' and introduce a new Second Life investigation for Definitely Thursday.

As any of you who attended my talk last year at Milkwood might recall me saying, I've taken in recent years to cheating a little before the start of NaNoWriMo by getting a few thousand words down over the preceding month (though still aiming to add 50,000 words post 31 October).  Somehow or another, I'm already past the 10,000 word mark for AFK4, so I have strong hopes that this year will see the book finished.

If you would like to hear me talk about NaNo, I've been asked by Harriet Gausman to talk again at Milkwood at some point over the coming weeks.  No date set as yet, so check back here later for more information.

Oh, and don't forget I have a free Excel Spreadsheet for keeping track of your NaNo progress - one of my most popular blog posts!  Click here.

2014 and all that

Happy New Year!  Last night - 1 January - I finished the first draft of my latest novel, 'AFK, Indefinitely'. The third installment of the AFK series ended up weighing in at an ounce over 60,000 words, making it the longest entry so far.  My editing process now will consist of going through the novel once in Word document format and then again in a draft printed version.  I also have to design a cover.  I'm currently aiming for all this to be done by the end of January, with a paperback, Kindle and Issuu release (the latter will be free) some time in February.

2014 should be a busy year.  I'm also hoping to release a new 'Huckleberry H Hax' novella (anything released under my name with the extra middle H means its not a NaNoWriMo project and significantly more time has been put into it) that I've been working on for a couple of years now.  'SIM' is nearly complete and I hope to release it Spring/Summer this year.  It's quite unlike anything I've written before, so it will be interesting to see what reaction (if any) it gets.

I've also been working on a collection of my various articles on Second Life over the last few years, most of them AVENUE articles.  I'm uncertain when this will be released at this moment, but hopefully something will turn up before the year is out.

I also have plenty of work to do in bringing all my books up to date in ePub and Kindle versions, and producing hardback versions of my latest three novels.  I know hardly anyone purchases the hardback versions of my novels, but they do look superb on my own bookshelf!

I've also been putting in a bit of work over Christmas on my 'HHax' Second Life furniture range.  Having purchased an inworld HUD recently that enables prim to mesh conversion I've been able to produce versions of my builds that look identical to the original prim-based products, but which take up a fraction of the land impact, making them much more attractive to the modern discerning SL home-owner.  I'll be uploading these to the Marketplace over the next few weeks and I might also publish an HHax dedicated website I've been working on over the last few months.

A lot of long-term projects coming together in 2014, then.  I'm looking forward to sharing them with you all!

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.

Some more novel ideas

Here's my November column for AVENUE magazine.

November is with us again, the month in which hundreds of thousands of people each year turn their backs to orange-coloured October and sink all their free mental capacity into the writing of a fifty thousand word story. I’m talking about National Novel Writing Month, of course: a cocoon-like period of time out of which one emerges bleary-eyed and startled to find that Christmas has somehow arrived.  I started in 2006 and I’ve only missed the finish line once since then. Actually, last year I was ten thousand words short by 30 November, but I did at least go on to finish that title and ‘AFK, Again’ – my fifth novel set in Second Life® – hit my virtual bookstore in March of this year. That’s a plug, by the way. You can buy it.

NaNoWriMo 2013 kicks off

And we're off...

Having said previously to quite a number of people that I wouldn't write a sequel to AFK, last year I wrote a sequel to AFK.  I enjoyed doing this way more than I expected and so this year I'm going to write during NaNoWriMo a third novel in the series.  It's pure indulgence on my part, but then what is writing if indulgence doesn't figure anywhere?

Here is the opening section.

“Got you,” said Inch Sideways, as she left.

In a way, you could say that it was Inch who turned me into a murderer in the first place. I mean, it’s not like I’d even contemplated killing anyone before I met her, aside from the occasional (and entirely understandable) desire to slaughter in cold blood the odd politician here and there.  And it’s hardly the case that, having done the deed once, I would go on to murder again. I like to think that I’m no more likely to kill a second person than anyone I pass on the street is likely to kill their first.

It was a dark and stormy night: some words for NaNoWriMo from Asimov

Many thanks to everyone who came to my NaNoWriMo workshop at Milk Wood last night.  In case you missed it, here are some words from the great Isaac Asimov speaking in 1974 about how it was he'd managed to write nearly 150 books in just under 25 years:

I’m constantly asked, “How do you manage to write all those books?”  And the answer is very simple.  First, you tell them the truth – I work very hard – but that’s not glamorous.  And so I dig deeper, and I come up with something which is surprisingly true: I cut out the frills like thinking. 

