Danko On Craft

First let me say that my typist and I had a bit of a row over who was going to write this piece and whose blog it would appear on. As I begin to type, I’m not sure which one of us won the argument.

There have been times in my virtual life when I’ve had no home. I’ve always had a pub and often had an office, usually both, but not always a home. There have been other times when I’ve had multiple homes. I go with what suits my needs and desires of the time.

One of the most enjoyable periods of my virtual existence was when The Steamlands were thriving in Second Life. At one point, I had six offices, three pubs and five homes scattered about Winterfell, Caledon, New Babbage, Austral, New Toulouse and Steelhead.

I was thinking of those days the other night when I rented a region on Craft World.

My farm town, Dankoville, has been my main virtual world project of the past two years even though there have been many other projects during this time as well. Dankoville is self-hosted and connected to Naras Nook grid. We hooked up to Nook in late February and things have worked out so well, I can’t say enough about it. (But I really should, in a separate article. Been meaning to.)

The thing is, in story, Danko never lived in Dankoville. His relatives ran the family farm nearby and Danko would visit but until the last couple of years he never spent any serious time there other than summers when he was a child. But his story has taken him there often these last two years and nowadays, he does consider the farm as one of his homes.

But therefore, he needs others too. He has Winterfell on Second Life, which he has considered his main home for more than five years. But in reality, he doesn’t actually have a home there now. He has the Storytellers Pub in Winterfell Laudanum and a little private office in the sky above but no house.

I think George took over for those last two graphs. Well, as I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself…

Regardless of the details, I still think of Winterfell as my main home and now Dankoville as my second home. But now that Dankoville is happily settled on Naras Nook and I can devote my time to improving it and looking for new story there, I now have the time, the desire and I think also the need for another home in OpenSim.

I’ve always wanted to have a place on Craft. It’s slogan is “the friendly grid” and it is home to many artists. The Craft Store is considered one of the best freebie shops in all of OpenSim for getting your avatar started and the welcome region, Hydra, hosts an excellent collection of teleporters to various regions on Craft as well as hypergates to other grids.

Somehow I lucked out and my new region, called Elsewhere, is just a few map squares northeast of Hydra and just a square away from VirtualChistine‘s popular Monte Gordo region. So I’m right in the middle of things.

Elsewhere is a hilly, wooded area in which two small state roads intersect. My house, in a sort of Victorian/New Orleans style, sits atop a hill, in the north of the region, away from the road. The landing point, in the center of the region, is next to an old gazebo or bandstand on which I plan to put some informational notecards. In the southeast corner of the sim, there are three worn commercial buildings where State Routes 25 and 94 meet. I’m almost finished installing a pub in one building (still need a name!). One of the other buildings will have a few hypergates and the third building will remain vacant for now and maybe in time will become a shop of some sort. I have room for one more building if the need arises. The rest of the region will remain natural and I’ll be adding more trees and plants as time goes on.

I haven’t done serious shopping for things for the house yet but I had Dankos from a couple other OpenSim grids come over via hypergrid and drop some stuff off to get me started. I arranged the furniture they gave me into sitting rooms on both floors of the house. The downstairs will be for entertaining guests or just hanging out while the upstairs will be for writing.

I used to do all my blog writing inworld, nearly all of it in Winterfell. I never minded if someone interrupted to chat or ask for help or whatever because in my RL writing work, that’s how it always was. But last year I began writing stories that were much too long for my story blog. These stories were more complex and therefore required more concentration and after an interruption it would take a bit of time to get back on track. So I started writing those stories offline. After awhile, I wrote everything offline.

That was all fine…but I missed writing inworld. I’ll have to keep working on those longer stories offline but I want to be writing inworld whenever I can. And to get that started, I need a new place or places to do it.

So now I have Elsewhere on Craft. And I just wrote this article there, err, here…in my new writing office/sitting room on the top floor of the house on the hill. Nice view from here.

And yeah, I hinted above that I might need another place to write inworld as well. I haven’t given thought to that yet but I’m feeling that one new place is not going to be enough.

HG to Elsewhere:

craft-world.org:8002:elsewhere