Fantasy Faire 2015 will open its doors to everyone within the next hour or so but as well as being a magnificent example of fantasy related themes, creations, storytelling, art, poetry and much more in Second Life, it’s also part of the Relay For Life In Second Life fundraising effort on behalf of The American Cancer Society.
Last year’s event raised 5,955,893 Linden Dollars, that’s 23,824 in US Dollars. So far this year, before the doors have even officially opened, the event has raised 1,643,825 Linden Dollars, that’s 6,575 US Dollars.
Fantasy Faire is of course far from being the only event in Second Life raising money for Relay For Life. The combined total for last year’s fundraising efforts reached a quite staggering $415,000, yes that’s US Dollars.
At Fantasy Faire 2015 they will be holding a literature festival. I’ve talked about this before but more details have been posted about the event on the official Fantasy Faire 2015 blog : Are You Looking Forward To The Literary Festival (LitFest) At Fantasy Faire? By the way, you should be looking forward to it!
As the poster suggests, there will be story telling, poetry, bring your own fantasy tale or poem, discussion workshops, meet the author sessions and more. Whereas some of the storytelling will be from works of popular fiction, such as Caledonia Skytower reading from Lord Of The Rings, in other aspects of LitFest, authors will be reading or discussing their own work, for example :
Freyja Nemeth discusses her book “The World of Ice and Fire”
Freyja Nemeth says as her real life self Linda Antonsson “My partner Elio M. García (Ran Garrigus in SL) and I collaborated with George R.R. Martin on “The World of Ice and Fire”, a book about the history, culture and geography of the world of “A Song of Ice and Fire” (and “Game of Thrones”).”
Interesting? Oh come on, that’s interesting. There will also be interactive sessions such as :
Collaborative fiction game with Taralyn Gravois
In Between – A Magical Story – Tara gives the group the beginning and end of a story. We think of characters to be in the story and use the sim we are on as the scene for the storyline. Then each person adds a line to the story until we get from start to finish.
There’s much more and one of the wonderful thing about all this on a personal level is that it’s introducing me to new storytellers and groups in Second Life, new to me I mean, they aren’t new to Second Life, for example :
Speculative Fiction Saturday
Led by Simeon Beresford
Simeon Beresford leads a regular long running fantasy and science fiction discussion group in this special location for Fantasy Faire.
Faire warning (pun intended) this blog is going to go Fantasy Faire nuts over the next eleven or twelve .. or thirteen days. I’m going to party like it’s 1419 (Shire Reckoning) as much as I can at Fantasy Faire 2015..
Now first things first, I’ve been sent a shed load of stuff as a blogger for Fantasy Faire and I have to announce that in all good faith, it’s highly unlikely that I will be able to review all the items I’ve been sent. I hope people won’t take offence if I don’t get around to looking at everything.
Next up, I don’t know where I’ll be staying for this year’s event. I usually manage to talk The Dwarfins in to letting me stay with them, but I may have to try out some different accommodation this year.
I’ve been taking a short break from blogging these last few days. A combination of getting ready for a lot of blogging, The Mighty Villa making it through to the FA Cup final and having trees cut down in my back garden have distracted me somewhat.
However, last Saturday I was invited to a blogger preview of MadPea Productions forthcoming game, UNIA. Alas a combination of confusion (the launch had been delayed by a week) and being forced against my will to go to the pub (no really ….) meant I missed the preview. This led to Kess Crystal sending me a photo of two people sitting in a diner, with the message :
at the end of the tour Ziki Questi and Kiana ate your tuna sandwiches in the UNIA diner 😛
Charming! The incriminating photo will be stored in my file of incrimination. However, what of UNIA I hear you ask, I mean after all, that’s why we’re here! Well the game is scheduled to launch on April 27th. Originally it was set to launch on April 20th. However the good news about the delay is that it gives people longer to enter a photo contest, details of which can be found here.
I saw a tweet from Canary Beck the other day about a forthcoming book from Huckleberry Hax. This may well sound like the start of a work of fiction, but I promise you it’s not because Canary has now blogged : Second Life Is A Place We Visit (2015) By Huckleberry Hax. One of the reasons Canary has been tweeting about this is explained in her blog post :
Huckleberry Hax has published a new book and it’s now available for download. I’m especially happy that Huck asked me to design the book cover typography for this work, a second time! And as a bonus, the cover image – taken by Huck – is a scene from my beach at Basilique!
Huckleberry Hax has been writing about the virtual world of Second Life® for eight years. This volume collects together 42 of these articles, including his monthly column for over two years at the celebrated AVENUE SL lifestyle magazine.
This is a work of non fiction, even if it is virtual world based. However what Canary’s tweeting (no pun intended) has also opened my eyes to is the fact that Huckleberry Hax also writes fiction, and a lot of that fiction is based upon Second Life.