You realise how many books don’t get written because of thinking?  That is, you write the first sentence, It was a dark and stormy night… and that’s fine if you’ll keep on, but you don’t: you commit the fatal error of thinking and you say, “not sufficiently dramatic.”  You cross it out and write, A dark and stormy night: that’s what it was.  And then you say, “No – it’s too dramatic.  Perhaps we ought to open on an air of uncertainty”. Was the night dark and stormy?  And then you think some more and you say, “No no I’m ruining it, it’s anti-climactic.”  And you say, “It was a stormy and dark night.” 

Well this goes on forever and you never write the book, see?  Now I don’t do that.  I start with the assumption that the way I say it the first time is right.

Pretty sound advice for NaNoWriMo, huh?

Five tips on writing a NaNoWriMo

Here's an article I was asked to write by Virtual Writers Inc about National Novel Writing Month. I'll also be hosting a workshop in SL at 3pm SLT this coming Friday at Milk Wood about writing a NaNo.  NaNoWriMo 2013 is fast approaching, and my own preparations are in progress.  Stay tuned for more news about that...

There’s plenty that’s already been written about the business of writing a 50,000 word novel in the thirty days of November – an annual act of insanity for the last ten years known as ‘National Novel Writing Month’, or just NaNoWriMo (the pedant in me – and it’s a considerable percentage of my personality, sadly – really wishes that could be changed to ‘International Novel Writing Month’ or even just ‘Novel Writing Month’; do we have to point out to America yet again that there are other countries in the world?).  If you’ve previously completed or attempted this feat, or gone no further even than just registering at www.nanowrimo.org, you will no doubt have received plenty of emailed advice and be fully familiar with such constructs as ‘the Inner Editor’, that pesky critic inside you that deplores every last word you’ve written and stops you from getting any more than a few pages into any novel-length writing attempt.  The Inner Editor is bad and must be silenced.  If, on the other hand, you’re completely new to the process, have a nose around on the website for this advice: it’s definitely worth reading.

NaNoWriMo 2012 update

The bad news: 'AFK, Again' will not be completed by midnight tonight unless I miraculously complete 10,000 words in just under 45 minutes.

The good news: I've written 40,000 words so far and intend to continue writing until the project is finished.  The thing is with NaNo, you have to suspend disbelief in your novel otherwise the doubts will start creeping in.  So it's full steam ahead and I'm hoping that by this time next week the firsr draft of my AFK sequel will be done.

What profile type are you? (NaNo 25%)

Due to a busy week in RL, I'm a little behind in my NaNoWriMo 2012 progress.  Today, however, I hit the 25% mark and the week ahead is clear for some solid writing.  Here's the exerpt that crossed 'AFK, Again' its quarter-way mark, an examination of some of the different categories of profile that can be found in SL.  Which type are you?

There are different categories of Second Life profile.  The Empty Profile (EP) is, as its name suggests, a largely unpopulated document, sometimes a single avatar snapshot in the main tab and a single group in the group list – but often not even that.  It’s completely understandable for a newbie – who perhaps doesn’t even realise that such a thing as a profile exists – but, after a month or so, starts to look suspicious.  An Empty Profile is often thought to be that of an alt that hasn’t been invested in.

Empty Profiles complaints are often one of a number of rants to be found on the Aggressive Profile (AP): a collection of gripes and assertions usually also including the aforementioned ‘By saying so here I have a right to copy and paste your IMs wherever I fucking chose to’ declaration.  Usually it gets worded along the lines of, ‘Don’t bother IMing me if there’s nothing in your profile; if you can’t be bothered to complete this then I can’t be bothered to find you interesting’ (but, in most cases, without the semi-colon and correct apostrophe usage).  Other issues often raised in the Aggressive Profile include a refusal to interact with anyone who looks like a newb, the promise of unimaginable consequences if you – the reader – should dare to think of ‘messing’ with a particular friend (usually someone given the honorary title of ‘sister’ – or, more commonly, ‘sis’) – it’s comforting to know that, in the twenty-first century, the way people feel most secure about expressing platonic love for someone is to threaten violence against anyone who might upset them – and a dramatic statement of disinterest in ‘drama’.

