Grrr…. Or, How Second Life Saves Me Time, Money, and Anguish

I live within driving distance of a terrific writers’ resource: The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. The Loft offers great classes, workshops, and author presentations, and makes it easy to find a peer group for that ongoing support and critique so key to writing success.

I’m a long-time Loft member and have utilized their resources a great deal. But it’s been exhausting — because here’s what I have to do to attend an event there:

1. Make sure I’m wearing sufficient layers just in case of a snowstorm or something (though for only about 9-10 months of each year).
2. Leave about an hour and a half before the event to allow for traffic jams, accidents, flash floods, or alien invasions.
3. Drive roughly 45 miles on clogged commuter and city freeways (which typically involve some fancy maneuvering on my part so as to not get sideswiped or knocked out of the lane I need).
4. Drive endlessly ’round and ’round inner-city blocks, looking for cheap parking.
5. Give up on cheap parking and pull into the expensive parking ramp only four blocks away.
6. Walk through heat, cold, snow, ice, slush, rain (or a rare warm, sunny day) to the event.
7. Attend the event, get all excited.
8. Think about accepting the invitation to join the other writers afterward in a bar or cafe.
9. Decide not to join the other writers because then I’d have to either:
   • a) drive through horrible traffic to the other side of the city and try to find yet another parking spot, and/or,
   • b) sit in a bar watching all the city folk chugging away happily while I sip my diet pop, because I still have to drive home.
10. Drive roughly 45 miles home on clogged city and commuter freeways, which, while I have been attending the event, most likely turned into skating rinks, rivers, or parking lots, depending on whether it snowed or rained or an accident occurred while I was inside.
11. Arrive home late at night, exhausted.
12. Deal with all the household, kid, and pet issues that accrued while I was gone.
13. Fall into bed well past my usual bedtime.
14. Wake up the next morning groggy and crabby from lack of sleep — and totally demotivated to write!

Now, to undertake such an arduous journey a couple of times a year is fine, but to do that every week to attend a writing workshop or meet with a peer group for support and critique? Are you kidding? Superwoman I ain’t!

Then along came the metaverse!

Now, to attend a workshop, class, reading, presentation, critique group meeting — whatever! — all I have to do is:

1. A few minutes before, get into a comfortable chair (usually my recliner).
2. Open my laptop.
3. Log into Second Life.
4. Teleport instantly to the event.
5. Stay and chat as long as I want.
6. Immediately transfer my heightened motivation to real writing.

I can attend as many events a day as I want; I can leave if I’m bored or tired; I can go to the bathroom whenever I want and no one notices! And besides, there are an exponentially greater number of programs for writers on Second Life.

For us writers who don’t live in the center of a thriving big-city writing community, virtual worlds such as Second Life are a godsend!!!!

Tagged as: humor, writers resources