Early Writing

Today I decided to take a look back at my early writing. While I’ve never been ‘published’ I’ve definitely done a lot of writing. I suppose the first bit that was seen by more than a few people was in 1991 for an in-game newsletter for a game called Gemstone III. It was run on a dial-up service called GEnie, and back then, cost about $7.00/hour to play. That’s right, per HOUR. It was a hardcore, RolePlay enforced MUD, and due to being on an ARIES IV mainframe, could only support 50 players at a time. It was a tight community, and the newsletter was always fully player written. You got rewarded in free playing hours for writing and having an article chosen, so it was pretty attractive. I wrote several articles under my character name of “Jhembryn Durrock” (a name I used to use everywhere, but had to stop once one of my accounts was hacked, and my name was pretty much ruined because of their actions).

After that, for almost every game I played, I searched out the “Role Play” community, whether it was other MUDs, or graphical MMOs like Everquest, World of Warcraft, EVE Online, The Secret World, or countless other games. Also, every time, I’d write out a detailed biography for my character(s). It always just made the game feel more “right” to me. I’d spend days reading the lore of the game, and more days writing up a backstory for the character. For me, it was fun!

Now I’m playing in someone else’s sandbox, and writing a story for the Golden Horde, with Chris Kennedy. Once that’s done, I’ll probably take a stab at creating my own world.