Social media and my new guilty pleasure.

Today, I talked to Justin Achilli for a few minutes. In case people haven't heard of him, he's currently the Lead Social and Community Systems Designer at Red Storm Entertainment (creators of the Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six games as well as the immensely awesome Far Cry 3) and was formerly the lead developer of the World of Darkness line of role-playing games by White Wolf Studios. If memory serves me correctly, he pretty much drove the plot-bus for the entire World of Darkness for about five years.

That was pretty fuckin' awesome.

After that, I talked to a couple of my readers. It reminded me of the comparison of me and Stephen King that Courtney had made as well as the comparison to J.R.R. Tolkien that Andrew had made (due to my obsession with connectivity between my various works and my obsession with things such as the economy, religions and societies of Unda Vosari, respectively). We'd talked about future plot ideas and where I want to take the series after "the core series."

I made one character shoot another character in the face today before that character stood up and was pretty pissed off about getting shot in the face. That was right before I made a war between three reasonably large factions in the world of Unda Vosari break out into open warfare. Across the planet, armies are marching (or sailing) and a small group of heroes is trying to find the source of corruption that is threatening to ruin three of the six kingdoms of Unda Vosari. I don't get to tell stories like that anywhere outside of Unda Vosari, and prior to that, the only two chances I'd had to tell stories like that were in Dungeons & Dragons (in a homebrew setting that turned into Unda Vosari) and Vampire: The Masquerade (and that was largely because I had an entire carbon copy of earth to use as a battleground for hidden wars).

That's when I figured out Unda Vosari isn't just a bunch of novels kinda connected together, at least to me. It's a bastion of self-expression and adventure that I hadn't had since I was running games in Vampire: The Masquerade, back in the late 90's. It's a whole world of stories about whatever I want to make them about in a place where anything is possible.

Combining that with my ability to use social media and networking to talk to people that created (and continue to create) things that truly inspired (and continue to inspire) me to write in the Unda Vosari setting, I don't see myself running out of steam anytime soon.

... I still think it's awesome I got to talk to one of the authors that inspired me to start writing in the first place, and that aspects of my writing are being compared to two of the most famous literary entities in history. Woo!