Get yer minds out of the gutter.

When I first went on the internet, it was so I could receive email from a client I was doing wordprocessing for back when we lived in Monterey and had just been married. That was in 1995. I dabbled a bit with some really, super, crappy web designs ala personal web site with lots of animations and huge backgrounds. The internet pretty much after creating a website was boring.

Then I discovered a place called Ancientsites.com. It was a roleplaying site based in the ancient worlds. It was also free and looked really cool. I signed up for an account. I didn’t last very long. All it took was for me to create a vampire character and one night I was literally chased off the site.

It was almost enough for me to pull the phone cord off the damn modem.

However, I discovered a very tiny link at the bottom of my account page that led to “Cybersites Affiliates”. I clicked on it and found myself at SciFiVines.com (aka SFV). I didn’t sign up right away. I lurked for a few weeks. Once I felt brave again, I signed up with my first character; one I’d written stories about on paper. Sihn, the Dark Queen of UruBetas.

There was no place at SFV for horror. Science fiction and Fantasy, but no scary stuff. The admin of SFV were afraid that a horror roleplay board would bring in unwanted players. Apparantly, those in the horror vein (pun intended), had a reputation for not following the rules. That seemed to be borne out by a group of vampire characters that had a thread to play in under the main RP area. Although they were told, time and time again not to use html, wavs, and other heavy graphics in their signatures, they went ahead and did so. And, time after time, they managed to crash the whole site which meant that in order to fix the problems, their thread was always wiped out and they had to start from scratch. After their banning period was up.

I helped another roleplaying writer to start a fantasy board called The Castle. We did something rather unusual there; we wrote a set of 13 guidelines for roleplaying at the Castle. Members that didn’t follow the rules, got bumped out by the Dark Queen. After almost two years, I wound up inheriting the Castle. I was flattered to have it, but there were a lot of kids that had accumulated over at the Castle and I wanted to write with adults. I also wanted to write my beloved scary stuff.

Five times I petitioned the admin-that-be for a horror board. One night I was dragged into a chatroom and was told I’d have to re-write my guidelines to include stuff about “html crap”. No problem there. I re-wrote the guidelines, submitted them, and The Mausoleum was born.

Our first story there was the Midnight Hour. It was the grand story of a man and his three wives that protected a tribe of werewolves. We had an out of character board for discussion and a little inn to just goof off in. It was a pretty sparse place.

I also kept a very tight reign on the story and the members. Die hard rp’ers may just gasp at this, but if and when it was needed, I wrote other members characters. It was the best was to direct the story and keep it moving. Traditional, online roleplaying tends to be rather strict about another writer writing for their character. It just isn’t done. I have to admit, it can make for a slow affair as far as writing goes.

The Mausoleum had a good year and half before the vampire group that was still causing site wide destruction, came to me and asked me to work on their behalf for a true horror site. They liked the Mausoleum, but they weren’t allowed in. They kept breaking the rules.

I had met some fine elves, and a few other adults that had remained at the Castle (which I was still running peripherally). They were getting a bit tired of the kids who tended to bring in these super characters that would just decimate everyone with “super, duper, purple laser powers”.

We came together, devised a board that would be meant just for adults and I went to the admin. By that time I had some considerable respect around SFV. Especially with the admin. I’d been running a board of adult writers who skated the line of “respectability” as far as horror went, and behaved by following not only my rules, but SFV’s as well.

The Cagliostro was then born. Here, not only were vampires finally allowed, but there was a bit of spooky cyber-punk, and other twisted tales. The Mausoleum was my first love, though, and when I was able to get away with it, I turned the Cagliostro AND the Castle over to other people to manage.

Some of the admin were caught off-guard by this, but three boards was really too much and those two boards needed to go their own way. And, after the arrival of a singularly disruptive individual in the form of a certain starship captain, my Mausoleum was busy deconstructing itself. There were also a myriad of other problems going on, personally and professionally. Problems, it seems, that tend to happen with any large community.

My first mental breakdown was on the horizon and when I went down, it was in flames. I was able to recover for a bit, though. SFV and all its sister sites were quickly gone, leaving hundreds of people to fend for themselves. Some started their own sites, some went to the really bad ezboards in an attempt to keep their worlds alive. The Mausoleum was dead, but oddly reincarnated in a new site called Dark Trek Voyages. If you ever read anything from there, then my sincerest apologies for any mental distress it caused you. Don’t send me a bill.

The Castle and The Cagliostro groups gathered together at ezboards and did a much better job of staying together than DTV did. Which, in the end, was a good thing.

A lot of time passed and when it was time for DTV to die, that was my second mental breakdown. I was really close to pulling the plug on the modem and tossing the computer in the garbage when, out of the blue I found two emails waiting for me, from two of the last people I’d ever expected to hear from. Suffice it to say this; even on the internet, people can go through some very rough times and people can get hurt. People are just as stupid, deceitful and mule-headed on the internet as they are in person (I’m lumping myself in this because I was just as much at fault as everyone else was). It was a credit to these two ladies to even think of writing to me after such a long time; almost five years. We had been good friends at one time. In their emails I saw evidence of the two women I had felt were worthy to be friends of mine. (Yeah, I know that sounds arrogant, but if you’ve read this far, gimme a break.)

The faction that had held onto the old Castle had broken away and those that were the remains of the Cagliostro were still on ezboards but doing their damndest to move up in the world. It’s taken them a long time and I wish it could have been an easy ride for them, but it wasn’t. Nothing in this life that’s worth having is easy.

Those writers, those good people, finally have a home and are growing every day. It’s called Bardic Web. A few weeks ago, I finally got up the nerve to put my roleplaying galoshes back on and get my feet wet. I may not get into the lengthy stories they do. I may just dabble. The point is, it’s keeping my imagination alive and I’m finding a part of my imagination that had gone missing for awhile. I’m not running a story, and that’s tough. I have to follow those rules of not writing for another character. Very tough, but it’s doable. Maybe, at some point, I might see about re-opening the Mausoleum. Yes, to run a story there, I would write another writer’s character, within reason, of course. As I did before. But for now, I’m dabbling in a few different worlds, getting used to things again. It’s a playground and I’m having fun.

Tags: fiction

This entry was posted on Monday, October 2nd, 2006 at 7:04 pm and is filed under About Me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.