WM: People do many things in Second Life, you of course write about it and have written several novels that are set in Second Life. When did you decide that you wanted to use Second Life as a literary setting?
WM: Where do you get the information or ideas for your novels?
HUCKLEBERRY: The thing that hit me back in 2007 - the thing that hits all of us who immerse in SL - was just how real SL relationships and their contexts are. Before entering the metaverse, I HUCKLEBERRY: I first played around hadn’t imagined such a thing to be with SL in November 2006 as task possible. Of course, there’s a whole avoidance from the children’s novel I debate to be had around what ‘real’ was working on at the time for means here, but the idea that you National Novel Writing Month. might interact in text with a cartoon Actually, I’d heard from a NaNoWriMo person and come away feeling that podcast earlier that week that you’d spent an evening with your new someone had set up a cafe in SL for best friend was a surprise to me. I’d people working on their November interacted with people in discussion novels to work in, so it was kind of forums before, and that had never felt related (though I never actually found like *being* with someone. Before I that cafe). I didn’t really end up doing entered SL, I’d heard the term much with that account and in March ‘cybersex’ but I imagined that this and 2007 I started over and made an any sort of romantic relationship in SL attempt to find friends and learn how had to be no more than a role-played the metaverse worked. As November thing rather than something that the 2007 approached, I started to think brain treated as though it was an about what my next novel would be actual happening. As I started to like; by then I’d become infected with realize the enormity of this, I began to the SL bug so the idea of setting a wonder about the uglier side of story there seemed obvious to me. relationships: jealousy, suspicion, I’d also struggled for many years with betrayal. I reasoned that there had to writer’s block that was partly based be such things as Second Life private around the conflict I had over what investigators who people hired to find people I knew would think about me if out if their SL partner was being they read the stories I wanted to unfaithful. A quick search confirmed write, so the idea of using my avatar that there were. So then I became name as a pseudonym became very fascinated with thinking about how an attractive. SLPI might work, given the restrictions 38