In direct response to this is the Anti-Aggressive Profile Profile (or the AAPP), a profile category which takes issue with the statements to be found in most APs.  AAPP picks can include, for example, a defence of newb-looking avatars (‘Are you a person who believes that beauty is only skin deep?  Then stop fucking hitting on noob avies and start looking below the surface’), a strongly worded retort to the ‘By saying so here I have a right to copy and paste your IMs wherever I fucking chose to’ declaration, and a challenge to the dislike of EPs which asserts that (a) belief in the possibility of  reducing the complexity of a human being to a few lines in a profile tab only demonstrates the utter superficiality of the person complaining (sometimes, a cross-reference is made to the noob avatar defence here), and (b) at least empty profiles spare you from having to read through endless collections of inane quotations.

Which brings me to the Somebody else’s Quotations Profile (SEQP), a profile type bookended with quotes read someplace (or copied from someone else’s profile), from which one is supposed to infer something meaningful about the avatar driver.  A variant on this is the Ironic Quotations Profile (IQP), a profile which contains either a quote about the meaninglessness of quotes or a fictional quote which cannot possibly be true to demonstrate comically the unreliability of quotations (my personal favourite being the Abraham Lincoln quote: “The thing about quotes on the internet is that you cannot confirm their validity”).

Then there’s the Promotional Profile (PP), the content of which is dedicated to the promotion of the resident’s interests: their shops, products, clubs, venues, events and any online fiction they’ve written.

The Shopper Profile (SP) is essentially a collection of favourite shops – or, at least – those which offer some sort of incentive for listing them in your profile.

The Poetry Profile (PoP) attempts to map out the personality of the resident in picks via a selection of poems; subsets of this category are the Rhyming Poetry Profile (RPoP) and the Own Poetry Profile (OPoP).

The In love Profile (ILP) also consists of a number of subsets, each representing a different way of declaring love for one’s partner.  These include ILMP, profiles saturated with virtual wedding stuff (wedding pictures, key dates, transcripts of proposals and marriage vows, copious use of the word ‘hubby’) and ILSP, where the partner is described in length as the ultimate soulmate (usually involving poetry or song lyrics; there’s significant overlap between ILSP and PoP).  Over time, ILPs are often transformed into either DPPs (Damaged Person Profiles) or NMoRPs (No Mention of Romance Profiles).

How profiles change over time is an important factor.  Static profiles hardly ever change, month to month, year to year.  Dynamic profiles change according to virtual life changes – new friends, partners, things to be angry about, etc).  Feed profiles are changed constantly, as though the very thought of entries remaining the same from one week to the next is appalling.  They are like twitter feeds, constantly being updated with new content like a Twitter feed or a Facebook page.  So an EP-s is a static Empty Profile – one that never changes, a PP-d is a Promotional Profile that gets updated when there are new things to promote and a ILP-f is an In Love Profile that gets changed the very instant a partner says something adorable.

And so on.  I employ most profile types across my portfolio of alts.  The Second Life tab text for my primary avatar reads, “Private Investigator, manager of the Step Stransky Second Life Detective Agency.  Discrete enquiries undertaken.  See picks for office address.”

Which means that one thing I had learned about Hewson so far was that he didn’t read profiles.

NaNoWriMo 2012 starts

Yesterday saw the start of National Novel Writing Month 2012 and the first few pages, therefore, of 'AFK, Again', my sequel to 'AFK'.  I'm currently at about the 4.5k mark and feeling pretty good about the start made.

Here's your first excerpt - the first two paragraphs of the new book.

Provided you can manage the whole guilt element, killing a man can be quite the liberating experience.  One minute, they’re there and they’re all they ever were to you; the next they’re winked out, switched off, gone.  You find it hard to believe just how easy it was to delete them.  You picture all of their thoughts and words and actions crammed into a pencil that you held in your hands and snapped.

I remember very clearly the way Step Stransky’s hands clutched at my forearms whilst I pushed the pillow into his face.  His nails dug furrows in my skin, it was wonderful.  I watched his body tense and jerk, as confusion transitioned to fear and fear transitioned to panic.  The bedsprings squeaked urgently as they had a few seconds earlier, but for completely different reasons.  You forget that emotion can be displayed across all parts of a person’s body when you’re so used to looking for it in faces; it’s a shocking, intensely beautiful thing to witness the physical bleed of it in this way.  I watched his conscious, purposeful mind drain out of his movement, never to return.  And with amusement – and no small degree of exhilaration – I watched his erection, still wet and shiny from my own insides, droop and fade and whither.  Sometimes, you know, I find myself wishing I’d let him cum after all.  I could have picked up and pushed that pillow into him whilst I was still on top and fucking him; it would have been the most incredible, the most intimate climax of his life and I would have received it gratefully and cradled the warmth from within my belly as his flesh grew cold to the touch. 

