Playing House & Being Wild

I came back to Second Life with a small fortune in Lindens. As I explored all of the different shops and brands that now exist in-world, I became overwhelmed by the beauty and artistry that evolved while I was away. I soon found myself dropping Lindens like crazy on objects simply because they were beautiful, spending time at gacha machines like a gambling addict would at the slots.

I became obsessed with houses and started a small collection of my favorites from Scarlet Creative, llorisen, and Trompe L’oeil. I filled them with the beautiful things I bought and spent endless hours decorating and arranging. The houses became like virtual mandalas, lovingly put together over a period of days only to be disassembled and returned to my inventory in pieces.

When Kei told me she had a plot of land in Sistiana (incidentally, this is the sim where we first met in 2004) and that we could turn it into our home, I was relieved. This meant I could stop obsessing over all these houses, resell the objects of my gacha addiction, and have one little place to call home.

We settled on the Meribel cottage from Scarlet Creative (my favorite house designer in Second Life) and it came together quickly and, in my mind, perfectly. The plot is distant enough from our other plots that it is an actual refuge, especially since half of it is bordered by water, but sometimes a hopping bunny will come down the street and sniff at our garden. Other times we can hear the sounds of soft crying from the Channel Island Mental Hospital across the water. All in all, it fits us.

It’s funny how important it is to me that I have a home in Second Life. I used to think the idea was kind of silly, and I never put any effort into nesting here before. In the old days, my café was enough. Now I understand, as Kei put it the other day, the importance of idealized reality. Having this homebase provides me enough stability that I can focus on making my other plots work. I have the Wrong Way Café and Wrong Way Books at the border of Sabre and Clearwing, and up the hill behind that, between a railroad and a horse trail, I have Wild Materials.

I named this plot after the poetry chapbook I published this year. After much fiddling and hemming and hawing over what to do with this large plot of land, growing more and more frustrated with its size and feeling like I had to fill it with a huge house or something, I finally decided to leave only my little writing shack amidst all the wildflowers, trees, bushes, and stone paths leading to nowhere. It has become a virtual/natural retreat for me when I need a quiet place to write, and every now and then I’ll add something to it that makes it even wilder. It feels a lot like my brain, overgrown and a little confusing and chaotic, but at times still sort of beautiful? I hope that anyone wandering into this parcel will enjoy some quiet there.

Coming Home

Three weeks ago I returned to Second Life after an eight-year hiatus. I became very ill in my real life, was bedridden, and needed something to distract me and burn my creative energy. My friend Kei Mars, who also hadn’t been in SL for a couple years, had to cancel a real-life visit due to my illness as well as concurrent upheavals in her own life. All of these things prompted us to reunite in the virtual world where we first met in 2004.

I quickly became addicted again and began to miss my old plot of land in Geometer. I built the Wrong Way Café there in 2005 where I held weekly poetry readings. The café is a poorly built structure full of broken things and surrounded by trash, and I always loved it that way. It was my Second Life home, and it still existed in my inventory when I returned.

I found a lovely plot of land in Sabre, erected the café, purchased two additional abandoned plots bordering that plot, and expanded my property as well as my ideas about what to do with it. In addition to resurrecting the weekly poetry readings, I want to publish Second Life writers in beautifully bound virtual books that can be purchased and displayed in residents’ homes. I always thought that poets, writers, and visual artists within Second Life should receive compensation for the beauty they bring to the community.

So I’ve created the Donovan Publishing House, which will have a reading room/bookstore and an upstairs gallery for visual art installations. I will seek out poets and writers who might be interested in publishing their individual work, and I will put out calls for submissions for limited edition collections. At the moment, the only books currently available are two of my own. I wanted to make sure I could create a beautiful product with my own work before I messed with anyone else’s.

In addition to spending my sickbed hours covering my land with wildflowers and buildings and agonizing over the perfect placement of every little object, I have gone mesh, explored some truly beautiful sims and builds, attended a number of fascinating and inspiring writing events, and marveled at how much livelier the writing community in SL has become over the last eight years. In a future post I will do a round-up of some of the best writing-related spots and event series I’ve come across since my return.

Most importantly, what started as a distraction from my illness and hospitalization, and the depression that resulted from that, transformed into a real desire to become a part of the SL arts community again. I’d like to discover what I might be able to contribute to this weird little virtual world we inhabit.