Mal Burns, Nara, Siobhan and Dorena... but not in that order... |
Siobhan Muir |
Siobhan Muir: I'm best known for two subgenres of romance: Paranormal Romance, and Military Romantic Suspense. You can find the military romantic suspense here: https://siobhanmuir.com/bad-boys-of-beta-squad.
I credit Nara with the idea of bringing my stories into virtual worlds. It was a way for us to cross worlds – bring readers into virtual and entice gamers with our stories. It was also a way for us to SEE our worlds in front of us, and help inspire us to write more.
Nara Malone: I wanted to bring stories to life in an interactive 3D sort of world since I discovered a dusty, battered copy of the book Hamlet on the Holodeck at a thrift shop. The author, Janet Murray made a powerful argument for participatory fiction as an artform. The book was published in 1997 before there were any virtual worlds to explore. One of my first tasks upon discovering Opensim was to create something like a holodeck that could rez a scene. The second task was to create an NPC I could interact with. I showed my experiments to a circle of friends, most of them fellow members of Romance Writers of America, a few of them joined up with me in my effort to bring Murray’s vision of storytelling to life.
Nara Malone |
Dorena Bree |
In Opensim, I’m probably best known for giving Fred frogs musical instruments, and forming the Greyville New Age Dixieland band.
Siobhan Muir: The original three authors that started the Nook were Nara Malone, Tina Glasneck, and myself, though over time we also had Brandy Evans, Shara Lanel, and Marilyn Campbell.
Nara Malone: In addition to those names, we have Neothar Cortex, who is contributing tweaks and mods to make the platform we’ve built more creator and user friendly. He rescued our last hypergrid story project by writing the NPC story sequencer that gave even our most technically challenged users the ability to control NPC storylines. He is currently working on a build to demonstrate the quality of both high and low poly projects in WebGL. Another important team member is Torn MacAlester who used to lead the Everything Writing Workshops at the Nook. He will be contributing futuristic tale in the "Storyteller’s Castle" Series.
Shannan Albright |
Nara Malone: Last but far from least, Shannan Albright. She is our extraordinary character creator and costume designer as well as a long-time author. She will also be contributing a Tale to the "Storyteller’s Castle" series. Castle tales are ten scene short stories, and the involve quite a bit of work, so we’re expecting to release one of these a year. I think most of us have known each other between 10-20 years. We all were friends before any of us had heard of a virtual world. This year marks ten years since Nara’s Nook launched.
Dorena Bree: I met Nara many years ago and she invited me to visit Nara’s Nook in 2013. Luckily, she held my hand(figuratively) during the whole process. After I learned that I could fly, I was hooked.
The recently refurbished grid has an interesting project, on a region called Story island. When you arrive, you see beach and ocean, a few buildings, but the thing that stands out the most are the open books, propped up in the sand. Standing in front of them you soon realize that you can enter the book, and explore a world within a world... within a world. But let the girls explain it properly.
Siobhan Muir: The Story Islands are a way to introduce both Hypergrid residents and readers to the world of Unity and WebGL. We’re trying to show that you don’t have to have OpenSim experience to visit us in a virtual world. All you need is your browser and a link and a keyboard.
Dorena Bree: The Storyteller's Castle project currently has 3 or 4(perhaps more)different novellas, broken down into 10 game scenes, each revolving around the idea that our dimension crosses with another and the characters become trapped and need to solve problems.
Our readers can access virtual worlds through a browser and our hypergrid friend s can access from inside opensim and hopefully they will all be intrigued enough to try both. Currently there about eight different games/demonstrations in the works. The Storytellers Castle is one of those eight and at the moment has four authors working on interactive virtual novellas for the series.
Here's Dorena's book, as you first encounter it.
Jump over to Nara's Nook to experience this fascinating experiment for yourself at world.narasnook.com:8900:Story island
Don't miss Nara and the gang on Mal Burn's TV show The Inworld Review with James Atlloud, on Sunday May 1 at 12 noon Pacific time! https://www.youtube.com/c/MalBurnsMetaworld
No comments:
Post a Comment