That all for now.  Look out for another update when I hit the 12,500 (25%) barrier.  And wish me luck.

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.

Your clothing is still downloading... final proof on the way

Look at this shiny cover!  The edits have been made, the final text uploaded, the cover designed and the 'OK' button clicked.  Along the way I learned that when paragraphs jump themselves completely onto the next page rather than leave a line all by itself at the bottom of the previous one, this is called 'orphan control'.  Yes.

The cheery email from lulu announcing the final proof paperback's postage arrived today... so I can probably expect the package within the next three weeks, what with it being seasonal and everything.

Once I'm satisfied everything's in good order, I'll probably throw a launch event: read a few extracts, flip the switch on the web page which will let you download the PDF for free, and so on.  It'll probably be some time in January, so keep an eye for notices if this in any way attracts the tendrils of your interest.

Your clothing is still downloading... draft print version arrives

Lulu.com have excelled themselves.  Just three days after the final words of 'Your clothing is still downloading' were written, the paperback version of the first draft has plopped through my letterbox.  Time, now, to get editing with my pen.  I also - as you can see - need to start thinking about a cover design...

Your clothing is still downloading... done.

This morning, 'Your clothing is still downloading' crossed the NaNoWriMo finish line with over three thousand words to spare.  I've managed to put down 53,500 words over the last month and I'm pleased with the result.

I'll be aiming to add this title to my free downloads by Christmas, with Lulu print and Smashwords ebook versions soon after.  I'll be doing a speedy readthrough later today and then getting myself done a personal print version so I can proof-read it properly (I always do this better when reading from paper).  Once that's done, I'll be updating the book into a second draft and getting it up online for anyone who's interested to read.

Here are the last two paragraphs of the novel.  There are no major spoilers in them, but you might want to skip them if you plan on reading the full novel when it becomes available.

It occurred to me in those first few months that the story of me and Cath was always about me wanting something I had no entitlement to. Is love ever actually any different? To want a person in that way is to want them in a way that just isn't possible; however connected two people can be – whatever metaphors we concoct – they are still two people, two minds, two realities, two separate visions of the world and its meaning. You cannot ever take a person completely from their reality. But that's just the overview. On a moment-by-moment basis, the connectedness it is possible to feel is extraordinary, astonishing, unfathomable. In these moments, the impossible becomes possible; it is life's greatest illusion that they are experienced only as the exception to the rule. 

Douglas Adams once wrote about a whole world parallel to our own, accessible by turning your head through the billionth part of a billionth part of a degree. Very few things are actually impossible. In most cases, it's just a question of how you're looking at them at the time.

Your clothing is still downloading... 90% update

This is it, folks; the final stretch.  Today, 'Your clothing is still downloading' passed the 90% mark of 45,000 words.  Whilst I'm still well ahead of schedule (I'm expecting to pass the 50,000 word mark by Monday at the latest), there's still a fair bit of story to be told and I'm anticipating writing all the way up to the 30th and possibly a little beyond.  This might well end up a 60k novel.  In any case, here's the paragraph that moved me into the last 5,000 words to the NaNoWriMo goalpost.

Lying. More lying. It occurred to me that in all probability I'd just stumbled across the very plan that Ben himself was forming. “I've told her,” he would say, perhaps in a telephone call. “And I told her you didn't know who she was when I introduced you. So she thinks you have no idea. I thought it through last night and decided this would be the best way. It's obvious, really. Think about it: the key deception involved her not knowing it was you, and that's now out. You don't have to pretend you don't know her any more. You're free to explore each other however you want. That's all that really matters. There's no reason to own up to having known before today: that would satisfy only your conscience, Gerry; that would be about meeting your needs and not hers.” Yes. A white lie to the benefit of all, easily justifiable in the name of discovered happiness. In the months that followed, these three days would come to appear a tiny misdirection, he would reason. A minuscule absence of truth of negligible actual consequence. Your clothing is still downloading. Others can see you normally.