With many thanks to Talla Adam who is a member of the Opensim Virtual Community on Google+ I have discovered a writer’s colony in OpenSim. I had never been to OpenSim before so the first thing I had to do was to figure out how to get there.
Fortunately for the purposes of this visit, Nara Malone has an excellent blog post on the matter : An Author’s Guide to the Metaverse & How to visit Greyville Colony. After following those instructions I found myself at the Writers and Readers Colony at Greyville. Those who know how to use OpenSim will need to create an account for Naras Nook or go to world.narasnook.com:8900. I’m not sure how this works with Hypergrid.
The welcome centre has a very useful notecard, which is so useful that it basically writes this blog for me! Now the first thing to note is that this is a work in progress. Nara Malone is the brains behind this, she’s the lady whose blog post I linked to above. The notecard includes details of the mission:
My mission here is to introduce authors to the power of the metaverse and all the ways it can inspire stories and assist in creating and promoting their work. I welcome suggestions and content from authors and readers. I expect to see lots of characters interacting with avatars and roaming all the regions here at Nara’s Nook. I have 16 regions for experimenting, exploring and inspiration. I don’t imagine I’ll ever be finished adding to them.
Inside the welcome centre I noticed notice boards for the following authors : Marilyn Campbell, Tracey Livesay, Nara Malone, Shannon Emmel, Leah St. James, Shara Lanel, Sofie Couch, Alexa Day, Siobhan Muir, Elvie Howard, Tina Glasneck, Kelly Jamieson, Denise Golonowski and Brandi Evans.
There are a number of buildings around and again I’ll use the notecard to describe some of the buildings there.
Writer’s Resource Center: The big brick building is the writer’s resource area. There is a classrooom for workshops, a self-guided tutorial area, and a library. I’m adding content as fast as I can. On the right, as soon as you walk through the main door, you will find information on all the authors currently a part of this grand experiment. There a few freebie objects in the library you might find useful.
Internet Cafe: Directly across the street from the landing area is the Dungeon Gourmet’s Internet Cafe. There are laptops there with internet access. Drop in and work on your novel, the page is set to yarn.me, a cloud wordprocessor that works here inworld. It will also allow you to save work to your computer. Try your hand at Yatze. Have a nice couple chat by the fire.
Continue reading “Greyville – A Writer’s Colony In OpenSim Part Of The Hypergrid Stories Project”