Originally written for iRez and posted in the Stories tab.
It’s
raining. After a few months of wintry landscapes, Second Life’s snow is slowly
melting away. There’s an unspoken urge amongst the residents for warm weather
and sunnier days. You can sense that, here and there.
Role-playing
the approach of spring and falling in to that same urge, I found myself
deleting the snow emitters at my place and reducing the areas covered by mounds
of white, feeling surprisingly content in doing so.
Some places
are gearing up for St. Valentine’s. Snow will soon be replaced by little red hearts
and the whiteness by an overload of pink.
Virtual
reality (and I speak of Second Life, in this case, considering it’s the one I
know the best and navigate in) offers a writer the inestimable power of
reaching farther, of immersing oneself in a world of order and in a tempting
world of disorder.
This parallel
universe hosting extraordinary and often unexpected traits of such familiar, comforting
evocations is a source of invaluable material since this familiarity is
something you can fully enjoy. As every writer knows, stimuli such as landscape,
ambiance, sound, are fundamental to the labor of writing an enticing story.
Virtual worlds give us the possibility of drawing words, ideas, sentences,
hesitations and a whole lot of determination from sims of all flavors.
Within
virtual reality, writers are also given the possibility of being selective, a
much appreciated option, considering that every writer is a victim of merciless
deadlines.
Recently, I
found myself struggling with an extremely demanding deadline, the NaNoWriMo.
Almost unexpectedly (and I say almost,
because in reality I had been toying with the idea of undergoing that torture…
I mean, experience, for quite some time), I trapped myself in this compromise
that would last a month. And I am stubborn enough to know that I would complete
this challenge even if it were the last thing I did… in writing!
All writers
have lives, of course, and although mine is fortunately fairly placid and
uneventful, coming up with almost 3000 words a day is a bit of a stretch for
anyone, even for those who, as is my case, do have a slightly longer amount of
time to write than the regular working (wo)man. So, I plunged into it, head
first, as befits a true adventurer, and I geared up my arsenal, I mean writing
tools, a few notes here and there (yes, in hindsight I should have prepared
things in a slightly more detailed fashion!), a word processor and my favorite spot.
I never really
debated whether my share of daily writing should take place exclusively within
a word processor or immersed in my Second Life home, surrounded by books and
cats and odd bits and pieces with a view to the cherry tree that stands guard
to my greenhouse and my swimming pool overshadowed by a few temperamental palm trees
that argue constantly with two circling seagulls about things we shall not
discuss here for the sake of good taste. The playful weasels laugh at these
arguments and tease the butterflies, trying to catch them, and a story starts
brewing in my mind, a story about weasels and palm trees and seagulls and a
greenhouse where something will happen that…
Oh, wait a
second! That’s not the point! The point is that I would park Lizzie, the
avatar, in front of her typewriter with a brewing, beautifully flavored cup of
coffee right next to her and have the word processor opened in a separate
window, resized, so I could have the best of those two worlds. I was certain of
it. And that seemed like the right thing to do. Why? I don’t know. I do have a
pretty nice desk in Real Life. Nevertheless, it just did seem right and that’s
where Lizzie sat to write.
Sometimes
though, I needed a change of scenery. The book I wrote was a thriller with a
bit of suspense and mystery, plus a crime obviously (private joke to my regular
readers; I do tend to kill a few, cough… a lot of the characters). You cannot
feel the pulse to a darker frame of mind if you’re sitting in your favorite
spot, now, can you?
And that’s why
writers are hoarders and never throw anything away! So, I resorted to my folder
containing an array of locations in Second Life that I visited and enjoyed in
the past. I fished one out that seemed appropriate, I teleported to that sim
and voilá, a whole new world, a whole
new set of ideas, a whole new range of vocabulary that I could juggle and play
with.
Every now
and then (or more often, when I chose to), I stumbled upon other tortured souls…
I mean writers, doing the NaNoWriMo or any other writing challenge. I sat down,
I shared ideas, and we encouraged one another. Suddenly, writing a book, what
seemed like a decision taken in a moment of utter lunacy, becomes a
possibility, a reality even.
The
NaNoWriMo is long over and new challenges have already emerged, challenges I’ll
embrace with the same sense of (in)sanity as I did the NaNoWriMo. However, this
time, I have a renewed certainty that I will write more and hopefully better,
drawing from the richness that a virtual world offers, both in spaces and in
people.
